By Brittany Bernstein
Wednesday, August 03, 2022
Several Republican state legislators in Arizona
who signed a resolution urging Congress not to accept the state’s electoral
votes for Joe Biden in 2020 remained silent this week after an
investigation by the state attorney general debunked claims that 282 dead
Arizona voters cast a ballot in 2020.
Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich responded to the
state senate’s request for a criminal investigation into the alleged dead voter
fraud on Monday, telling senate president Karen Fann in a letter that just one
dead voter was found in his office’s investigation, which included hundreds of
hours of research by the AG’s Election Integrity Unit.
While it was not clear who that single dead voter was,
the AG’s office prosecuted a woman who admitted to voting with her dead
mother’s ballot in 2020, according to the Arizona Republic.
“All other persons listed as deceased were found to be
current voters,” he wrote.
Brnovich wrote that his office supported the Senate’s
ballot review but that “allegations of widespread deceased voters from the
Senate audit and other complaints received by the EIU are insufficient and not
corroborated.”
National Review reached out to sixteen
legislators who signed a joint resolution in December 2020 asking Congress to
either accept the 11 “alternate” electoral votes for former president
Donald Trump or “to have all electoral votes nullified completely until a full
forensic audit can be conducted.” Only one — state Representative John Fillmore —
responded to a request for comment
Those who did not respond to a request for comment
include state representatives Kevin Payne, Leo Biasiucci, David Cook, Travis
Grantham, Walter Blackman, Jacqueline Parker, Beverly Pingerelli, Joseph
Chaplik, Jake Hoffman, Judy Burges and Mark Finchem. Finchem won the GOP
nomination for Arizona secretary of state in Tuesday’s primary election.
Several members of the state senate did not respond
either, including senators Kelly Townsend, Sonny Borrelli, Warren Petersen, and
Wendy Rogers.
Fillmore, who says he still believes the 2020 election
was stolen from Trump but that he has stopped pressing the issue as not to
start a Civil War, said: “We never said that dead people voted in the election
and you know, in 2020, there were so many [allegations] and a lot of it was
frivolous. The contentions and the ‘dead people are voting’ and ‘people that
voted 37 times’ and things of that nature and we were never saying that.”
He accused Brnovich of investigating some of the more absurd
claims to further his own political interests; Brnovich was running for U.S.
Senate in Arizona but was defeated by venture capitalist Blake Masters in the
Republican primary on Tuesday.
Investigators with the AG’s office looked into 6,634
complaints about dead voters in 2020, including reports from the state senate’s
contractor, the Cyber Ninjas.
“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber
Ninjas reported as dead and many were very surprised to learn they were
allegedly deceased,” the state attorney general said.
The Florida-based Cyber Ninjas issued a report more than
ten months ago after carrying out a review of 2.1 million ballots in
Maricopa County, Ariz. In April, Brnovich said an initial review of the
contractor’s report found “serious vulnerabilities” in the election’s
procedures, but no crimes.
Another report submitted to Brnovich’s office did not
separate alleged dead voters from dead registrants.
“Once again, these claims were thoroughly investigated
and resulted in only a handful of potential cases,” the letter said. “Some were
so absurd the names and birthdates didn’t even match the deceased, and others
included dates of death after the election.”
Fann, who gave the list of suspected dead voters to the
AG’s office as part of the state senate’s review of ballots from the 2020
presidential and U.S. Senate races, thanked the AG’s office for its
investigation in a statement to the Arizona Republic.
The senate president said the results answer some of the
“grave concerns” voters and lawmakers had about election fraud.
“They asked us to do the hard work of fact finding, and
we are delivering the facts,” Fann wrote. “This step of the AG’s investigation is
critical to restoring the diminished confidence our constituents expressed
following the last election.”
Fillmore said the Senate audit was a “farce and a joke”
and that the arrest of Guillermina Fuentes, who is accused of
illegally collecting early ballots in the 2020 primary election, is proof
that there was widespread voter fraud and “mules” in the election, similar to
the debunked theories in Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules.
Fuentes, the former mayor of San Luis, Ariz., pleaded
guilty in June as part of an agreement with state prosecutors to drop forgery
and conspiracy charges against her, the Arizona Republic reported. Investigators with
the state attorney general’s office said Fuentes, a well-known Democratic
operative in the area, ran a sophisticated operation in which she convinced
voters to let her gather and sometimes fill out their ballots.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped three felony counts,
unable to prove that she filled out one voter’s ballot and forged signatures on
some of the four ballots she illegally returned for people who were not family
members.
However, investigators said there is no reason to believe
Fuentes’s ballot harvesting was part of a widespread effort.
Fillmore argued that to pursue Fuentes and not nonprofits
who he claims are paying “mules” to conduct “ballot trafficking,” is akin to
investigating a small-time drug dealer rather than a drug cartel.
“So when Mr. Brnovich goes, ‘Oh, well, I proved that
there was no dead people voting, that would be the equivalent of saying, ‘Well,
I proved that no people came from outer space and voted.”
He said he was concerned the Senate did not immediately
have an audit and that the audit that ultimately occurred was “more of an
embarrassment than an audit.”
State Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who did not sign on
to the 2020 resolution regarding the state’s electoral votes but has said deceased voters are being sent ballots,
told National Review that the Senate audit and Brnovich’s
investigation were both wasted opportunities.
“Well, personally, I think that Karen Fann has just
missed an opportunity to do something legitimate when it comes to elections,”
she said. “She’s off chasing rainbows and unicorns. She mismanaged the audit.
She had Cyber Ninjas — a discredited company — lead a very, very, very
important audit review and she had the AG spend months and months and months
using hundreds of hours of resources to ultimately come up with nothing.”
Ugenti-Rita, who ran for Arizona secretary of state but
was defeated by Finchem in Tuesday’s primary, accused Brnovich of mishandling
the situation as well, by failing to complete a timely investigation and
waiting until the day before the election to release his report.
“There are places that need significant improvement and
are ripe for exploitation,” she said. “There are and we need to focus our
attention on them. But what has happened is you’ve got a bunch of grifters who
have exploited this issue for their own self-promotion.”
Asked if she was concerned that people were voting on
behalf of dead voters and if it was worthwhile to investigate that, Ugenti-Rita
said: “It absolutely does happen. I’ve seen it firsthand, ballots being sent to
people who are deceased. It’s absolutely legitimate.”
However, asked if she believes the AG’s report was
accurate she replied, “I don’t see why they wouldn’t be.”
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