The Arizona State Senate is conducting a behind closed doors audit fishing expedition that targets only Maricopa County which Biden won in 2020.  The effort is backed by the Arizona GOP peddling the Big Lie to discredit Biden’s win.  As if that’s bad enough, HOW it’s being done will most certainly yield a predetermined result, and is being given cover by the State Senate and the courts, all Republican controlled.

The fishing expedition is being conducted by a firm called Cyber Ninjas, whose founder, Doug Logan, has repeated and supported the conspiracy theories of the Big Lie.  Worse, their is no oversight of the count by outside parties, the press is banned from observing, and the ballots are being housed in an unsecured room in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the Arizona State fairgrounds.  Some members of the press have been able to get into the room and observed that workers were using blue pens which could be used to tamper with the ballots to change the votes.  That’s against state law; all audits are mandated to be conducted with red pens to prevent tampering.

It gets worse: Yesterday, conservative judge Christopher Coury temporarily halted the count after Arizona Democratic party petitioned to halt the count.  He expressed doubts about the process, but, and it’s a big but, he ordered the party to post a $1 million bond to cover any costs of a delay.  That bond more than 5 times the amount budgeted by the State Senate for the audit.  Coury’s effort to appear non-partisan is belied by the excessive bond he required of the Dems and they declined to post the bond.  The judge is well known in Arizona for his conservative rulings and was the target of Dems in 2020 be removed for his ruling against an education reform measure on the ballot.

Arizona (along with Texas and other red states) shows the danger of extended single party rule including the courts.  The effort to discredit the Arizona presidential election is brazen, and so far the courts are aiding and abetting the effort.  There is no reason for this fishing expedition except to shore up the Big Lie to give the GOP more cover to pass voter suppression laws to tilt the balance in their direction.  The effort is dangerous and anti-democratic.