‘ Votes are counted by staff at the Maricopa County Elections Department office on Nov. 5, 2020. Photo by Courtney Pedroza | Getty Images
By Gloria Gomez/UA Don Bolles Fellow for Arizona Mirror
Voting would return to 19th Century methods — with their glacial pace and flawed accuracy -– and reduce voter access under legislation Republicans approved in a legislative committee that would ban machines from counting votes, critics said.
The proposal is rooted in the Big Lie, a belief that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump. Although there are various evidence-free theories purporting to explain how that happened, a prominent one is that ballot-counting machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden.
The idea has been tossed out of court for a lack of evidence, and a biased election review conducted last year by the Arizona Senate examined ballot tabulators in Maricopa County and found nothing to back up the claim.
Nonetheless, a state legislator who has built a nationwide political following by espousing widely debunked lies about the 2020 election says machines designed to quickly count ballots more accurately than humans are likelier to result in false results because of cheating.
“This is paper only ballots, this does away with the machines,” Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, said about her Senate Bill 1338.
She cited Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan as the inspiration behind attempting to prohibit any technology use in future elections. The company directed the so-called “audit” of the 2020 election, despite having no experience analyzing elections or knowledge of Arizona election law. Logan, like Rogers, was a vocal proponent of election lies that the outcome was affected by rampant fraud, and he worked to persuade U.S. senators to overturn elections in Arizona and other battleground states.
“He said, ‘Senator Rogers, we need to go back to paper ballots, and they need to be counted by hand,’” she said.
