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To get into the V&As blockbuster about the influence of Alice, I had to stand at a security gate for ages, waiting to be called forward into the silent museum. It was a tiny bit Kafkaesque. Then I remembered Kafka was probably influenced by Carroll so it was in fact Carrollesque. Both Carroll and Kafka create slippery, unstable realities in which hapless characters face menacing trials. They both define our world but one was a modernist and the other a 19th-century don. This is the question this hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking exhibition raises: how did a Victorian childrens author create one of the myths that sum up the modern condition?

Its huge fun, of course, from the acid colours of a 1967 poster of the Cheshire Cat (with Jefferson Airplanes Grace Slick singing White Rabbit nearby, natch), to Heston Blumenthals recipe for mock turtle soup, one preparatory part of which takes, he says, about 67 hours. But what really plunged me down the rabbit hole was a film by artist Mariele Neudecker revealing that Cern has a physics experiment going on that it calls Alice A Large Ion Collider Experiment. This is a nice literary crossover, as the experiment frees quarks from their bonds quarks being a word invented by James Joyce, whose nonsense masterpiece Finnegans Wake is a Carroll homage. From psychedelia to avant garde cuisine to quantum physics, Alice has come to symbolise how, in Slicks words, logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.

This permanent revolution began more than 150 years ago with an Oxford mathematician telling a story to a friends children. Picture yourself on a boat on a river. Curiouser and Curiouser might be a glib romp if it wasnt so securely anchored in the Victorian world of Lewis Carroll himself or rather Charles Dodgson, lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, pioneering photographer and friend of the college dean, Henry Liddell. The puns and (il)logic games that permeate his writings, the show reveals, go back to his own childhood: a school report describes the young Dodgsons constant, compulsive punning as if it were a tic. His mathematical research, too, took him through the looking glass, as we see in a scribbled page of Fallacies in which he gleefully demonstrates false syllogisms in algebra. The wit and weirdness of Carrolls creations comes from these obsessions with the pitfalls of language and logic: one false word and youre in another reality. When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, as Humpty Dumpty tells Alice.

The surrealists adopted Alice as a document of psychological mayhem. Theres a letter here from the British surrealist Eileen Agar about why Carroll was a godfather of this movement that wanted to unleash the unconscious. Max Ernsts collage of a Victorian railway carriage compartment in which a bird-headed man is observed by the Great Sphinx appears to be on a riff of one of John Tenniels illustrations in Through the Looking Glass, which shows a man in a paper suit (his face that of Benjamin Disraeli) sitting opposite Alice, while she is closely observed by a porter with binoculars. If there was any doubt that Ernst is thinking of Carroll here, its removed by his painting called Alice in 1941, in which her grown-up body is encrusted with red melting rocks in a decomposing goo.

Voyeurism and nudity here is a door the exhibition doesnt want to open. It has Dodgsons haunting portrait of Alice Liddell in profile, but keeps his other photographs of children to a minimum. He was an enthusiastic photographer of girls.

Yet the V&A makes a powerful case for Carroll as an overwhelmingly positive influence on the world. It stresses Alice Liddells own agency first as an assertive child who bullied him to write down his story about her, then as a woman growing up among artists, tutored by John Ruskin and posing for Julia Margaret Cameron. We see how her hugely publicised visit to America in 1932 got Hollywood interested in Alice. Disneys creation of a pop culture Alice is explored in detail but so are more eclectic versions, such as Jan vankmajers Freudian puppet nightmare and Jonathan Millers black and white 1966 vision with Ravi Shankar on sitar.

Alice is revealed here to be so universal, so multifarious in modern culture that pinning down the Mad Hatters tea party or Jabberwocky to one interpretation, one ide fixe is futile. And to understand that you need to go back to its Victorian creators, plural. For the icon that is Alice was a collaborative creation. If you want to accuse anyone of creating a fetish blame Tenniel, the original illustrator of the Alice books.

Tenniel was already a celebrated political cartoonist. Their close working relationship is set out here. When Tenniel said a chapter of Through the Looking Glass called A Wasp in a Wig was too dull to illustrate, Carroll removed it. The artists sketches and trial pulls of the books plates are brilliant. Theres a study for the corkscrew nose of a Slithy Tove, illustrating Humpty Dumptys explication of the nonsense poem Jabberwocky: an image of mutating, nonsense nature that must have made contemporaries think of Mr Darwins dangerous ideas.

