“‘The No. 1 issue’: Trump whips up election falsehoods after flawed Arizona report”

Politico:

Friday’s flawed report from the Republicans investigating Arizona’s 2020 election isn’t changing minds or dampening enthusiasm among election conspiracy theorists. Instead, the movement keeps gaining traction in the Republican Party.

Inexperienced reviewers hired by the Arizona state Senate have been trawling through the results in Maricopa County for months, with the county’s Republican elected officials debunking their claims as they went along. But as draft copies of the report surfaced Thursday night, with a vote count aligning with the official results showing President Joe Biden won, GOP-controlled Texas became the latest state to launch a copycat investigation of 2020 results in four large counties. Republican state legislative leaders in two states Biden narrowly won, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, recently blessed election reviews as well.

Republican candidates up and down the ballot in state after state are adopting former President Donald Trump’s phony claims about fraud and stolen elections. And in Arizona, Republicans said their demand to keep revisiting 2020 was inflamed — and that the report made it necessary to consider more restrictive voting rules in future elections.

“This is a huge win for the 3 November movement to get to the bottom of the 2020 election,” said Boris Epshteyn, former special assistant to Trump who has been tracking efforts in Arizona. He said “the next step is a full audit and canvass of all Arizona counties and including a full canvass in Maricopa County.”

The Arizona state GOP held a watch party for the unveiling of the report, and multiple candidates for governor questioned the validity of the state’s 2020 election results throughout the day. The same thoughts and statements have spread to other states, too, driven by Trump’s lies and unsubstantiated claims about the election.

For months, Trump has been fixated on reports about the 2020 election results, and has been particularly interested in the Republican efforts in Arizona. During media appearances and at event speeches, Trump made questioning the 2020 election results a major rallying cry, even calling it the “crime of the century.” Behind the scenes, Trump got regular updates from aides and allies about the minutiae of the Arizona auditors’ findings and closely followed the right-wing media’s coverage.

Months of work and millions of dollars poured into producing a report that election experts — including Democrats, Republicans and nonpartisan officials — have urged people to reject out of hand because of the improvised processes of the review, the inexperience of those running it and their promotion of conspiracy theories about the election. They said the fact that the final vote tally from the report closely tracks the actual official results does not change the fact that it should be dismissed.

“The takeaway is that this was a colossal waste of time,” said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is now running for governor, in a brief interview on Friday. “And anyone who is considering replicating it in their state, or taking further action based on this report, should not be considered a serious leader.”

See also NYT’s ‘Stop the Steal’ Movement Races Forward, Ignoring Arizona Humiliation:

After all the scurrying, searching, sifting, speculating, hand-counting and bamboo-hunting had ended, Republicans’ post-mortem review of election results in Arizona’s largest county wound up only adding to President Biden’s margin of victory there.

But for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest. Former President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists redoubled their efforts to mount a full-scale relitigation of the 2020 election.

Any fleeting thought that the failure of the Arizona exercise to unearth some new trove of Trump votes or a smoking gun of election fraud might derail the so-called Stop the Steal movement dissipated abruptly. As draft copies of the report began to circulate late Thursday, Trump allies ignored the new tally, instead zeroing in on the report’s specious claims of malfeasance, inconsistencies and errors by election officials.

Significant parts of the right treated the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication — offering a fresh canard to justify an accelerated push for new voting limits and measures to give Republican state lawmakers greater control over elections. It also provided additional fuel for the older lie that is now central to Mr. Trump’s political identity: that the 2020 election was stolen from him….

The Arizona review, and similar partisan election investigations around the country, are one spear in a multipronged effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to dispute the outcome of the 2020 race and to overhaul future American elections.

That push has alarmed Democrats, good-government groups and historians, who point to the ways that Mr. Trump undermined democratic norms while in office, including his fight to subvert last year’s election, an effort that culminated in the Capitol riot.

New evidence for their arguments emerged this week in the form of a memo unearthed in a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post. According to the memo, drafted by John Eastman, a Republican lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign, by refusing to accept the results, Mr. Trump could help prompt a state legislature to send an alternative slate of electors to Congress.

The memo concluded that, with multiple slates to consider, former Vice President Mike Pence and allies in Congress could refuse to certify the states in question, which would nullify the election results and lead instead to a vote in the House of Representatives on the president, with each state delegation receiving one vote.

In 2020, Republicans held the advantage in state delegations, with 26, meaning that Mr. Trump would have successfully overturned the election in this scenario….

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