SC shouldn’t follow in Arizona GOP’s footsteps in pursuit of 2020 election audit

Members of the Lexington County Legislative Delegation should listen closely to Jack Sellers and Bill Gates, Chairman and Vice Chairman, respectively, of the Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz.

Sellers and Gates, both longtime members of the Arizona Republican Party, testified Thursday about the county’s election and the uproar that followed once Joe Biden was declared the winner.

“The election of Nov. 3, 2020 in Maricopa County was free, fair and accurate,” Sellers told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform at a hearing held following the conclusion of a review of the election results in his county by Cyber Ninjas.

Sellers spoke of the many steps the county took in the months and years prior to 2020 to ensure the voting process in the nation’s second largest voting district were secure and accurate.

“We ran the 2020 general election in November and suddenly, what to that point had been a great process, was deemed fatally flawed by a small yet loud minority,” Sellers said.

That’s a key phrase in his testimony - small, yet loud minority.

“During these last 10 months I’ve learned a lot about people,” Sellers said as he told the committee about his, what he sees now as naive, efforts to explain the process to his fellow Arizona Republicans in the State Senate.

“There are those who don’t care what the facts are. They just want to gain political power and raise money by fostering mistrust of the greatest power an individual can exercise in the United States - their vote,” Sellers said.

Gates, a former election lawyer who worked for the state’s GOP, said the 2020 election in Maricopa County was the best they had ever run, and the results had been confirmed and validated by hand counts, machine counts, court rulings and even a survey of residents who overwhelmingly said they were satisfied with how the election was run.

Some in his party, Gates said, see it differently despite the results, and have instead “fanned the flames of conspiracy” leading to what he called “a staggering refusal to follow the will of the voters.”

He called the Cyber Ninja’s operation an “amateurish review of Maricopa County’s election technical infrastructure.”

“The Cyber Ninjas, they changed the policies and procedures. They chased conspiracy theories. They threw out false claims, and, worst of all, they accused our good elections workers of committing crimes. They said that they deleted files, but these were files the Cyber Ninjas just couldn’t find.”

“This was either an out and out lie or a level of incompetence by the Cyber Ninjas that was staggering,” Gates said.

Gates said the movement to undo legitimate elections was “ the biggest threat to our democracy in my lifetime.”

“If elected officials continue to choose party over truth, then these procedures are going to continue on, these privately-funded, government-backed attacks on legitimate elections. And losers of elections will just go out and find financial backers who will continue to drag these procedures on, and unfortunately that is going to negatively impact our democracy,” Gates said.

South Carolina’s election was, by all accounts, free and fair. There are no reports of massive voter fraud or any other wrongdoing.

State Election Commission Spokesman Chris Whitmire told The State that the commission has no evidence that the 2020 election results are inaccurate or that votes were switched from Trump to Biden. Trump won with about 64% of the Lexington County vote to Biden’s 34%.

Gov. Henry McMaster didn’t defend or attack South Carolina’s 2020 election process when asked about a Lexington County GOP call for an audit of the results. Instead, he said, “We want to have safe secure elections all the time, and if there’s a group that thinks they need an audit, then by golly they ought to have one.”

State Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick, meanwhile, said South Carolina didn’t have the problems reported in other states. “I think here in South Carolina we got it right,” he said.

State Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, said any audit, no matter who pays for it, wouldn’t change the outcome and would not be a wise way to spend money. “We’re still just stirring the pot when we can be working for the better good,” Shealy said. “This is what we accused the Democratic Party of doing — worrying about what happened in the last election for four years.”

Sellers and Gates offered clear, concise testimony about their experiences with a small, yet loud minority in Arizona since November 2020.

Listen to their words and heed their advice, Lexington County.