Month: May 2021

I didn’t think I would ever positively share a Mona Charon column but never say never. This one is a keeper — it lays out another unspoken important aspect of the GOP’s “stop the steal” strategy: the fact that someone did try to steal the election — Donald Trump.

The great cause that Republicans are uniting around is “election integrity.” That’s rich. The reality is that somebody did attempt to steal the 2020 election—Donald Trump. During the days and weeks following his loss, he brayed endlessly that the outcome was fraudulent, laying the groundwork for an attempt to overturn the voters’ will.

From the White House, he made multiple calls to local election officials demanding that they find votes for him. He dialed up members of local canvassing boards, encouraging them to decertify results.

At a time when Trump’s toadies were calling for legislatures to ignore the popular vote and submit alternate slates of electoral college votes, he engaged in flagrant election interference by inviting seven Michigan state legislators, including the leaders of the house and senate, to the White House on November 20. What did they discuss? You can surmise from their statement issued after the meeting: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and, as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors . . .”

Trump phoned a Georgia elections investigator who was conducting a signature audit in Cobb County, and asked her to find the “dishonesty.” If she did, he promised, “you’ll be praised. . . You have the most important job in the country right now.”

The then-president phoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger 18 times. When he finally got through, he wove a tangled theory of voting irregularities that crescendoed to a naked plea to falsify Georgia’s vote: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.”

Trump entertained ideas such as declaring martial law, seizing the nation’s voting machines, and letting the military “rerun” the election. He turned loose his Kraken-conspiracy nuts and his pillow man to spread lies about Dominion Voting Systems, Black-run cities like Philadelphia, and Chinese bamboo ballots.

The Trump campaign and its allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging election procedures and lost all but one. Pennsylvania was found to have erred in extending the period to fix errors on mail-in ballots. The case was a matter of three days and a small number of votes that would not have changed Pennsylvania’s outcome.

And then came the ultimate attack on election integrity—the violent attack on the Capitol and on members of Congress and the vice president as they were fulfilling their constitutional duties.

Leaving no doubt about his intentions for the riot, Trump told a crowd in February that the only thing that prevented the violent mob from successfully hijacking the official tally of the Electoral College votes was the “cowardice” of Mike Pence.

Today, we stand on the precipice of the House Republican conference ratifying this attempt to subvert American democracy. They are poised to punish Liz Cheney for saying this simple truth: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” In her place, they will elevate Iago in heels, Elise Stefanik, whose claim to leadership consists entirely of her operatic Trump followership.

Let’s be clear: The substitution of Stefanik for Cheney is a tocsin, signaling that the Republican party will no longer be bound by law or custom. In 2020, many Republican office holders, including the otherwise invertebrate Pence, held the line. They did not submit false slates of electors. They did not decertify votes. They did not “find” phantom fraud. But the party has been schooled since then. It has learned that the base—which is deluded by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin—believes the lies and demands that Republicans fight. As my colleague Amanda Carpenter put it, the 2024 mantra is going to be “Steal It Back.”

If Cheney must be axed because she will not lie, then what will happen if Republicans take control of Congress in 2022 and are called upon to certify the Electoral College in 2024? How many Raffenspergers will there be? How many will insist, as Pence did, that they must do what the Constitution demands? How many will preserve any semblance of the rule of law and the primacy of truth?

I’m going to guess none. Any who would will have been purged by that time, on both the state and the national level.

I am more am more convinced that this is going to happen and that we are going to have to rely on the courts to defend democracy. I have no idea if they will. When it came down to it in 2000, the Supreme Court went with the party.

Fergawdsakes:

A New Hampshire town of just 16,000 residents has become the focal point of MAGA-world fantasies positing that a reversal of President Trump’s 2020 defeat is just around the corner. Their hopes are pinned to an audit beginning on Tuesday that is looking at a discrepancy that arose in the recount of a state representative race in Windham.

