Rachel Alexander loves her election-fraud conspiracy theories, and she has another one to promote in her Feb. 7 WorldNetDaily column:
Concerns are increasing that Kari Lake’s loss to Ruben Gallego in the Arizona U.S. Senate race in November was due to malfeasance. For example, many believe around 60,000 votes were transferred from Lake to the unknown Green Party candidate in the race. Now, the CONELRAD Group, a team of mostly former intelligence and military officers located primarily in southern Arizona that investigates illegal election activity, along with the Pima Integrity Project, or PIP, have issued a new report on alleged improprieties in Pima County’s elections last year.
The groups found 10 areas of concern, including some where laws or rules were allegedly violated involving “possible malfeasance,” and called on the Arizona Legislature and the Trump administration to investigate.
The 54-page report, compiled by CONELRAD founder Jack Dona and a couple of team members including Tim Laux of PIP, found what they are calling multiple violations of the chain of custody (COC) of ballots, which is a class 2 misdemeanor, noncompliance with the state’s Election Procedures Manual (EPM), also a class 2 misdemeanor, refusing to allow political party observers at early voting locations, providing mostly left-leaning ballot couriers, courier time records that were impossible, unsecured ballot boxes, and ineligible voters on the voter rolls.
Dona suggested to this writer how the wrongdoing could have happened. “All of the information lawfully obtained in this report begs the question: Is this nothing more than a series of possible mistakes, errors, incompetence, malfeasance … or is it something else entirely?” he asked. “One could imagine if the fictional character Sgt. Joe Friday of the TV Show ‘Dragnet’ were assigned to this case, his discussion with his partner, Detective Bill Gannon, might go something like this: ‘Bill, let’s see if we can piece this all together. First they make a copy of the voter database. They use that copy of the database to adjust addresses. Then let’s say they send a dump for printing. The database copy then gets tossed and disappeared.'”
He went on, “‘Then when the election happens, those adjusted addresses go to different places, ballots filled out and dropped somewhere? Isn’t it a fact that between the November election and the January data dump, thousands of records are removed? They don’t go inactive first as ARS (Arizona Revised Statutes) states, do they?… Don’t they just go away? Has anyone ever seen those ballots’ histories because as I understand it the voter record is gone? Doesn’t this answer the question as to why a voter swears they didn’t vote in spite of the records showing they actually did?'”
There isn’t a lot of transparency regarding the two groups Alexander is promoting. The report itself is posted at Telegram, which requires an account to access, and the Pima Integrity Project website is currently inaccessible because the domain name was allowed to expire. And despite her column being headlined “Did Kari Lake really lose in November?” Alexander offers no actual proof to the contrary — it’s just a lot of pedantic theorizing by right-wing obsessives who are more interested in discrediting the process when their preferred candidate does not win.
Alexander made no mention of how no credible evidence has been found to back up Lake’s previous claims of election fraud in a 2022 election she lost — indeed, when she had the opportunity to provide evidence of it, most recently in a defamation lawsuit against her by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, she refused to do so.
Unsurprisingly, Alexander touts how the report calls for more election meddling:
CONELRAD and PIP recommended as solutions, “Based upon the preponderance of the analysis provided in this document, and the repeated mistakes, errors, possible malfeasance or possible other election ‘irregularities’ that continues to plague elections in Pima County, the situation will require the direct intervention of the Arizona State Legislature to correct.” Additionally, “The President of the United States should immediately convene an investigative body, with law enforcement subpoena capability, perhaps a Special Council, that will be able to step in and identify and correct the problematic issues plaguing Pima County Elections.”
Many believe there were a couple of races in addition to Lake’s that were manipulated; one was the state representative race in Pima County’s LD 17 where Republican incumbent Cory McGarr lost even though Republicans have a 10-point voter registration edge over Democrats. There is also speculation that the abortion-till-birth proposition, Prop. 139, passed due to cheating.
Alexander did not not identify who this “many” were, or if any of them exist outside her bubble of conspiracy theorists.