Arizona's ballot audit could spread to other states. Here's what to know
The presidential elections in Arizona and Pennsylvania were forever linked on Jan. 6, the day of the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol followed by the failed effort by most House Republicans to set aside the results in those two battleground states.
So it was perhaps inevitable that at least some Pennsylvania Republicans want to follow in Arizona’s footsteps by pursuing a ballot review modeled after the one happening in Phoenix.
But the Arizona Senate-ordered review of Maricopa County’s ballots is attracting more than attention borne of curiosity: some in other states are looking to mimic it.
Three Pennsylvania officials toured the ballot inspection in Phoenix last week with an eye toward doing one of their own.
Last month, a judge in Georgia gave a conspiracy-minded group the green light to inspect absentee ballots in that state.
Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide
The speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly is pushing for an investigation of that state’s results.
Michigan officials are facing calls for reviews in a small county.
New Hampshire officials already reviewed one town's election results that resulted in a sizable shift in vote tallies, but not because of apparent fraud.
Arizona's extra layer of review, larded with partisanship and light on time-tested ballot-inspection protocols, hasn’t dented an unshakable but baseless belief common among many Republicans in the post-Trump era: The 2020 election must have been stolen.
The Arizona review is part of a wide-ranging effort by Republicans to ensure that future elections are administered more to their liking. As it did more than a decade earlier on immigration enforcement, Arizona could help set a standard for others to follow.
Some GOP-controlled states, including Arizona, have already changed their voting laws in ways expected to make voting more restrictive. And others are considering measures to strip away ballot-counting responsibilities from offices that have handled them in the past.
While President Donald Trump has reportedly suggested in private that he could be reinstated in office later this summer — along with others, such as former Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz. — some Republicans see the ballot reviews as a chance to prevent future fraud by rewriting state laws or create a historical record of what went wrong.
Daniel J. Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the continuing interest in ballot reviews in other Republican-controlled states is an indicator of Trump’s hold on the GOP and polarization deepening into state and local politics.
“I very, very much see what's going on in Arizona now and the requests for … additional investigations of the propriety of the 2020 election as a clear signal of the ways in which American politics is nationalized,” he said.
Nationalization refers to a move in which state and local politics are increasingly decided on the basis of federal political fault lines.
Hopkins, author of “The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized,” said Trump remains the most important voice in GOP politics as the party undermines confidence in fair elections, something that wasn’t a partisan issue until last year.
Trump has been transfixed by the Maricopa County ballot review.
“I think that we are at an inflection point. We are at one of these moments where the actions of our political leaders will go a long way toward determining whether this was a kind of particular threat which we overcame," Hopkins said. "After elections, you see some the party that loses often raises concerns. But this is a whole new level. This is a whole new level of doubt.”
Pennsylvania echoes Arizona
The Pennsylvania contingent included state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican viewed as among the most conservative members of that state’s Legislature and who has been lauded as a “hero” by Trump.
On Wednesday, Mastriano told the media pool reporter that he wants an Arizona-style audit in his state, perhaps involving two counties, one Republican-leaning and another Democratic-leaning.
“Specifically, I like this approach in Arizona because it is scientific," he said, expressing a sentiment not widely shared among election experts. "I mean, what I saw there, there is no way that they can be accused of slanting or bias because it's just counting votes, looking at ballots, and then doing the forensic analysis.
“I'm not about overturning anything, I'm just trying to find out what went right, what went wrong, and how do we have better elections in the future?”
Is the Maricopa County election audit truly an audit?:Here's what professional auditors have to say
Mastriano, like many involved in the Arizona ballot review, long ago made clear he thought the 2020 elections were riddled with problems.
On Nov. 25, Mastriano convened a meeting in Gettysburg involving state Senate members and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who outlined a series of unproven allegations of election fraud and tried to suggest Trump still had a path to reelection.
Five days later, Giuliani held a similar gathering in Phoenix involving GOP officials that was a public meeting, not a governmental hearing.
Mastriano attended a meeting at the White House after the Gettysburg meeting and unsuccessfully sought to have the GOP-controlled Legislature pick the state’s presidential electors, rather than voters.