After the audit plans made it into the spotlight of conservative media, more than 500 people reportedly showed up at a meeting last week of the Windham Board of Selectmen — normally a sparsely attended affair — where the review was being discussed. Trump cheered on those agitating around the audit in a statement the day after the meeting that celebrated the “great Patriots of Windham, New Hampshire for their incredible fight to seek out the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Many in Trump’s circle claim the audit is one of several dominos about to fall that will finally validate his lies about the election being stolen from him — never mind that it will not examine the presidential results and that it will cover a number of ballots that’s well short of Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state. An ongoing recount of the election results in Arizona’s largest county has become a magnet for 2020 election truthers who have been able shape its procedures around some of the most sensational mass voter fraud conspiracy theories of last year.

“This isn’t just about the town of Windham,” Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Monday evening, according to a video posted to Facebook of him speaking to a crowd of New Hampshire Trump supporters who have rallied around the audit. “We’re seeing things take place across this entire country.”

But the circumstances of the Windham audit are quite different than the baseless claims that drove Arizona’s Republican Senate to order the shambolic recount of Maricopa County’s results. The Windham audit is the result of a bipartisan push to review a legitimate discrepancy between the initial tabulation of the town’s state legislative results and the results that came out of a recount. The auditors chosen by state and local officials are known entities in the election administration world. Meanwhile, the Florida-based cybersecurity consultant hired to lead the Arizona recount has attracted scrutiny for his lack of election experience and his promotion of false election fraud claims last year.

Many 2020 election truthers are now pushing for the Windham auditors to be replaced with Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracy theorist who was reportedly involved in crafting some of the most questionable aspects of the Arizona recount.

But with the Windham audit expected to be finished in the next two weeks, if not more quickly, they’re about run out of options to hijack the New Hampshire review. Their latest gambit is a lawsuit filed Monday in New Hampshire state court seeking to stop the official audit so that the ballots could be turned over to the activists to do their own audit instead. The Democrats who sought the audit in the first place remain skeptical that the Trumpists will be able to derail the current plans.

“The horse is out of the barn,” Kristi St. Laurent, a Democratic candidate in the race in question, told TPM.

When November’s election results had St. Laurent just 24 votes shy of one of the four state representative seats up for grabs in the eight-person Windham race, she requested a recount. That recount produced discrepancies much larger than the normal variance that what would be expected for a hand recount of an election of this size. St. Laurent came out with 99 votes fewer, while the four Republican candidates who had beat her out each had 300 extra votes added to their tally.

She then sought a further review to determine what was behind the discrepancy. A debate dragged on about whether the kind of review she sought was permissible under state law and, if it was, who would have the authority to conduct it. Ultimately, the legislature unanimously passed legislation that authorized an audit of the Windham results. The bill laid out comprehensive and thorough rules for the review, which will also include a recount of the town’s votes in U.S. Senate and governor’s races, as well as an examination of the election machines.

St. Laurent told TPM her goal in pursuing of the audit was not to reverse her loss, but to understand whether it was the original tabulation or the recount that produced the flawed count.

For months, St. Laurent worried that the discrepancy in her race would be usurped by the Trump election-reversal crusade, particularly as the recount suggested that the Republican candidates may have been deprived of a few hundred votes in the original tabulation. If anything, she said, she was surprised it took this long for the MAGA-universe to latch on.

“I just hope we get some answers that are clear enough,” St. Laurent said. “I’m sure they’ll find something somewhere else to look for, but this will not be a feather in their cap.”

The biggest flashpoint in the Windham audit so far has been the Board of Selectmen’s choice of Mark Lindeman as one of the auditors, as the town was allowed to hire one of the three members of the audit team. Lindeman is co-director of Verified Voting, a well known election technology non-profit.

Right-wing blogs like the Gateway Pundit seized on the fact that Lindeman had signed a letter, along with other election experts, opposing the Arizona’s Senate launch of the Maricopa audit. There are also suspicions about Lindeman’s selection being announced shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris visited the state, Marylyn Todd — a “voter integrity” activist who is trying to coordinate a “citizen’s audit” — told TPM.

