For a political party that seems obsessed with political theater, the GOP’s stage management sucks balls. The Arizona Republican Party has been in an on-going effort to audit ballots from the 2020 Presidential election – an extension of Trump’s “big lie”, and clearly a bad faith effort to make false claims about the integrity of ballots and generate conspiracy theories to feed the right-wing echo chamber and by extension claim that Biden’s not a legitimate President. Somehow the Arizona GOP managed to win a lawsuit allowing the matter to proceed, in spite of a prior ruling from a judge declaring that the Republican Party was presenting claims that were wrong as matters of both fact and law, and clearly presented in bad faith.

Now, the whole thing is turning into a fiasco. The auditor who was chosen to oversee the recount is a GOP operative with ties to who wrote an “election fraud facts” handbook for GOP Senators who wanted to try to overturn the 2020 election. The Arizona GOP was recently deplatformed by Google for violating their terms of service, which led to the usual conservative whining about “censorship”. Shortly after Google gave them the boot, they started having obvious problems with the cloud based form builder and data storage provider Wufoo.com. If you click the link in the tweet to the wufoo.com form in the Maricopa recount twitter feed you’ll get a “This account is currently disabled” message, but there’s no follow up tweet (as of 8:40pm on April 15th) explaining what happened to that form. One could imagine that companies may just want nothing to do with a bunch of authoritarian pricks who’ve pledged their fealty to a megalomaniac asshole who is trying to overthrow a Federal Election. An additional problem for the GOP is an apparent lack of volunteers to act as election auditors. A review of their Twitter feed contains multiple appeals, and who can imagine that someone could pass up the opportunity to stand on their feet for hours while a bunch of hysterical Matt Gaetz-wannabe GOP shitheads rant and rave like Jack Russel Terriers that just ate a bag full of kibbel and crystal meth doggie treats?

And the Arizona GOP clusterfuck doesn’t stop there. Apparently, in spite of having spent thousands of dollars on legal cases and to hire an election auditor for all of this political kabuki theater, the GOP couldn’t be bothered to tell Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel where all of the recount materials need to be delivered to so the recount may proceed. An excerpt from Adel to the Arizona GOP follows:

“The County has been waiting for direction for a month and a half regarding when to deliver the remaining subpoenaed materials. Your April 13, 2021 email to me stated that the Cyber Ninjas planned to begin its inspection of the tabulation equipment ‘sometime on or after April 21, 2021’ But your email did not provide direction concerning when the County should deliver the subpoenaed material. Some 2.1 million voted paper ballots, 360 small tabulators, 9 large central count tabulators, and other equipment are subject to the subpoenas. It is important the County receive sufficient notice of a delivery date so that it may make the necessary arrangements, including ensuring minimal disruption to County elections operations and avoiding unnecessary expenditure of taxpayer money”

Now the fun part: Adel’s letter goes on to say that the County reserves the right to sue the Republican Party for staff time and costs associated with preparing the election materials for delivery. Given that Adel’s letter already documents a series of attempts to contact the Arizona GOP, and the Arizona GOP has apparently failed to respond in a timely manner, the Republican Party is absolutely exposed to legal liability for any additional costs imposed on taxpayers as a result of the Arizona GOPs failure to respond to communications in a timely manner. Even the most far right civil court judge isn’t going to over-rule centuries of precedent and declare that a party to a legal agreement can ignore the requirement for timeliness of communications and just do whatever the hell they feel like. Additionally, if the County really wanted to get aggressive, they could seek additional sanctions against Maricopa Arizona GOP lawyers under Rule 11, on the grounds that the GOP lawsuit was just political theater, and clearly brought in bad faith (we say “additional” because prior rulings have already found the party to be acting in bad faith and liable for legal costs). This argument would be supported by prior rulings that stated the GOPs arguments were wrong on matters of both fact and law and had “no legal basis”.

The Arizona GOP’s ballot audit is turning into a total shitshow. They’ve got a corrupt shithead running the whole thing, they can’t find people to volunteer for the effort, and they apparently aren’t even bothering to answer their mail. On top of that GOP lawyers affiliated with the recount may soon face legal sanction under Rule 11, and the party could end up being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of their incompetence. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people.