Curiousest of all, Tenniels picture of Alice climbing on to the mantlepiece and through the mirror above it, which melts like mist, proves there was no surrealist dream, no cinematic special effect, these Victorians didnt anticipate. The power of Tenniels designs is their confident realism. Perfectly matching the way Carrolls prose is clear yet creates delirium, Tenniel firmly draws the impossible.

Or is it all too possible? Tenniel himself, in his day job, used Wonderland as a satirical weapon, mocking contemporary politics in a Punch cartoon captioned Alice in Blunderland. Its a move many have made since, from a 1911 suffragette play called Alice in Ganderland to a recent Martin Rowson from the Guardian in which Theresa May says: Why, sometimes Ive tried to believe six impossible things before Brexit.

Perhaps Wonderland really is the landscape we negotiate, changing shape like Alice as we struggle to adapt to the latest dream of the Red King. In the end, this delightfully unhinged journey offers no answers and ties itself to no theory. It just leaves you marvelling at how a childrens bestseller from the Victorian age defined our modern sense of lifes oddness in a way matched only by far less accessible modernist texts such as The Trial, Finnegans Wake or Endgame. There must have been something in the tea. See this and feed your head.

Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser is at V&A, London, from 22 May.

Original post:
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser review a wonderful tumble down the rabbit hole - The Guardian

Have Travis Barkerand Kourtney Kardashian found their happily ever after in the happiest place on earth?

The blink-182 rocker and the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star visited Disneyland in Anaheim,Calif. with their families on May 20, and afterwards, Travis posted a few photosto remind fans their romance is something straight out of a fairy tale. Kourtney commented on the pictures by writing "happiest," and her boyfriend replied by writing, "with the love of my life."

All together now: Awwwww.

Kourtney brought along her kids Mason Disick, Penelope Disickand Reign Disick, who she shares with her ex Scott Disick, and Travis was joined by hissonLandon Barker and daughterAlabama Barker,who he shares with ex Shanna Moakler, and his stepdaughter Atiana De La Hoya, whoShanna shares with ex Oscar de la Hoya. Together, they enjoyed a number of attractions, including The Haunted Mansion, the Pirates of the Caribbean, the It's a Small World and Mad Tea Party rides. They also ate some Disney-themed treats and walked down Main Street U.S.A.

Excerpt from:
Travis Barker Calls Kourtney Kardashian the "Love of My Life" After Family Trip to Disneyland - E! NEWS

During a March webinar, Bill Ely pulled up a map of Harris County while presenting the local Republican Partys ambitious plan for the 2022 midterms: Building an army of 10,000 conservative election monitors. Ely, a local Tea Party leader who heads the committee within the Harris County GOP dedicated to ballot security, pointed to the northwest Houston suburb where he lives, where almost seven out of 10 homes are Republican. Ely stressed to other party leaders on the call the importance of recruiting more election monitors from neighborhoods like his, then he dragged the cursor down to the heart of the city. Pointing to majority Black and brown neighborhoods, Ely said the party needs people with the confidence and courage to come down in here in these areas where we really need poll workers, because this is where the fraud is occurring.

Later in the hour-long presentation, discussing the need to monitor busy urban polling places, Ely arrived at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, a Third Ward hub for civil rights activists that once hosted Martin Luther King Jr. and is home to one of the countys oldest and most active voting precincts. Garnet Coleman, a Texas House member and Black Democrat who lives around the corner from the church, called the plan the latest example of a long-term strategy by Tea Party activists to target minority voters. Coleman said that hes seen partisan poll watchers at precincts in his district, crowding and challenging voters at their booths, delaying or disrupting the pace of casting ballots, and sometimes even carrying guns.

Its been done before, and it is disruptive because you have people standing over voters as they try to exercise their right to vote, Coleman said.