In addition to the lawsuit, there was also a petition drive over the weekend to collect the signatures of those who want Pulitzer on the audit team. Pulitzer — derided by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) as a “failed treasure hunter” when he tried to meddle in the election there — has fashioned himself as a “pattern recognition expert,” according to the Daily Beast, who claims he’s created key technology to examine ballot folds. He previously invented a scan code that, the Beast noted, was deemed by a computer trade magazine to be among the “Worst Tech Products of All Time.” The findings he’s turned up when he also tried his hand at treasure hunting have also been questioned.

Todd says her group has collected more than 1,000 signatures from Windham residents so far. (She herself is not a full time resident of Windham — she said she typically spends the summer months there and the winter months in Nashua, but has been seeking to become a full-time Windham resident since before getting involved in the audit.)

The townspeople think they’re very important because of their homeboy’s close relationship with the Dear Leader:

When Lewandowski — who is a Windham resident — spoke to Todd’s group on Monday, he was presented with a copy of the lawsuit filed Monday for him to show to Trump. Lewandowski told the crowd he was with Trump in Florida last week, the day before Trump put out his statement on the Windham audit, and that the former President “is actively watching whats happening.”

Lewandowski — when asked by TPM if he was serving as a liaison to Trump’s inner circle — said via text that he was getting involved “because I want ballot integrity” and because Windham is where he lives.

You may think they are grasping at straws, and they are. But the effect is to reinforce the idea that the election system is rigged against the Trump cult and they needn’t accept any results that don’t go their way.

An astute op-ed from Olivia Troye, the former Pence aide turned never Trumper:

The path from Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally to the Capitol was paved with lies about the 2020 election. Now, lies about what happened on Jan. 6 are becoming the Republican Party’s only strategy to regain power – and it’s working.

The Republican Party doesn’t have a governing agenda. It’s a pathetic predicament but obvious to anyone who stepped foot in Trump’s White House. One reason congressional Republicans are focused on cultural issues – Dr. Seuss, fake red meat regulations and a handful of transgender high school athletes around the country – might be to avoid judgment on how they used power: no health care reform, no infrastructure package, heading toward 600,000 dead from the pandemic, and the attack on the Capitol.

She has a point there. The contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans just in terms of legislative activity is striking. It does expose the fact that during Trump’s term they were basically just dancing fools and sycophants, accomplishing nothing but confirmations of judges and running their mouths. You can see why they’d want to distract the public with bullshit.

I also thought she hit on something important I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention:

The strategy is simple: Obfuscate, lie, change the subject and hope voters hold the other party to a higher standard. It’s cynical, un-American and, as exasperating as it may be, effective.

That part I highlighted is a big part of their plan. They are shameless and will eagerly attack Democrats for anything that even remotely resembles the kind of blatant authoritarianism and corruption they commonly practice. Their hypocrisy is one of the things their followers most admire about them — the same way that some people admire bullies and punks for being smart-asses.

And while it’s perfectly correct to hold the Democrats to a high standard, they also know that Democrats will be driven to prove their moral superiority to the Republicans and many will willingly join even a bogus pile-on if the GOP can get it going. (I don’t think I have to remind anyone of “emails” do I?)

This is part of their strategy and I think Democrats (and the media) should think in advance about how they plan to deal with it.

Update: Katha Pollitt’s column speaks to this. Well worth reading.

By this point it is clear that the top brass of the Republican Party is simply going through the motions of participatory democracy. Like a fraternity or sorority, they insist they will decide who gets to participate.

