The partisan audit of Maricopa County, Arizona's 2020 election ballots has heightened tensions between the county's majority-Republican Board of Supervisors and the Republican state lawmakers who forced the audit in the first place.
Since its beginning, the latest Maricopa County audit has been fraught with ineptitude and shady behavior. The private firm hired to oversee the process, Cyber Ninjas, has no election experience and fought to keep its methods hidden from the public, even though its founder supported election lies on social media.
Throughout the process, the audit team and its supporters have presented bizarre conspiracy theories and flat out lies. One auditor even said the team was searching for bamboo fibers on ballots, searching for evidence to corroborate the lie that ballots were flown in from Asia. Millions of dollars' worth of election equipment has been compromised due to the audit as well.
So when state Senators prompting the audit issued yet another subpoena to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, they were met with a blunt refusal from its chairman, Jack Sellers, who vowed they'd no longer be participating in this "adventure in never-never-land."
Now, state Senator Amy Rogers is calling for the imprisonment of the board and any other officials not complying with the audit.
When the tweets were met with widespread criticism, Rogers began lashing out.
Brahm Resnik, a journalist, mocked Rogers in a quote tweet. That's when the state Senator said Resnik—a Jew whose family was part of the resistance against Nazi occupation and who died in concentration camps—would have sided with the Nazis in the World War II era.
She accused Resnik of being "anti-American" for not supporting extrajudicial imprisonment.
Rogers has tweeted or retweeted more than 60 times in the 24 hours since her original screed calling for the imprisonment of Maricopa county supervisors.
That hasn't stopped her from receiving near-unanimous backlash for her unhinged rant.
But though Rogers' claims are absurd and idiotic, they're still motivating extremist rhetoric across social media from those who buy into her delusions.
It's unclear how much longer the audit will continue in the face of evaporating support—and how much further it will erode the faith of Arizonans in their elections.