He was on hand in Washington on Jan. 6 when a pro-Trump mob sought to push Congress to change the results. Mastriano milled around the Capitol, as did Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, R-Oro Valley, and then-Rep. Anthony Kern, R-Glendale.
Mastriano said he was among the crowd outside the Capitol area, but rejected the violence that ensued. He said he followed police orders and was as uninvolved in the subsequent mayhem as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf was when police were attacked after a Black Lives Matter rally in Harrisburg last year.
Absentee ballots eyed in Georgia
Last month, a Georgia judge sided with residents there suing to inspect the state's absentee ballots in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.
Unlike Arizona's ballot review, the one in Georgia requires that the ballots remain in the custody of election officials.
The Fulton County absentee ballots will be re-tallied after several other efforts, including a hand recount and an investigation by the Republican secretary of state, verified President Joe Biden won the state by the slimmest percentage in the country, less than a quarter of 1 percentage point.
Biden won Arizona by the thinnest vote margin in the country, 10,457 out of 3.4 million ballots cast.
Those who sued to access the Georgia ballots have claimed fraud and improper counting, and had sought to transport the ballots off-site for inspection, but will now settle for high-resolution scanning in hopes of corroborating their allegations.
The Georgia review is paid for with private funds.
Michigan county weighs an audit
In Michigan, another private group wants to audit Cheboygan County's voting machines amid allegations by Republicans that the machines could "flip" votes.
Trump lost Michigan by about 154,000 votes but won smallish Cheboygan County by 4,700.
The GOP-controlled Cheboygan County Board of Commissioners is considering allowing what is billed as a forensic audit. As it does, the elections director for the Democratic secretary of state has notified officials there that the county's election officials do not have to provide access to their machines.
In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has already told Maricopa County officials that she may not permit its balloting machines to be used again because the county broke the procedures for properly securing and tracking the machines when it provided the machines to the state Senate under subpoenas.
That could cost state or county taxpayers extra.
The county is midway through a $6 million lease with Dominion Voting Systems, a company already viewed warily by conservatives. The state has said it would reimburse the county for harm to the machines during the ballot review, though the future of the machines and who would cover the cost to replace them if needed is unclear.
Other election issues in Wisconsin
In Wisconsin, a key lawmaker is taking a narrower tack on raising election-integrity issues.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, is hiring retired police officers to investigate lingering voting-related questions, such as how cities used private grants to administer the elections and how clerks handled absentee ballots in some cases.
Vos does not claim Trump won the state in November but has said he is using public resources for a three-month probe to bolster confidence in voting moving ahead.
“Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire? We just don’t know yet,” Vos told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week.
Dusty election machines a factor in New Hampshire
New Hampshire officials faced election-fairness concerns as well, but have sought to defuse them in a process seen by some as less partisan.
A Democrat in Windham, New Hampshire, sought a recount in November after falling 24 votes short of her GOP rivals for a state representative post.
After the hand recount, she lost by more than 400 votes, raising questions of what had happened.
That led to a bipartisan audit of the election equipment and a remarkable, if politically benign, preliminary theory: The election machines were dusty.
Experts conducting the audit suspect the tallying machines had a buildup of dust, which led the machines to incorrectly count creases in the ballots as votes.
In April, Trump pointed to the undercount of Republican candidates as a sign of a rigged election, telling a crowd at his Florida estate, “They found a lot of votes up in New Hampshire just now. You saw that.”
If the push for further ballot investigation has attracted more support in some key states, it still lacks backing from important corners.
A day after Mastriano spoke in Phoenix, one of his Republican colleagues in Pennsylvania's House of Representatives, Seth Grove, who chairs the Government Oversight Committee there, rejected any additional scrutiny of his state's ballots.
"The PA House of Representatives will not be authorizing any further audits on any previous election," Grove said in a tweet. "We are focused on fixing our broken election law to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat."
In a written statement Friday, Trump signaled he still expected the Pennsylvania state Senate to move ahead on its own, much as Arizona's did.
"The people of Pennsylvania and America deserve to know the truth," Trump said. If the Pennsylvania Senate leadership doesn't act, there is no way they will ever get re-elected!"
Reach the reporter Ronald J. Hansen at ronald.hansen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4493. Follow him on Twitter @ronaldjhansen.
Subscribe to our free political podcast, The Gaggle.