If you follow prominent Republicans like State GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, former AZGOP spokesman Zach Henry, or former State Representative Anthony Kern on social media, you have noticed a steady diet of posts and tweets in support of election audits, transparency, and election integrity. In their words, Democrats are obstructing an audit because they are afraid of what the audit will reveal, and why should anyone listen to or follow Democrats who are working so hard to thwart the public’s right to legitimate elections with transparent audits?
Ward, through her AZGOP platform, is raising tens of thousands of dollars to fight the “we need an audit to stop the steal” fight, and appears on countless videos, wherein she blasts the Democrats and their political and legal efforts to stop the audit. “What are they hiding?” Ward asks in one tweet. She has also had harsh words for Republicans who have been on the side of efforts to prevent the audit, and will use hashtags like #FullForensicAudit.
Yet at the same time, some say Ward and the AZGOP are spending party funds to block, at any cost, an audit of her January election as Chairman, along with several other senior officers and the Party’s 27 At-Large Members.
The very public fight over the State GOP not following its own bylaws so as to thwart an audit of an election that was reported to have potentially fatal flaws in its registration, balloting, and tally processes, has been going on for months, leaving many Republicans trapped between loyalty to a principle like election integrity, and loyalty to a State Party Chairman they support politically or personally.
Zach Henry is the former AZGOP spokesperson, and while he often tweets about the audit in clear terms, writing “Only conspiracy theorists would question the outcome of an audit”, and “Mistakes can be fixed, inaction is failure. The @ArizonaAudit is underway and can’t be stopped so Plan B is to try to slow and delay.” He has no discernible position on an audit of the Party he spent two years managing communications for.
Even former Representative Kern, whose own social media posts celebrate not just the County Audit but his role in it, refuses to call for his own party to follow a similar path, or to apply the principles of election integrity to its own elections. Unlike Henry, who no longer has any sort of official role within the Party, Kern is one of those Members-At-Large who was elected in January. As such, he has a powerful position to press for audits and accountability within the AZGOP, but he has refrained from doing so.
Kern told Arizona Daily Independent that “The AZGOP election in January was probably one of the most efficient we have done as a state party. Republican National Committeeman Chair Tyler Bowyer, who ran the meeting, said it was one of the most efficient he has ever seen. It was a good election in my opinion.” Kern added that he thought any “internal disagreements” could be worked out behind closed doors.
Democrats and members of the media have spent the last three months pointing out what they say is the hypocrisy of prominent Republicans, something that advocates for a real AZGOP audit say they have been motivated by. Former Senate President Russell Pearce wrote a widely circulated op-ed stating that doing things the right way in the AZGOP was required, not optional, and that the fight to see things get done right would last as long as it needed to.
As the fight over election integrity and audits rages on in Arizona, voters who hear Republicans speak out publicly in favor of them now ask: “Is that something you believe in for every Arizona election, or is it just something you support for the Trump/Biden election?”