The narrative that Republicans are cowards in fear of Trump and his supporters is nonsense, says Greg Sargent, citing the endless recount in Maricopa County, Ariz. “It is a deliberate action plainly undertaken to manufacture fake evidence for the affirmative purpose of further undermining faith in our electoral system going forward.” Forward? This effort goes back as far as 1964’s Operation Eagle Eye. The voter fraud squad has worked for decades to convince Republicans election results cannot be trusted if Democrats win. The fraud is itself a fraud.

Sargent writes about the appearance on “Fox News Sunday” of Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the chair of the Republican Study Committee. Banks both admits Joe Biden won in 2020 fair and square and that he still had  “serious concerns” about the validity of the eletion.

Sargent writes:

This is not the act of a “coward” who “fears Trump,” and would vouch for the integrity of the election if only he could do so without consequences.

Rather, it is the act of someone who is fully devoted to the project of continuing to undermine confidence in our elections going forward.

This is for purely instrumental purposes. Republicans are employing their own invented doubts about 2020 to justify intensified voter suppression everywhere. Banks neatly crystallized the point on Fox, saying those doubts required more voting restrictions — after reinforcing them himself.

Indeed, with all this, Republicans may be in the process of creating a kind of permanent justification for maximal efforts to invalidate future election outcomes by whatever means are within reach.

As I said, a whole lotta pretext goin’ on.

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg adds two other points. Republicans are not hostages to Trump and the threat of primaries: “What should really be scary for Republicans, however, is that Trump could turn against the party in general elections, where he wouldn’t need to convince very many voters to stay home to deal a devastating blow to the party.”

Then, Republicans are now a real threat to the republic’s continued existence. Many now refuse to support the rule of law:

What we know is that when Trump attempted to subvert the election, a number of Republicans in key positions refused to go along. We know that, for the most part, those individuals won’t be able to stop a similar effort in 2024, and that the party has sent clear signals that standing up for the constitution and the rule of law was unacceptable.

It matters to few how clownish this effort seems if it accomplishes the goal of leaving Republicans in control, even of something that was once a democratic republic and is no longer. Better to reign in Hell.

Last August, 53% of voters in Missouri voted to amend the state’s constitution to expand Medicaid in the state. They joined voters in other red-leaning states: Maine, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Utah. The U.S. Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius in 2012 upheld the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, but allowed that states could choose for themselves whether to expand Medicaid. Many Republican-controlled states refused. Voters had to push their lawmakers.

Republicans in Missouri’s state senate voted “20 to 14 against funding the winning measure, effectively punting the issue to the courts to determine whether a cut-and-dry referendum ought to be acknowledged,” Natalie Shure writes at The New Republic. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a purer distillation of the Republican Party’s nihilistic political project anywhere in the country.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a purer distillation of the Republican Party’s nihilistic political project anywhere in the country.

Unless you visited Florida.

Nearly two-thirds of Florida voters in November 2018 approved a state constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to felons who had completed their sentences, parole, and probation. The next spring, the Republican-controlled legislature passed (and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed) a law requiring former felons to pay all outstanding fines and “user fees” from their sentencing before their rights are restored. A federal appeals court upheld the law in September 2020, despite the “administrative nightmare” it created. With no central database tracking such fees, neither felons nor county clerks could easily determine what was owed by whom.

The two thirds of voters that explicitly chose to restore voting rights to over a million fellow Floridians with a constitutional amendment could take a flying leap at the moon as far as Republican legislators were concerned.

Missourians only passed a referendum. Shure lays out the costs for the state:

The federal government currently covers 90 percent of Medicaid expansion costs, which leaves Missouri on the hook for only $130 million per year, a number quite a bit lower than its $1 billion budget surplus. And that’s before you consider added incentives in the American Rescue Plan Act, which would make expansion an even more plum deal for the state—and which Republicans in other states have likewise signaled will not thwart their opposition to Medicaid. In short, adding a few hundred thousand people to Missouri’s Medicaid rolls is startlingly cheap for the state itself, and could be accomplished using money already left over in the state’s coffers. Even the federal portion of the expansion would run less than $2 billion annually—a crumb of the overall federal spending pie.

