The Daily Agenda: If it ain't broke, break it

Their numbers were indeed screwy ... Gallego's neighborhood is so hot right now ... And the presidential candidates could always get worse.

Newly revealed text messages from Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan show that he knew what we all knew — the numbers in his volunteer-led recount of the 2020 election in Maricopa County were, in technical terms, “screwy.”

The Republic’s Robert Anglen has a doozy of a report based on the latest batch of texts pried from Logan’s phone from the paper’s ongoing public records lawsuit, showing, once again, the remarkable degree of incompetence the company employed in its “recount.” After hand-tallying the votes, Cyber Ninjas had no way to add up the 70,000 tally sheets upon which volunteers had chicken-scratched their results. 

The company delivered their screwy numbers anyway. Taxpayers shelled out at least $150,000 (not including the additional $5 million in legal expenses and new tabulation machines associated with their shoddy work), raising the obvious question: “Isn’t that some kind of fraud?”

Of course, Logan has bigger problems. He’s wrapped up in separate criminal probes in Michigan and Georgia for allegedly gaining illegal access to voting machines and taking them apart in an attempt to finally figure out how elections work so he can more effectively cast doubt on past and future elections. 

The election fraud crowd has graduated from undermining faith in the security of our elections to literally undermining security in our elections. 

The top-notch hand-counting job Cyber Ninjas did has inspired Arizona lawmakers to attempt to outlaw election tabulation machines and counties to try to conduct their own hand counts. While neither effort has been successful, counties, at least, are sure to try again in 2024. 

But perhaps the widest-reaching aspect of Cyber Ninjas’ audit in Arizona is to turn the state into the white-hot center of election denialism nationally. By amping up the rhetoric among their believers and sustaining the narrative of election fraud, Cyber Ninjas contributed to the atmosphere we have today, where seasoned elections officials are fleeing the field in droves, leaving counties scrambling to find someone semi-qualified to run their elections. 

Not content to simply screw up amateur hand counts and scare qualified elections officials away, MAGA forces are now pulling their states out of ERIC, the National Election Registration Information Center, a tool widely praised by elections officials of both parties that allows states to compare their voter rolls. ERIC is the most effective check on the kind of fraud that actually does happen in every election: people voting in two states. 

Why would election integrity hawks want to pull out of a system that can actually catch fraud? Because the misinformation peddlers at Gateway Pundit declared it a "left-wing voter registration drive," bankrolled by billionaire George Soros, NPR’s Miles Parks discovered.

“NPR analyzed hundreds of thousands of posts on five alternative social media sites frequented by the far right — Gettr, Gab, Parler, Telegram and Trump's Truth Social — over the past two years, and found that conversation about ERIC really only began after the first Gateway Pundit article published,” Parker writes.

Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed Republican lawmakers’ attempt to drop ERIC. But eight conservative states have pulled out of ERIC since Gateway Pundit started pummeling the program. And that means that Arizona’s voter rolls are less clean, as the system no longer checks our records against those states’ records. 

As soon as someone votes in one of those states and Arizona, expect Republican lawmakers to cry that our elections are vulnerable to fraud and cannot be trusted. 

That’s not to say the system is perfect. There are plenty of reforms we could implement to make elections more secure and reliable, as Votebeat’s Jen Fifield notes in her latest about Maricopa County’s new ballot printers. Currently, no state or federal laws are regulating which printers Arizona counties can use, she writes, which means that there’s no rule against using retail-grade printers that can get overwhelmed, as happened in Maricopa County in 2022. 

“Requiring ballot printers to be certified in Arizona, as other election equipment such as ballot tabulators are, would set standards for the printers and the testing of printers that might help prevent future problems,” Fifield writes.

Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of solution that gets traction at the Capitol. Instead, most of the election bills lawmakers have proposed are not even solutions in search of problems — they’re problems looking for a place to embed themselves. 

There’s an old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Election fraud believers are so determined to prove our elections system needs fixing that they’re willing to break it to make their point. 

