President Biden was sworn into office more than six months ago, but officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., are still searching for evidence that Biden's victory in their state was based on massive voter fraud — even after multiple audits found no issues.
New Yorker writer Jane Mayer says the Arizona audit is an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.
Mayer notes that although the audit appears to be the work of local extremists, it's actually being funded by sophisticated national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country's wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives.
"The 2020 election is long since over in most people's minds and settled and decided," Mayer says. "But these groups are doubling down in the money they're putting into, and the effort they're putting into, trying to push the idea of fraud — potentially in order to challenge the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election."
Mayer writes about what she calls the "dark money" behind the challenges to Biden's victory in her latest article, "The Big Money Behind the Big Lie." She says a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump's false claims of widespread fraud to promote alterations in the way that ballots are cast and counted in 49 states. And, she adds, 18 states have already passed new voting laws in the past six months, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Mayer notes that while some of the challenges are coming from extremist groups, established conservative organizations — including the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council — are also getting involved.
"Organizations that we have come to think of as pillars of the conservative movement ... [are] throwing their efforts behind a very anti-democratic movement here that is scaring even some Republican election officials and is also scaring election law experts," she says. "They are really going all in on this Trump lie."
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