If Republicans’ objections to Medicaid are clearly not fiscal, they are ruthlessly ideological: If expanding Medicaid wouldn’t bankrupt Missouri, it does further entrench a critical public welfare benefit for residents who fall well beyond those the right-wing would define as the most pathetic and deserving, thereby broadening the constituency for the sort of robust public programming it vehemently opposes. This has a significant political impact: Poor and disabled Medicaid recipients eligible before the ACA—those earning less than 21 percent of the federal poverty line in Missouri—were among the least likely to vote at all, much less vote for Republicans.

The expansion of the overall population of Medicaid beneficiaries has lent the means-tested insurance program wider and deeper support than it’s enjoyed in the past, more akin to the affection showered on Medicare. This helps explain why protests born out of a fierce loyalty to Medicaid in particular played a major role in saving the ACA from near ruin in 2017. Nevertheless, the idea of whetting appetites for an expanded welfare state is anathema to Republican goals, which boil down to enriching their plutocratic donors as much as possible and maintaining a haggard surplus workforce who are desperate enough to work for scraps—designs that are undermined by collective security that expanded health care benefits bestow. As state senator Andrew Koenig put his objection to funding the measure, “I’m sorry, if you are a healthy adult, you need to get a job.”

There are a lot of jobs out there for those willing to work. I know people who have two or three. And still they are haggard.

Serving the interests of the ultrarich is inherently undemocratic—but when Republicans aren’t obfuscating their disdain for democracy with disingenuous bloviation about nonexistent voter fraud, they make their position gobsmackingly plain: “If voters had all the information we do, I think they would have made a different decision,” Missouri Republican Senator Dan Hegeman asserted as he voted against funding the winning ballot measure. Representative Justin Hill took an even more paternalistic approach: “Even though my constituents voted for this lie, I am going to protect them from this lie.” Direct ballot measures are far from problem-free, but for all their faults, no form of electoral decision-making isolates voters’ desires quite as vividly. Beyond that, “having information” is hardly a prerequisite for voting, even if you presume the voters aren’t as savvy as the lawmakers who govern their lives.

After last August’s vote, Republican lawmakers in Missouri moved to make it harder to amend the state’s constitution.

Even clutching their pocket constitutions, wrapped in the flag, and misty-eyed at singing Lee Greenwood’s anthem, democracy — popular sovereignty — is really not Republicans’ thing. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.

New AP-NORC poll:

In the fourth month of his presidency, Biden’s overall approval rating sits at 63%. When it comes to the new Democratic president’s handling of the pandemic, 71% of Americans approve, including 47% of Republicans.

The AP-NORC poll also shows an uptick in Americans’ overall optimism about the state of the country. Fifty-four percent say the country is on the right track, higher than at any point in AP-NORC polls conducted since 2017; 44% think the nation is on the wrong track.

Those positive marks have fueled the Biden White House’s confidence coming out of the president’s first 100 days in office, a stretch in which he secured passage of a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package and surged COVID-19 vaccines across the country. The U.S., which has suffered the most virus deaths of any nation, is now viewed enviably by much of the rest of the world for its speedy vaccination program and robust supplies of the shots.

“We are turning a corner,” said Jeff Zients, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator.

The improvements have also impacted Americans’ concerns about the virus. The AP-NORC poll shows the public’s worries about the pandemic are at their lowest level since February 2020, when the virus was first reaching the U.S. About half of Americans say they are at least somewhat worried that they or a relative could be infected with the virus, down from about 7 in 10 just a month earlier.

As has been the case throughout the pandemic, there is a wide partisan gap in Americans’ views of pandemic risks. Among Democrats, 69% say they remain at least somewhat worried about being infected with the virus, compared with just 33% of Republicans.

He’s still underwater on immigration and guns but I don’t think there’s anything to be done about that. Those two issues get him criticism from both sides. But on the rest he’s doing quite well. 63% in this insane environment is very good.

