Arizona’s top election official said the effort ordered by Republican state senators leaves ballots unattended and lacks basic safeguards to protect the process from manipulation.
Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, said the process had ignored long-established safeguards against mistakes or deliberate manipulation of the election results. /Credit…Pool photo by Ross D. Franklin
By Michael Wines | The New York Times
Untrained citizens are trying to find traces of bamboo on last year’s ballots, seemingly trying to prove a conspiracy theory that the election was tainted by fake votes from Asia. Thousands of ballots are left unattended and unsecured. People with open partisan bias, including a man who was photographed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 riot, are doing the recounting.
All of these issues with the Republican-backed re-examination of the November election results from Arizona’s most populous county were laid out this week by Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a scathing six-page letter.
Ms. Hobbs called the process “a significant departure from standard best practices.”
