News Roundup: The Evolution of the Big Lie

This week saw two major victories for transparency in Arizona and Pennsylvania — and new developments in the partisan election investigation in Wisconsin.

Government transparency

Voting rights

Inquiriespress@americanoversight.org

There are multiple places we could point to for evidence of just how entrenched the lies about rigged elections are in right-wing circles.

From Arizona to Wisconsin, from Michigan to Washington state, election-deniers have pushed for conspiracy-fueled election reviews. Even as Covid-19 deaths reach levels not seen in months, voter-fraud lies are being promoted alongside opposition to masking requirements. False claims about fraud were circulating in California well before Tuesday’s decisive defeat of the recall effort.

As American Oversight laid out earlier this week, the Big Lie — that voter fraud robbed former President Trump of his reelection last year — “was able to take hold in part because it was built on a decades-long campaign by conservative activists and lawmakers, who hyped up the threat of voter fraud in order to impose restrictive voting laws and to cement their own political power.” See our report on the evolution of the Big Lie.

Read on for the latest news on these election-undermining efforts.

Arizona
On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court left in place rulings from two lower courts that had determined that records in the physical custody of Cyber Ninjas — the lead contractor in the state Senate’s partisan election “audit” — are public records and must be released.

The Senate has been fighting to avoid transparency for months. During a hearing in the state Superior Court on Thursday, the Senate’s attorney said that Cyber Ninjas had not yet turned over “audit” documents.
The attorney also disclosed that the Senate plans to release its (compromised) findings next Friday, 24, after months of delay.
We’ve already obtained tens of thousands of records that point to the biased political origins of the “audit” as well as the involvement of prominent election conspiracy theorists. And as detailed in Rolling Stone, the records have also revealed the extent to which top Republican and Trump campaign figures have played a role in the “audit” from the beginning.

Wisconsin
Election-deniers have been pushing for an Arizona-style operation in Wisconsin, despite the existence of two ongoing investigations — including one ordered by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. That investigation took a strange turn this week:

On Monday, county clerks received an email signed by Michael Gableman, the former state Supreme Court justice whom Vos hired to run the investigation, asking that clerks retain all election records, including information “retained on … voting machines.”
Of course, the machines don’t actually contain information — that data is kept on memory cards and is loaded onto servers. “This is where he doesn’t understand how any of this works,” one clerk told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
That isn’t the strangest part: Gableman’s email was not sent from a secure government account. It came via a Gmail address belonging to someone named “john delta,” and ended up in many clerks’ spam folders.
The attached letter, signed by Gableman, indicates its author was Andrew Kloster, an attorney who worked in the Trump administration’s Office of Presidential Personnel and has since vocally supported the Big Lie. He has been accused of yelling at election workers on election night last November while serving as an observer for the state Republican Party.
This isn’t the first indication of Gableman’s leanings. Not only has he said in the past that the election was stolen, he has been working with election-denying conspiracy theorist Shiva Ayyadurai, who also appears in the records of Arizona “audit” officials’ communications that we obtained. So does Gableman.

Pennsylvania
Another partisan probe is underway in Pennsylvania, where Republican lawmakers on Wednesday approved subpoenas to the Pennsylvania Department of State for election data, including voters’ personal information and communications with county election officials.

American Oversight scored another legal victory for transparency earlier this week, with a ruling from the state’s Office of Open Records determining that officials in Fulton County must begin releasing records related to “audits” the county conducted in December and February.
Those “audits” were conducted by the company Wake TSI, which also worked as a contractor to a nonprofit run by sanctioned attorney Sidney Powell, who had been behind legal efforts seeking to overturn 2020 election results. Wake TSI later joined the Arizona operation.
In July, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state decertified Fulton County’s voting machines after concluding that Wake TSI’s examination violated the state’s election code.

Other headlines related to the Big Lie:

Major Trump backer is hosting a huge QAnon conference in Las Vegas (Vice)
Grisham texts cast doubt on book claim (Politico)
Kansas agrees to $1.9M settlement for defending Kobach’s baseless voter fraud claims (Kansas Reflector)

On the Records

Kelly Craft’s Kentucky Focus
We obtained State Department calendars for former U.S. Ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft, revealing that she spent more than half of a two-month stretch in 2018 in her home state of Kentucky or — when she was in Canada — meeting with Kentuckians. Forbes reported on the calendars last week; previously, we found emails showing that Craft had directed government business to the Trump International Hotel in D.C.

News Roundup: The Evolution of the Big Lie

Other headlines related to the Big Lie:

On the Records

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