For some reason I’m reminded of this:

He also says that “each day relitigating the past is one day less we have to seize the future.”

Uh huh:

That’s just from this past weekend.

I’m fairly sure this guy agrees with Liz Cheney on only one thing. But it’s an extremely important thing:

If the right succeeds in destroying out democracy, none of the other issues we care about have a chance. Sanders gets this. We all need to take this threat seriously.

He’s not the only Senator who is more than a little bit concerned:

This is a stunning story about anti-Asian hate crimes in Vancouver Canada. It kind of explodes the myth that this kind of racist violence is confined to the US:

It’s said to be the most Asian city outside Asia. Where a quarter of residents speak a Chinese language and the char siu rivals what’s served in Hong Kong barbecue shops. Where a Sikh gurdwara, a Tibetan monastery, and a Chinese evangelical church coexist in harmony along a 3-kilometer stretch of road dubbed the Highway to Heaven. The kind of place that should be immune to a rise in pandemic-fueled racism.

Vancouver has been anything but.

Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined. With almost 1 out of every 2 residents of Asian descent in British Columbia experiencing a hate incident in the past year, the region is confronting an undercurrent of racism that runs as long and deep as the historical links stretching across the Pacific. 

Covid-19 was the trigger. But the resentment had been building for decades. Few cities have been so visibly transformed by Asian immigration—and money—as Vancouver, a struggling industrial backwater that morphed into a glittering cosmopolis of luxury condos and designer boutiques. The disproportionate rash of incidents has raised an unsettling question: Maybe Vancouver isn’t the bastion of progressive multiculturalism it thinks it is.

“Covid has just revealed what’s always been there,” says Trixie Ling, 38, a Taiwan-born immigrant who runs a nonprofit called Flavours of Hope that assists refugee women. She was accosted in May 2020 by a man who spewed a stream of racist and sexist insults before spitting in her face. “There is so much anti-Asian racism in our past that carries through.”

The backlash against the broader Asian community started almost as soon as the virus began spreading beyond China in early 2020, with Vancouver seemingly poised to become an epicenter. The city had more direct flights with mainland China than any other in the Americas or Europe. A local businessman flying home from Wuhan became British Columbia’s Case 1 on Jan. 26, among the first detected outside Asia at the time. 

Months later, it would become clear that route wasn’t, in fact, the principal cause of the virus’s spread in the area: Epidemiological studies showed that the primary source of infections was strains from Europe, eastern Canada, and Washington state. 

But in the early weeks of the pandemic, simply looking Asian and wearing a mask in Vancouver triggered verbal assaults—“Virus spreaders,” “Go back to China,” “Stop stealing masks from front-line workers.” The attacks quickly escalated: One 92-year-old was hurled out of a convenience store to the sidewalk; a woman was punched in the head at a downtown bus stop in broad daylight. Vandals repeatedly defaced statues and buildings in Chinatown with racist graffiti. 

In 2020, Vancouver police documented 98 anti-Asian hate crimes, an eightfold increase from the prior year. That was triple the number recorded in New York, which logged the most of any U.S. city, according to police data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.

How much do you want to bet that these haters are the same people who refuse to wear masks and won’t get the vaccine?

Of course, most incidents go unreported. An April 9 survey by Vancouver-based pollster Insights West revealed that 43% of British Columbia residents of Asian descent say they experienced a racist incident in the past year, ranging from racial slurs to property damage to physical assault. And almost half say they believe the racism will get worse. Another report in September found that Canada per capita had a higher incidence of anti-Asian racism than the U.S., with British Columbia topping the list. 

For those living in Richmond, a district just south of Vancouver proper where ethnic Chinese constitute 54% of the population, it’s been a particularly bitter irony. Richmond residents began practicing social distancing and donning face masks even before British Columbia’s first case was detected. Months later, public-health officials and researchers would commend the local Chinese community for playing a key role in containing the virus’s early spread. More than a year into the pandemic, Richmond’s total infection rate remains dramatically low, closer to that of the remote Arctic territory of Nunavut than to the Vancouver metropolitan area.

