PERSPECTIVE: ELECTION INTEGRITYArizona’s Top Prosecutor Concealed Records Debunking Election Fraud Claims
Following the 2020 election, the Arizona attorney general’s office conducted its own through investigation, and confirmed that Joe Biden had won the state, debunking Donald Trump’s false accusations. But Mark Brnovich, the attorney general, was by then running in the GOP primary for the Senate. In an effort to court primary voters, Brnovich refused to release his office report, and “began to flirt with claims of election fraud instead,” Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker write.
Shortly after the November 2020 election, Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s attorney general from 2015 to 2023, confirmed then-President Donald Trump’s loss in Arizona in November 2020, angering fellow Republicans. He went on, in the face of more Republican criticism, to resist Trump’s efforts to overturn the vote in the state.
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker write in the Washington Post that his early affirmation of Trump’s loss in Arizona notwithstanding, Brnovich began to flirt with claims of election fraud as he was, over the next two years, courting GOP support for nomination as the party’s candidate for the Senate (he would lose the Republican primary to Blake Masters).
During his 2-year campaign for the nomination, Brnovich was “trumpeting his interim report on a far-right radio show and saying, ‘It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020,’” Sanchez and Stanley-Becker write. “It was only in the final days before this past November’s midterm election, several months after Brnovich had lost his Senate primary, that he began to denounce politicians who denied Trump’s defeat, calling them ‘clowns’ engaged in a ‘giant grift.’”
Sanchez and Stanley-Becker add:
Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general, Mark Brnovich, launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time.
Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private.
In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat — released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.
His office then compiled an “Election Review Summary” in September that systematically refuted accusations of widespread fraud and made clear that none of the complaining parties — from state lawmakers to self-styled “election integrity” groups — had presented any evidence to support their claims. Brnovich left office last month without releasing the summary.
That timeline emerges from documents released to The Post this week by Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat. She said she considered the taxpayer-funded investigation closed and, earlier this month, notified leaders on Maricopa County’s governing board that they were no longer in the state’s crosshairs.
The records show how Brnovich used his office to further claims about voting in Maricopa County that his own staff considered inaccurate. They suggest that his team privately disregarded fact checks provided by state investigators while publicly promoting incomplete accounts of the office’s work. The innuendo and inaccuracies, circulated not just in the far reaches of the internet but with the imprimatur of the state’s attorney general, helped make Arizona an epicenter of distrust in the democratic process, eroding confidence in the 2020 vote as well as in subsequent elections.