Mr. Gallego’s Neighborhood: Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego claimed both his Phoenix home and a D.C. home as his “primary residence” in loan documents, allowing him to get a VA loan for each, Politico reports. While VA loans are usually only used for one primary residence, the VA can make exceptions for “unusual circumstances.” And unlike state lawmakers, Congressmen aren‘t actually required to live in their districts, though Gallego maintains he does. In other Gallego district news, Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Kelly endorsed Raquel Terán in the growing Democratic primary to replace Gallego in the House as he gears up to run for U.S. Senate. Finally, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chose Democrat Quantá Crews to fill the vacancy in Legislative District 29, which covers the same neighborhoods that Gallego used to represent in the Legislature.¹

Let your freak flag fly: State Sen. Janae Shamp likes the “An Appeal to Heaven” flag, and she doesn’t really care if far-right extremists do, too, Jerod MacDonald Evoy reports for the Arizona Mirror.

There’s still time to try again: Gov. Katie Hobbs crossed the 100-veto mark when she axed a bunch of bills this week, including one that would have prohibited filming pornography at schools and banned sexually explicit books (in the same bill). Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman said the veto shows Hobbs supports filming pornography at schools, while Hobbs basically said he’s bad at writing bills, Camryn Sanchez reports for the Capitol Times. This week’s other vetoes include bills that would have required cities and counties to dismantle homeless camps and prohibited ranked-choice voting.

They don’t say gay or promo homo: Even if they don’t become law, bills that target the LGBTQ community still sow chaos and confusion, Lane Sainty reports in the Republic. When teachers and librarians aren’t sure what the current laws allow, there can be a chilling effect on speech about gay issues. In related news, the hotline created by Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne to field anonymous accusations about inappropriate curriculum in schools is being flooded by what the office calls “out-of-state political extremists and their robots,” the Republic’s Yana Kunichoff writes.

Cool: The City of Phoenix installed its 100th mile of “Cool Pavement,” ABC15 reports. The latest stretch of the pavement coating is on the southwest side of town, and it should keep the streets about 10-12 degrees cooler. 

Not cool: Donald Brown, a former teacher in Tucson, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for sending an email to the Trumped Store in Show Low threatening to kill Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers when she was in her district for a July 4 parade last year, Wyatt Buchanan and Ray Stern report for the Republic.

We’d join them in solidarity but we need this job: The Republic has lost a third of its newsroom in the last five years and more than half in the last 10 years, its union workers told The New York Times while they went on a two-day strike this week. Mike Reed, the CEO of the Republic’s parent company, Gannett, earned about $11 million in 2021 and 2022. 

Arizona’s richest people: Arizona is home to 12 billionaires, Jessica Swarner reports for the Copper Courier. She went through the Forbes list of billionaires and found members of the family that founded U-haul, a billboard tycoon, and others, but no newsletter owners.  

We, unfortunately, went into the newsletter business instead of the U-Haul empire business (or the newspaper CEO business). Please validate our poor life decisions by subscribing today.

Moving on up: San Tan Valley residents want their unincorporated area to become a real city. Or at least, the largest plurality of residents do, according to a survey that showed 46% wanted to incorporate, Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda reports. The percentage of those surveyed who wanted to be annexed or stay unincorporated was in the teens.

Plenty of water, not enough cops: Raymond Zhong of The New York Times helps you get “unmoored from time” as he navigates the Grand Canyon and shrinking Colorado River. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego wants to make clear Phoenix itself has enough water to keep growing, as national news outlets implied the whole state, rather than groundwater-dependent suburbs, will have to scale back the endless rows of manufactured homes we’re famous for, Holly Bock of AZFamily reports. And while it’s good on water, Phoenix can’t find enough cops so it’s beefing up its emphasis on “civilian positions like Police Assistants,” ABC15’s Javier Soto and Brittney Barba report. 

Speaking of Cyber Ninjas, remember “Dr. Shiva” AKA Shiva Ayyadurai? 

He’s the guy who claimed he invented email, had all sorts of weird theories about vaccines and who the state Senate hired to help with the audit and post-audit review and then went on to make all sorts of errors because he had no idea how any of that worked.

Well, you’ll never guess but… 

1. Yes, we’re really stretching that theme. And to come full circle, that’s the seat that was left empty when Flavio Bravo got appointed from the House to the Senate to replace Terán because she resigned to run for Gallego’s congressional seat.