The Harris County GOPs plan to recruit thousands of people for a new Election Integrity Brigade was first publicly unveiled in an excerpt of the webinar published this month by the progressive group Common Cause Texas. We separately obtained an unredacted copy of the training video that Republicans posted on Dropbox on March 10. The plan dovetails with the growing conservative fixation on voter fraud, which extensive research has repeatedly shown to be incredibly rare.

Politicians at all levels of government have repeatedly, and falsely, claimed the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections were marred by large numbers of people voting illegally, said the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. However, extensive research reveals that fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is virtually nonexistent, and many instances of alleged fraud are, in fact, mistakes by voters or administrators. The same is true for mail ballots, which are secure and essential to holding a safe election amid the coronavirus pandemic.

While Donald Trumps baseless claims of a stolen election drove his right-wing base to mob violence this year, Harris County Republicans have long been focused on election integrity. Over the past decade, as the region has gone from swing territory to solidly blue, local conservatives have pushed for voter roll purges and tighter monitoring of elections.

*****

Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel defended the partys new election monitoring plan for the 2022 midterms, saying the goal is to ensure every legal vote is counted.

The push to recruit more conservative election monitors in Harris County coincides with proposals from Republican lawmakers that could further embolden partisan poll watchers statewide. Election integrity bills moving through the Texas Legislature this session aim to expand the footprint of poll watchers, giving them the power to film and photograph inside polling places even while voters cast ballots and threatening criminal prosecution for election workers who get in the way. The bills would also give such groups more power to challenge voters, push for prosecutions of suspected voter fraud, and purge voter rolls.

New protections for poll watchers are among the many changes embedded in a pair of omnibus election integrity bills that top Texas Republicans have deemed a priority this session. Senate Bill 7, which passed the Senate this month, and House Bill 6, which passed out of a House committee, double down on what are already some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. People assisting voters with disabilities or limited English proficiency would be required to fill out a form documenting their relationship and reason for assistance and could even be filmed in the polling place if election watchers believe that the assistance is unlawful, new requirements that Dennis Borel, executive director of the Coalition for Texans with Disabilities, called an invasion of privacy. The proposals would also block efforts to expand voting access that drew legal challenges from Texas Republicans during the pandemic, particularly in Harris County, such as 24-hour polling places and drive-through voting. One provision criminalizes local officials who proactively send out mail-in ballot applications to voters, even when records show they qualify under Texas narrow eligibility for voting by mail.

One of the bills, SB 7, would require some naturalized citizens to prove their right to vote, an apparent repeat of Republicans attempted purge of the voter rolls in 2019. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Harris County Republican who backs the voting bills, has argued for systemized purges similar to those previously conducted in Harris County and elsewhere in Texas that were struck down by federal courts over the past decade. That includes eliminating voters who use post office boxes to register, since no one lives in a 2-by-3-inch P.O. Box, though by his own count this could disenfranchise at least 4,880 Harris County voters. He has also pushed for requiring challenges of voters who indicated in drivers license applications or jury forms that they were not yet citizens despite the botched 2019 purge that Texas election officials attempted using the same public records. As part of testimony in a federal civil rights lawsuit, state officials admitted their purge attempt wrongly targeted tens of thousands of naturalized citizens and agreed to drop it.

Texas Republicans propose similar voting changes nearly every session, yet this year their efforts are part of a larger conservative movement in Georgia and dozens of other states to police the vote. That movement rooted in the lie of rampant, election-stealing voter fraud escalated in tandem with former president Trumps utterly baseless accusations of widespread illegal voting. More than 60 of the former presidents lawsuits were dismissed, even in cases where the federal judge was a Trump appointee. The lone instance when the former president found success in court didnt even deal with alleged voter fraud but rather the amount of time Pennsylvania voters had to fix errors on their mail-in ballots, according to PolitiFact. Thats still not thwarting the GOPs mission.

Texas Republicans, from Gov. Greg Abbott to Attorney General Ken Paxton, have fueled that cause for years, investigating and resolving a small number of minor voter fraud cases in the state. Last year, that involved Harris County residents accused of giving false addresses on voter registration forms. After Trumps defeat, Paxton tried to overturn the election results in four battleground states. Then, on Jan. 6, Paxton addressed protestors in Washington, D.C.

