Fact Check Arizona: Election Conspiracy Theories

This week, Fact Check Arizona dives into election conspiracy theories with Jen Fifield, Votebeat's reporter in Arizona, who has been covering election issues and fraud claims for year.

Transcript:

Zac Ziegler: Welcome to the Fact Check Arizona podcast from AZPM. In each episode of this series, we'll look at a particular claim about elections in Arizona. We'll set the record straight and also give a sense of the context surrounding it. I'm show producer Zac Ziegler, filling in for Steve Jess. This week, Arizona has been at the center of many voter fraud accusations for the past four years. It's hard to fact check all of what's being said about the election itself. So I've brought in some help today. Jen Fifield is a reporter with Votebeat and has been on the election beat in Arizona for years now. Jen, welcome to the show.

Jen Fifield: Thank you for having me on.

ZZ: So let's start with a recent issue that much was made of the fact that the Arizona Secretary of State's office recently announced that a large number of voters had not shown proof of citizenship when they registered. This was a problem dating back years. What exactly happened here?

JF: Well, this came at about the worst time, because we have all these claims federally about non citizens voting, right? And then we find out that we have not been properly tracking voter citizenship in our state since 2004 when we passed a law creating this rule that you have to provide documents proving citizenship. We have for anyone who got a license before 1996 did not properly track that they hadn't given us this proof. This is anyone who registered to vote after 2004 so it's kind of complicated before that you didn't have to show this proof so you're all grandfathered in. These voters will now, after this election, the Supreme Court said, not before, but after, you'll have to provide documented proof of citizenship. Now, obviously this took off with like Elon Musk and everyone else saying, Look, we knew it all these non citizens are voting, but it is important to emphasize that these voters attested to their citizenship. They've lived here since before 1996 in the same location, and there is a vast understanding from Republicans and Democrats alike that most, if not all, are citizens.

ZZ: You're making me glad right now that I'm not just a couple years older, because that would have probably put me in that group, and I don't need one more thing to do in my life.

JF: Hopefully the secretary of state's gonna make it easy for these voters to just log onto a website and give but it is annoying.

ZZ: I saw some talk of something resurfacing recently that you wrote about in 2022 the old why can Florida count all of its ballots in one night, but we can't here in Arizona. Why does it take Arizona longer to count its votes?

JF: Well, it's a great question. It's also kind of a hard question to explain, because, you know, people in who have lived here a long time may have said, Oh, back in 2020, we used to know the night of. Well, a lot has changed since then, and mostly it's how close our presidential race is, our statewide races, and that's the main change that we're seeing here, is that it's always taken this long to finalize the ballot count because of our long cure period we give people the correct signature issues on their ballot because of a state law that allows these last minute drop offs at the polls on Election Day. So we've always counted a long time. We just want the results right away, and we're not getting that in these close races. The other main thing here is we do allow those last minute drop offs. So other states like Florida say you cannot drop off your ballot on election day if it's sealed in in an envelope. We don't want to be doing signature verification to verify your identity after Election Day. That is not something we want to do. We're going to cut that off on Friday. Here we say you can do that. And 290,000 people did that in Maricopa County, at least. In Pima County, it's a lot less, but it still takes time to verify all those signatures, and we're talking days after the election

ZZ: I mean, I guess one more thing that might extend is we, we've had some changes to recount rules, I believe, right. We're, we're probably going to see more recounts from here going on,

JF: Right, so even after we're done counting, we're going to recount all of them in these really close races because we narrowed that margin of votes that takes trigger an automatic recount. So now even wider margins are going to trigger those recounts, but hopefully, you know, we don't have the presidential race falling into that this year. That's one thing that people are a little worried about, because we have some tight deadlines to get our results to Congress. I think it's December 17 everything has to be final. We have to have counted and recounted everything.

ZZ: So when it comes to other conspiracy theories that are starting to be talked about with voting and voter fraud in Arizona this election, are we hearing new ideas around this, or is this just kind of like when I go see a band that I was a fan of in high school on their reunion tour, and I'm just hearing all the hits played again for me?

JF: It is the greatest hits. But unfortunately, a lot of people don't know these songs. So like, it's new to them, right? So like, for example, in 2022 there were, there were claims that we didn't probably track our ballots like we didn't sign off when they moved from one place to another. That's coming back up this year. Look, Maricopa County already isn't tracking these ballots correctly. We have concerns about the voting machines if they're going to be tabulating accurately. We have all of these concerns that have come up before that are making around again, and there's nothing really do you can do to, like, fact check it, it again. You just kind of say what you already know about it. '

ZZ: At least, you just have to repost the old articles you know. That helps take care of it.

JF: Yeah, and it's, it's complicated to try to tell people gently that this is something that's come up before

ZZ: Election security and election fraud have been big topics in county recorder races across the state. This is something you just wrote about, from the big spots like Maricopa County down to the smaller counties like Coconino and Navajo counties. Are these candidates out and out mentioning these theories, or are they just kind of hinting and using dog whistle type language to refer to them?

JF: Well, we found in across the state in five races, and including in the Pima County Recorder race, the Republican challenging our current Democratic recorder is just a mention of fraud, a mention of mistakes in elections, to try to justify them running, to try to secure our elections. That's the main talking point. It's easy talking point to have when you try to get into details, it's kind of like, well, I heard about this one person who got two ballots at their house. And I know this happens everywhere, and I don't want that to happen, so I'm going to run for this position that would clean the voter rolls. And you know, you try to go into the specific claims, and it's they just want to talk in these broad strokes that are more talking points.

ZZ: We've also now seen in in recent weeks here and elected official Peggy Judd and Cochise County take a plea deal for holding up certification of that county's results in 2022 I believe she doing about this, in terms of like, based on what I've been hearing, was kind of her excuse for delaying that. Is there any chance that this could result in some things improving, or, you know, the fact that people are being held accountable, could this change things?

JF: It's interesting. I was talking to the supervisor, supervisor, Peggy Judd about this, and after this, she agreed to a plea deal this week to reduce her sentence to a misdemeanor. She said she was recently at the county supervisors meeting where she talked to other supervisors about what they thought about her decision, what they thought about Maricopa's decision to certify the 2022 election, when there were problems in the Maricopa County election, and she said that supervisors are all on the same page. They are going to certify this year. I don't know if that's the case. I haven't checked in with them, but I'm thinking that you know this case from the Attorney General, involving the coachee supervisors, other county attorneys, just emphasizing to supervisors, this is a ministerial duty to finalize your election results. I'm thinking that we won't see it as much this year.

ZZ: So you've been covering this day in and day out. It's been your life. We were joking about how much time you've been spending on it before we started here. Is there anything we missed that we should be talking about on this topic?

JF: I think that it's important for voters across the state to understand that like results will come in late, that there might be mistakes on election day, that there might be theories going around, but you can't spread that misinformation without really digging into the details and understanding it. And just because we have our results coming in late, just because there's mistakes, it doesn't mean that we have an inherently flawed system. Yes, it can be improved, and that's part of my job is like looking at ways we can improve it. But I think that you know, voters should remain confident that we're counting ballots correctly, and if we're not, we're finding out those mistakes, potentially even in these recounts that we're doing.

ZZ: Jen, thanks for joining me today.

JF: Thank you so much.

ZZ: Jen Fifield is a senior reporter at vote beat, covering elections in Arizona, and that does it for this episode of fact check Arizona. We'll be back with at least one more episode next week, and we'll see where things go after election day. If you have any ideas for an episode, you can go to our website, news.acpm.org, and contact myself or our newsroom. I'm Zac Ziegler. Steve will be back next week. Thanks for listening.