It’s always something …

The article explores the long history of anti-Asian bigotry and discrimination. It’s not pretty But this blatant street violence is simply grotesque and frankly, sociopathic. It’s a sign of a society that’s lost its civilizing restraints. That’s not good.

It’s getting very, very crispy out there:

A group of Arizona citizens, including one Republican Congressional candidate, is asking the state’s Supreme Court to invalidate all election results since 2018 and remove all elected officials from their offices immediately. 

And who should replace the ousted election officials? Well, the citizens who filed the lawsuit, of course.

The legal petition claims all officials elected in Arizona since 2018 are “inadvertent usurpers” because the elections they won were conducted by vote-counting equipment that was not properly certified.

The plaintiffs claim the evidence to back up this staggering claim will be provided in the lawsuit’s appendix, which unfortunately they had not submitted at the time of writing.

The plaintiffs claim that the court has the authority to void the terms of the named officials—which include Gov. Doug Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs—and install themselves as appropriate replacements.

“When in the past citizens have been appointed by the Governor to finish out a Senate term due to unusual circumstances, the Governor has typically chosen pedigreed, well-known politicians, but this is not necessary. Any Arizona resident meeting the minimum qualifications is entitled to and has the right be appointed to a seat in unusual situations,”  the lawsuit claims.

The legal filing is the latest harebrained effort by pro-Trump and QAnon supporters in Arizona to get the results of November’s election overturned. There is currently an audit of 2.1 million votes being conducted in Maricopa County. The GOP-sanctioned recount is being conducted by a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, which has no experience conducting audits. 

So far the group has used UV lights to look for watermarks that conspiracy theorists claim were placed on certain ballots by former president Donald Trump to prove election fraud. And last week they began examining the ballots for bamboo fibers, based on a false claim that 40,000 ballots were flown in from Asia to tip the election in President Joe Biden’s favor.

The new lawsuit was filed with the Arizona Supreme Court on Friday, and the plaintiffs in the case sought to have their names redacted. “Petitioners have chosen to redact their names and personal information and utilize initials due a reasonable concern for their safety,” the plaintiffs write in the lawsuit.

But the group does give some indication of who they are by calling themselves “We the People,” a widely-used phrase in the QAnon community.

One of the people involved in the “We The People” group is Daniel Wood, a former Marine who was a Republican candidate for Congress in last November’s elections.

Wood, who was beaten by Democratic rival Rep. Raul Grijalva, is mentioned at the bottom of a press release about the lawsuit which was published by the right-wing website the Gateway Pundit.

Also listed on the press release is Josh Barnett, a businessman who says he is a Republican candidate for Congress in 2022.

“As average citizens of Arizona, from all walks of life, we have discovered that our past elections in 2018 thru 2020 are out of compliance per the U.S. Election Assistance Commission,” Wood and Barnett claim in the press release.

Wood and Barnett did not respond to a request for comment from VICE News.

The lawsuit was shared widely on pro-Trump and QAnon message boards and channels over the weekend.

“Hang onto your hats, it’s getting wild in Arizona,” Dave Hayes, a prominent QAnon booster known as “Praying Medic”, told his 61,000 Telegram followers on Sunday. Ron Watkins, the administrator of the message board 8kun and who has been identified as a likely author of  many “Q drops,” also shared the news with his 200,000 Telegram followers,  saying the lawsuit “is something to watch carefully as it plays out.”

But not everyone in the Republican world is happy about the efforts to overturn the election results, including those who voted to sanction the audit last month.

“It makes us look like idiots,” State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, told the New York Times.

“Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”

What was his first clue?

This is probably not going anywhere, obviously. But it’s clear they are working themselves up into a frenzy and it’s happening all over the country. The good news is that they’ aren’t violent. Yet.