What we have in President Trump is a fighter, Paxton said, shortly before rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, resulting in five deaths. We will not quit fighting.

*****

Texas House member Briscoe Cain, a Houston-area Republican who was part of the legal team attempting to overturn Pennsylvanias election results last year, was appointed chair of the House elections committee this year. He oversaw the 17-hour committee hearing earlier this month on HB 6, which he authored. The hearing illustrated how conservative activists in the state coordinate with Republican officials to drum up allegations used to justify tougher voting laws.

During testimony, Alan Vera, chair of the Harris County GOPs Ballot Security Task Force, warned of dead voters because people had reported deceased relatives receiving applications for absentee ballots after officials tried to expand mail-in voting last election. Vera, also a co-founder of a conservative group called True the Vote (formerly King Street Patriots), has been nationally active for a decade in recruiting election monitors and advocating for voter roll purges. A self-described ex-U.S. Army Ranger, Vera said in a 2012 speech that he had the goal of recruiting a million poll watchers, calling on patriots and fellow veterans to rise up to defend their system against what he called domestic enemies.

True the Vote members, who were involved in recent voter challenges in Georgia, also participated in purges of so-called dead voters in Texas, like the 2012 purge that targeted about 300,000 Texas voters with common names, including Sylvia Garcia, a long-time Houston politician who in 2018 was elected one of Texas first Latina members of Congress.

The movement to change Texas election laws isnt isolated to conservatives in Harris County. During the hearing on HB 6, Monty Bennett, a Dallas hotel magnate and moneyman for hard right conservatives in Texas, told lawmakers that voter fraud had tainted several recent elections in Tarrant County. Bennett is part of a crew of North Texas Tea Party sympathizers who began focusing on voting laws after claiming forged applications for mail-in ballots doomed their preferred candidates in a 2015 Tarrant County water district election. In the hearing, Bennett claimed his groups investigation into Tarrant County elections uncovered thousands of fraudulent votes over several years and implicated top local Democrats. However, years after their probe, on the eve of the 2018 midterms, Paxton unveiled charges against just four low-level campaign workers accused of forging signatures or providing false information on mail-in ballot applications for 28 people. One of them also faces a single second-degree felony count of illegal voting for allegedly marking one elderly mans ballot without his permission.

The kingpins got away, Bennett told lawmakers.

Voting rights groups have condemned changes to election law that Texas Republicans are pushing at the Legislature this year as a naked attempt to suppress the vote and say new restrictions would disproportionately burden vulnerable voters, as well as people of color in an increasingly Black and brown state. The Texas Civil Rights Project says its voting hotline received 267 reports of voter intimidation during the 2020 general election, including reports of poll watchers who crowded voters trying to cast their ballots. Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, fears the changes would encourage vigilantism among poll watchers while subjecting voters with limited English proficiency to further scrutiny.

Many people will be deterred from voting if they think that somebodys going to follow them around at a polling place and watch them vote, Perales said.

During his webinar on poll monitoring in Harris County, Ely highlighted how a much smaller group of poll watchers had already reported a dozen instances of alleged fraud during the November 2020 election and submitted affidavits to Paxtons office, yet Paxton, Ely said, is slow-walking these cases. Obtaining video proof of alleged misconduct, possible if state law changes, could help volunteers prevail in what are otherwise he-said, she-said cases, Ely told party members.

In a press release describing the webinar, Common Cause executive director Anthony Gutierrez characterized the partys emphasis on alleged voter fraud in minority neighborhoods as a racist dog whistle and the exact same dangerous rhetoric that led to the insurrection at the Capitol, but this time the target is Black and brown communities in Houston.

In an email, Harris County Republican party officials insisted their hour-long grassroots election worker recruitment video had been blatantly mischaracterized in what they called a shameful effort to bully and intimidate Republicans.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Texas Observer.

Original post:
Election Integrity or Voter Intimidation? - Fort Worth Weekly

Voice of Westmoreland was among the wave of pop-up progressive groups that spread like dandelions in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.

Many doubted VOW, as the group has come to call itself, would ever be a force in politics. In a county that leans decidedly red, theyve yet to elect a candidate.

