Election integrity champion Gina Swoboda was elected chair of the Arizona Republican Party on Saturday, prompting negative coverage from the mainstream media. Endorsed by both Donald Trump and Kari Lake, she won the election in a landslide over another MAGA conservative, Arizona Corporation Commissioner Jim O’Connor, but The New York Times portrayed the election as chaotic and evidence of the party’s “yawning ideological divide.”
The article said Swoboda “runs a nonprofit group that has falsely claimed to have found huge discrepancies in voting records in a number of states.” The article linked to a piece by ProPublica which reported on the work of Swoboda’s Voter Reference Foundation (VoteRef). VoteRef discovered discrepancies between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast in numerous states. ProPublica cited objections to the report from several election officials as evidence the work was invalid.
However, at least three judicial decisions from the 2020 election have recognized this as a problem and addressed it. In Daunt v. Benson, a lawsuit was filed in Michigan over inaccurate voter rolls. In response to the lawsuit, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson agreed to perform the same function VoteRef performs — making the voter data available for people to examine and find discrepancies. In a press release, Benson said she would make “publicly available the list of approximately 177,000 voter registrations slated for cancellation because the state has reason to believe the voter has moved away from the registration address. … To ensure that voters who still live at their registered address have an additional opportunity to prior to cancellation, enabling voters and civic groups to review the list and notify local clerks of any list errors or registrations that should be updated rather than canceled.”
Similarly, Judicial Watch successfully sued the state of Colorado over its inaccurate voter rolls. In Judicial Watch v. Griswold, Secretary of State Jenna Griswold entered into a settlement with Judicial Watch agreeing to provide them with public data from a federal survey on an annual basis for the next five years so the group could monitor the voter rolls for ineligible voters.
Read the rest of the article at The Arizona Sun Times