Why the Arizona election review is not simply an exercise in ‘transparency’
If you’re not a witch, why are you afraid of a witch hunt?
By Phillip Bump for The Washington Post.
There’s a guy at work who doesn’t like you. Who has never liked you. He sees you as a threat and is convinced that you’ve been able to succeed because you’ve done something underhanded — what, he can’t say, but that doesn’t stop him from spreading rumors around your workplace anyway.
Last year, you were both up for promotion. The new position was an important role in the company and both of you went through repeated interviews with company officials scrutinizing your work records. You emerged on top.
Your nemesis’s crusade against you suddenly went into overdrive. Worse, he got his best friend, who works in human resources, to open an investigation of your bid for the role — an investigation led by your nemesis’s friend, someone who in the past has publicly agreed with your nemesis’s allegations.
The H.R. guy gets to work, assuring everyone that he’ll explore every rumor anyone has raised about you — solely, he assures you with solemnity, to be able to rule everything out. The claim your nemesis made about your having worked remotely from the International Space Station for a month? He has a device that will detect the presence of jet fuel residue. The H.R. guy asks that you step out of your workspace for a week or two and he takes possession of your work computer and all of your files so that he can examine every aspect of how you’ve performed. He has never done this sort of investigation before, but he insists that he will be objective in his review.
Perhaps he'll try to be. But, invariably, he will find something suspicious; after all, the entire reason for his review is to pick out suspicious things and to treat as serious vague suspicions. For example, he ran a piece of cloth across your keyboard and the jet-fuel test came back inconclusive; that window, then, is still open. He came across a file called “System32" on your computer, which might be a reference to your 32-year-old nemesis's theory that you've targeted him systematically. Into the “suspicious” pile it goes.
Things go more slowly than anticipated, but the H.R. guy is able to overcome the limited budget provided by your company because of contributions from your nemesis and his friends. By the end of the two-month inquiry, everything you’ve done at your job has been organized into three piles. The largest pile includes those materials that don’t suggest that anything questionable happened. The smallest, consisting of a few sheets of paper and a few files, are the pieces of evidence that the H.R. guy thinks offer concrete evidence of impropriety on your part. Among them, a receipt for a lunch meeting that you filed with your expenses that included parking, against the company’s rules. Things like that. And then there’s a substantial middle pile, containing a number of documents: all the things that the H.R. guy finds suspicious.
The H.R. guy calls a company meeting to announce that, yes, his investigation has determined that he can’t rule out the possibility that you behaved inappropriately before seeking your promotion. He and your nemesis had insisted all along that their investigation had nothing to do with your new position, that it was a done deal. Now, though? They point at the two non-exculpatory piles with exaggerated shrugs.
Regardless of what you did or didn’t do — which I never articulated — it’s easy to see how this process for adjudicating your guilt is flawed. If there are serious concerns about your performance, which this scenario doesn’t suggest is the case, there’s a much more fair way to evaluate them than to have someone both inexperienced and who has demonstrated prejudice against you do the investigation. What’s described above is a scenario in which an effort is being made to rationalize the suspicions of people who are already suspicious of you.
This lengthy allegory has a point, of course. It hews fairly closely to the scenario underway in Arizona, where the Republican state Senate approved a similarly objective investigation of the election results in Maricopa County.
By now you’ve probably heard stories about that “audit.” It’s being led by a small (if not one-person) firm called Cyber Ninjas, which has no experience in auditing an election and which was founded by a guy who has publicly promoted debunked and nonsensical allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. It is treating as valid every theory that has been proposed for how fraud might have occurred, most infamously a claim that somehow bamboo-tainted ballots from Asia were injected into the totals. But there are myriad other questions about process, including the process for counting votes as well as the assumptions being made about what is and isn’t a suspicious ballot.
The process is being championed by supporters of former president Donald Trump, who (with Trump) clearly hope and believe that Trump’s narrow loss in the state will be called into question by the “audit” results. Trump has publicly claimed that the Arizona review will somehow shake loose a few bricks in the wall that’s blocking his sudden return to the White House. Millions of dollars are being poured into the effort, supplementing the amount allocated by the state Senate.
Criticism of this effort, for which the stakes are obviously enormous, is generally centered on the idea that it is about “transparency,” that only those who are worried about what might be uncovered are actually opposed to what's happening.
The argument, then, is that you should have no concerns about that H.R. guy ransacking your work record and identifying scores of things to which you’ll need to respond. It’s just transparency! If you didn’t do anything, you should have no problem countering the perception created by those big piles labeled as “suspicious.” Surely everyone, including your nemesis, will sit down patiently and follow along as you explain why things such as that “System32” file are actually not suspicious at all. Certainly your bosses will see all of this for what it is and stand by you. Right?
If you're not a witch, why would you worry about a witch hunt?
It’s important to remember that there’s no actual evidence that something suspicious happened in Arizona. Nor is the state somehow aberrant in its results. Arizona has been trending more Democratic over time. In 2016, it voted 5.6 points more Republican than the country overall. In 2020, that narrowed slightly to 4.2 points.
The results in the state have been reviewed already by objective actors and nothing unusual has been identified. But, in our modern political environment, there is to many no accepted “objective” party; everyone from the media to state officials is considered necessarily biased if they don’t comport with the assumptions made by partisans and the hype amplified in conservative media. So an obviously nonobjective party is appointed by a nonobjective legislative body and presented by nonobjective media outlets as an official assessor of the unfounded claims that all of these parties have made.
What’s ironic here is the outlier case. Imagine if you actually had done something illegal or immoral, something you’d successfully buried out of sight from the review before your promotion. Imagine that the H.R. guy had stumbled across evidence of it and included it in his review.
Because the review was itself so biased against you, the discovery is itself tainted. Had the discovery been made as part of a review conducted by an unbiased party that wasn't obviously predicated on digging up as much dirt on you as possible, the response would be different. But by being part of this review, the bar for it being treated as substantive is that much higher.
There’s no credible evidence to suggest that the results in Arizona were tainted beyond vague hand-waving about voting machines. There’s no reason to suspect that the review underway is being conducted fairly and that its eventual findings should be treated as themselves credible on their face.
There’s also no reason to assume that this will matter. The audit is being conducted to elevate claims of wrongdoing and the audit is being presented as itself being evidence to that end. Guilty until suggested as guilty in a court of public opinion is not how justice works in the United States, much less how election results work.
Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. Before joining The Post in 2014, he led politics coverage for the Atlantic Wire.