One of the plaintiffs suing the Arizona Republican Party to force an audit of its January 23rd election got a boost from the Minutes of the meeting, recently submitted by the Party’s Secretary Cynthia Love.
Sandra Dowling claimed that she was named the winner of the CD8 Member at Large election at the meeting, and that her victory was reversed after the meeting was over without any explanation other than “human error.” AZGOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward was adamant that any challenge needed to be made at the meeting itself, that Dowling’s win was reversed before the meeting ended, and that her lawsuit was nothing more than sour grapes.
Yet according to the Minutes, Dowling was named the winner and there was no reversal before the meeting ended. In fact, according to the Party’s Minutes, Dowling is the listed winner, along with former State Representative Anthony Kern and LD22 State Committeeman Mitch Friedlander.
Since the meeting, the AZGOP’s attorneys have reversed Ward’s position and admitted that any State Committeeman has the right to challenge the results and get an audit so long as their request is filed within 10-days of the meeting – a deadline Dowling and dozens of others met. But Ward supporters who have continued to maintain that Dowling should have protested at the meeting itself are now learning that the sequence of events described by Ward were not accurate, and that Ward in fact ended the meeting before removing Dowling from her elected office.
Some Party officials, including newly elected Secretary Yvonne Cahill have indicated that they will be attempting to edit and “correct” Love’s minutes before they are formally approved by the AZGOP’s Executive Committee, and Ward likely has enough loyal supporters on that board to get it done. It is unclear if Cahill will attempt to change Love’s record of the race outcomes, but sources tell ADI that complicating that effort to rewrite history is that Love herself records the audio of the meetings in order to produce the most exact possible minutes, so members may be asked to choose between events as they actually occurred, or as Kelli Ward claims they occurred.