The Daily Agenda: The consequences of the grift
Don't ghost the attorney general ... Democrats worry, the headlines tell us ... And a parody website for Kari.
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Having recently relocated his backbone after he lost the U.S. Senate primary, the office of Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote to the FBI and IRS, telling them an investigation into several false claims by True the Vote could be needed.
True the Vote, a nonprofit behind the thoroughly debunked movie “2000 Mules,” has repeatedly ghosted the AG’s office. The group claims to have evidence of crimes like ballot collection, but has so far refused to turn over that evidence to the AG’s Office or the FBI, despite multiple claims it would.
And, it seems, Brnovich is finally fed up. Reginald Grigsby, chief special agent in the AG’s office, wrote the letter to the feds, which details the obfuscation and lack of evidence provided by True the Vote. The group has claimed its work and data had resulted in criminal charges in cases it had no part in, like ballot collection charges in San Luis.
“TTV has raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud and their efforts would train the public to protect election integrity at the polls and to help protect all voters’ rights. They indicate they have provided the information to law enforcement agencies; in our case they have not after promising to do so. … Given TTV’s status as a nonprofit organization, it would appear that a further review of its financials may be warranted,” Grigsby wrote.
The AG’s latest letter comes after his scathing press release about false claims of rampant dead voters, which came the day before the August primary. Brnovich should continue standing up to the grifters who seek to undermine our faith in elections. With his electorate prospects this year canceled, hopefully the former no-nonsense AG is back, if only for a couple more months.
Republican candidates up and down the ballot have embraced the false claims in “2000 Mules” on the campaign trail. Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has praised the movie, going as far as to rent a movie theater to host a showing of it. She also touted an endorsement from True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips. AG candidate Abe Hamadeh has embraced TTV as well, meaning any investigation into the group under Brnovich could be halted if Hamadeh wins.
These widespread claims of ballot harvesting are not based in reality. So far, the state has prosecuted just two people for ballot collection, both in San Luis, a border community that does not have home mail delivery, which occurred in the August 2020 primary. One of them, Guillermina Fuentes, was recently sentenced to 30 days in jail and two years of probation for delivering four lawful ballots, a sentence her lawyers claim is part of a “political prosecution.”
And the movie’s falsehoods have led to groups organizing to watch ballot drop boxes in some parts of the state, convinced that so-called “mules” will be coming to stuff ballots into boxes that routinely have camera feeds on them anyway.
These tactics intimidate voters. That’s the entire point. Evidence doesn’t matter to those who want to believe their guy couldn’t possibly have lost the 2020 election. The election deniers, including the ones at the top of the ticket, have built their base and made their campaign coffers flush on these lies about our elections.
Finally, hopefully, those lies — and that endless grift — could have some consequences.
Fraudsters drink to victory, cry fraud: U.S. Senate Republican nominee Blake Masters and GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake toasted to their looming victories at an event this weekend. Meanwhile, Masters claimed the Democrats are already loading up the voting machines to ensure he loses, and Lake refused to say if she’ll concede defeat if she loses.
Katie and Kelly would be catchy: While “Blake and Lake” have teamed up as a campaign duo, Katie Hobbs and Mark Kelly are taking the lone wolf approach to campaigning, kind of like U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who is nowhere to be found on the Dem campaign trail, the Republic notes. And while there’s a dearth of Democratic surrogates stumping for the Democrats, there’s no shortage of Republicans coming to town to back the Blake and Lake slate. Still, Gov. Doug Ducey isn’t campaigning for Lake — he instead went to Michigan to back GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon this weekend.
Dem optimism has peaked: The ebbing economic tide is sweeping national Democratic optimism in this election out to sea, the Hill reports. Closer to home, Hobbs’ team put out a list of talking points for her friends to combat the most recent wave of negative press, 12News’ Brahm Resnik reports. National Democrats fear that Lake will win Arizona and immediately become a national MAGA star, Axios reports. The New York Times says Democrats are full of angst over Hobbs’ sub-par campaign. And Republic conservative columnist Phil Boas declares that sound you hear is the momentum in the governor’s race whooshing away from Hobbs and toward Lake. Meanwhile, national Democrats are pulling $300,000 out of planned ads for Kirsten Engel in Arizona’s 6th Congressional District after the whole “defund the police” thing came to light, and Planned Parenthood Arizona endorsed every major statewide Democrat except Adrian Fontes for secretary of state.
Smile! You’re on Kari’s Camera: The Washington Post’s Ruby Cramer highlights Lake’s lavalier mic as a symbol of her campaign’s readiness to fight the media at all times, writing about how she leans on her background as a TV news anchor when she throws punches at the press and Hobbs, who doesn’t want to be part of her spectacle.
“It’s the same worry you hear from reporters on the campaign trail: If you engage, you risk starring in Lake’s next video,” Cramer writes.
About that spectacle: After declaring that Arizona PBS had one day and then “one hour” to announce a debate between her and Hobbs, Lake said she won’t do any televised appearances on PBS after the debate debacle. Meanwhile, state Rep. John Kavanagh announced he wants to defund AZPBS over DebateGate. AZPBS still isn’t answering questions about who made the call to invite Hobbs for her own interview, but Ted Simons read the official statement about it on “Arizona Horizon” Friday, while the dean of the Capitol press corps, Howard Fischer, expressed his disappointment in the station.
How to lose friends and upset people: Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly denied party observers the ability to watch early voting sites in the primary, saying the request came too late. But now she’s also denying them in the general election, saying it’s her decision to make. Both parties are upset, the Daily Star’s Tim Steller notes.
That’s littering: The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation told Ducey that those shipping containers he put on the border are illegal, as they’re blocking the federal government’s project to fill the gaps, the Republic’s José Ignacio Castañeda Perez reports. Ducey said he’s not removing them until he sees a contract to fill the gaps, but the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi reports that the ones in Nogales are already gone, and that Ducey’s office conceded the hilly Nogales terrain isn’t great for dumping shipping containers as border wall.
Oops: Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer removed from his website the letter opposing Prop 309 that the Arizona Association of County Recorders had penned after he got hit with a complaint that his office was engaging in electioneering by posting it. Meanwhile, Democrats stepped in to defend Richer and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors against a lawsuit complaining that they didn’t hire enough Republicans to work the polls in the August primary.
Policing the parks: The Phoenix City Council is considering spending $400,000 to post unarmed private security guards in eight local parks after receiving complaints about public drug use. The city already has private security patrolling a few downtown parks, KJZZ’s Christina Estes reports.
E-board finds thesaurus: Your choices for attorney general are “stark,” the Republic’s editorial board declares. (Meanwhile, Democratic AG candidate Kris Mayes has an op-ed in the Daily Star denouncing the election-denying Republicans running for office, and specifically her opponent Abe Hamadeh.) And voters’ choices for Maricopa County Attorney are “vastly different,” rather than stark, the board declares.
Humans are simple: The order of the names on your ballot are set by state law, which defers to whichever party won the governorship to be listed first. And the names listed first can benefit from what’s called the “primacy effect” or “order effect,” which can range from negligible to moderate depending on how high-profile the race is, AZFamily’s Derek Staahl reports.
A former “South Park” writer put up a parody website of Kari Lake at KariLake2022.com, lampooning Lake for her election denialism, stance on abortion restrictions and embrace of Trump.
The site includes copy like “My Potential Services Include: Ignoring the rights of women” and an endorsements section with “Paranoid Woman Who Writes Down Every License Plate of Cars Driving By Her Home.”
Toby Morton’s parody websites attack a series of far-right politicians, making official-looking websites with funny claims about the candidates, the Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz writes.