The fight for a redo of the Arizona Republican Party’s elections in January is heating up.
Kelli Ward, the state GOP chairwoman who narrowly won reelection, claims a letter calling for an April 24 meeting of the party to hold a new vote for several top positions has an insufficient number of electronic “signatures.”
An unspecified number of state committee members contacted the party “claiming that their names are being used without permission by those who lost their elections in January and that any signature from them is fraudulent,” Ward’s statement on Tuesday said.
The letter was signed by roughly 350 Republicans, according to a report from KJZZ, and William Beard, a Pima County Republican, said that is above the 20% threshold of the approximately 1,400 GOP committee members to move forward with the proceedings.
More than a dozen Arizona Republican legislators have called for an audit of the leadership election. Tucson businessman Sergio Arellano, who came in second place in the race to lead the state GOP, requested a recount in January after Ward won the election by only 42 votes in a runoff. A pair of GOP activists, Beard and Sandra Dowling, even filed a lawsuit in Maricopa Superior Court, asking a judge to require the state party to explain why it should not conduct an audit of Ward’s election.
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Ward has argued the outcome is “final” because there were no attempts to contest the results on the day of the election. But Beard said the decision about a special meeting in April is not up to Ward as it is the state secretary who is in charge of certifying the signatures.
“Once it is officially recognized that the 20% threshold has been passed, it sets in motion a series of events that the chair, I mean, [Ward], has every right as an individual to refuse to show up if she so chooses, but the party will continue to operate, and the officers will move forward with conducting the meeting,” Beard said, according to the National Public Radio member station.
JUST IN @AZGOP chair Kelli Ward fires back at ‘dishonest sham’ by ‘disgruntled few’ party members to force April 24 revote on her election & others. Among GOPers who signed on: Russell Pearce & several sitting & former lawmakers. BACK STORY https://t.co/IZH5xFzDZa pic.twitter.com/vCkSpGpD1q
— Brahm Resnik (@brahmresnik) March 30, 2021
Ward’s “news alert” said an “initial review” of the March 25 submission conducted by Republican Party of Arizona’s Secretary Yvonne Cahill “indicated that there are serious issues with many of” the signatures, including that the names of nonstate committee members were “deceptively submitted.”
The statement insisted a special meeting will not take place on April 24 and included a “list of ‘signers'” for committee members to review to see if their names were “falsely added to the list.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Arizona Republican Party to ask how many signatures are believed to be fraudulent and whether Cahill had any comment on the matter.
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All this has played out as Ward and other members of the Arizona GOP echoed former President Donald Trump’s election fraud accusations, calling for audits of Maricopa County’s presidential election results. The GOP-led state Senate plans to hand-count all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county’s Nov. 3 election over protestations by Democrats.
The county has conducted two separate audits, finding no irregularities in election equipment or materials, and invited Republicans and Democrats to participate in the process.
