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Hickman: Election deniers pose the true threat to election integrity

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Back before “election integrity” advocates cajoled the Arizona Senate President into hiring unvetted, unqualified, private companies with known biases to bungle their way through the world’s worst audit, Maricopa County taxpayers were $3 million dollars richer and a robust series of checks and balances, codified in law, protected the system from election-changing fraud.

Today, those laws still exist, the technology is as good as it’s ever been, and your neighbors (Republican, Democrat and Independent) are still the people helping to administer fair elections, including the recent August Primary Election.

Elections here in Maricopa County remain fair, secure, and accurate, even if they don’t always result in my candidates or causes winning.

But a strong election system in Arizona is also facing its greatest risk in my lifetime in the form of these so-called election integrity advocates. You see, they’ve co-opted a phrase that I’d previous seen as something good — improving nonpartisan election administration — and used it as a political weapon.

Recently, the Washington Post reported that people working to overturn the last presidential election copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia, then shared that data with computer and technology folks who already believed the 2020 election was stolen.

According to their reporting, this “multistate effort to access voting equipment … was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported.”

This is exactly what the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors warned about two years ago when the Arizona Senate subpoenaed taxpayer-funded election machines and the people’s ballots, and publicly flirted with hiring a company, Allied Security Operations Group, whose founder — among his other false claims — once alleged fraud in Michigan based on vote totals in Minnesota.

In our court filing to protect Maricopa County voters, we said: “The Senate ended up hiring ASOG-adjacent ‘Cyber Ninjas,’ whose CEO Doug Logan was so plugged into the “‘Stop the Steal’ movement that, per the Post, he had already been given access to sensitive election files from Michigan and Georgia before coming here to Arizona. Senate leadership gave the Ninjas carte blanche, and the Ninjas proceeded to audit their way out of existence with a six-month circus of spinning tables, blacklights, and bamboo.”

Just a few weeks ago, one of the Senate’s audit subcontractors, Ben Cotton of Cyfir, testified in court that he made copies of sensitive election data from Maricopa County and took them to his so-called lab in Montana to review. Alone.

Did he ask you? No. Did he get approval through a public vote of the entire Arizona Senate? No. Do we know what he did with it? No.

Here’s what Cotton said, based on the court transcript:

Cotton: “Under contract I was allowed to produce one copy of that data and I have retained that in a U.S. Government approved GSA safe.”

Court: “And you — who gave you permission to retain that copy?”

Cotton: “The Senate.”

Court: “The Arizona Senate?”

Cotton: “Yes.”

Court: “The full body of the Senate? Did the Senate vote on it?”

Cotton: “I know that the President of the Senate, under the contract that was initiated, authorized us to make that copy.”

Court: “And how did you get it from Arizona, outside our borders, up to Montana?”

Cotton: “I received permission from the U.S. Senate — or the State Senate to transport that I personally transported that in my vehicle.”

Remember, this was all done in the name of election integrity.

It goes without saying that Ben Cotton is not an Arizona election official and therefore should not have anything to do with Arizona elections.

But many of our loudest critics and many of the audit’s most generous donors — the people who claim our board should be tried for treason — don’t even live in Arizona, have no idea what our laws are, and are simply repeating lies they saw on the internet.

The push to give outside actors access to election data and machines is clearly a security issue, but it’s also a financial one.

When the Senat gave our election equipment to private companies with no business auditing elections, they became compromised and unusable in future elections. We had to pay $3 million to lease new machines to run elections this year.

Are we going to do that every time the party in power doesn’t like an election result? That’s not American. That’s not conservative. That’s insane.

My concern going forward is that this type of behavior is being normalized and promoted. From rogue county clerks in Colorado to contracted computer experts in Georgia, the examples are multiplying. It’s clear there’s a broad campaign to replace trained election workers with people who have a political or financial stake in the outcome of elections. This is terrible for democracy. It’s also dangerous for real people.

Election professionals across the country are being demonized and threatened at unprecedented levels, all based on lies.

Who is going to stand up with me and say enough?

About the author

Republican Clint Hickman is a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors representing Country District 4.