But four years after its first rally on Courthouse Square in Greensburg, where a handful of activists gathered in February 2017 to protest President Trumps Muslim travel ban, the group that is fueled through monthly member dues is feeling its way in the political landscape.

Tapping skills in door-to-door canvassing and phone banking honed during a get-out-the-vote drive for Joe Biden, VOW is starting small in this years municipal elections. The organization has endorsed a slate of three candidates for school board openings in Greensburg Salem and Norwin and two candidates for Greensburg City Council.

The move reflects the sentiments of VOW co-founder Clare Dooley, who explained the groups decision to get involved in the presidential election last fall as part of its commitment to change and social justice.

Were in it for the long run. Elections are how you change things, said Dooley, of Unity.

The group recently affiliated with Pennsylvania United. The umbrella group with loose ties to Democratic Party and organized labor now boasts affiliates in seven Pennsylvania counties including Allegheny, Beaver, Centre, Crawford, Erie, Washington and Westmoreland. All told, the local chapters are running 24 candidates in school board and municipal races in four of those counties, including Westmoreland.

One of the ways we believe we can create long-term change we want is by building power from the grassroots up, said Sarah Skidmore, one of the leaders of VOW.

She said the multicounty slate of activists that local groups are mounting puts people over politics and wants to be sure everyone, regardless of brown, black or white, can earn a good living.

This slate of candidates took a candidate pledge not to take corporate cash and committed to a multiracial, multigenerational grassroots change, Skidmore said. Were having conversations, being a presence in the community and caring about our neighbors, no matter what they look like.

In Westmoreland, their candidates include Dana Barvinchak William and Carrie McConnell Muniz in the Norwin School Board race. They are calling for more transparency in school operations, data-driven decisions and an emphasis on the well-being of students.

In Greensburg, their slate includes Sara Deegan, a librarian at the Greensburg-Hempfield Area Library. She wants to ensure students in the Greensburg Salem School District have access to well-staffed libraries and arts programs.

VOW also endorsed a pair of candidates for Greensburg City Council: Yukie King, who is Black and transgender and who once experienced homelessness, and data analyst Ceil Kessler. Their campaigns have emphasized meeting community needs in areas such as housing, transportation and health care.

Into the void

Lara Putnam, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who tracks grassroots movements, said its been interesting to watch groups such as VOW evolve in areas where the Democratic Party has been in decline.

Theres a pattern were seeing broadly, nationally, that PA United may be a part of, Putnam said. The groups that have emerged and consolidated were not just in suburban, upscale Philadelphia collar counties that have been trending Democratic, but also in places Democrats electoral fortunes have been declining in recent years in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

In quite a few places, the groups that have coalesced and endured over the last couple of years have affiliated with PA United. Theyve moved into network issues. Theyre not affiliated with the Democratic Party, but they are left of center.

The theme of starting local has a familiar ring to Kim Ward, the Hempfield Republican who is the first woman to serve as Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader.

Ward got involved in the Westmoreland County Republican Committee 29 years ago on the tail end of the Reagan Revolution. Back then, many were dismissive of the former respiratory therapist turned stay-at-home wife and mother to three young sons.

There were 148,000 Democrats and 52,000 Republicans in the county, Ward recalled.

Democrats had held nearly every elected position in the county for decades.

But Ward saw a way.

She persisted and persuaded the Tribune-Reviews late publisher Richard Scaife, a longtime figure in conservative circles nationally, to make a contribution that enabled the local committee to open an office in an old Greensburg storefront.

We had to be present, Ward said. We opened an office and staffed it. We started going out to events, taking out local candidates, knocking on doors and talking to people. It was fun.

Gov. (Tom) Ridge came in and held a fundraiser for us, and we raised $50,000. We started pulling people in, but we still couldnt win anything.

In 1996, local GOP candidates won two township supervisor races. After that, Republican wins started piling up. Registration numbers also inched upwards, finally eclipsing Democrats in 2019. And Ward rose from committee member to township supervisor to county commissioner and finally state senator in 2008.

Along the way, the Tea Party movement, which was seeded by Republican national donors in 2010, helped boost the development of local conservative grassroots activist groups.

Ironically, Trumps continued influence in the GOP may be one factor keeping grassroots groups that supported President Biden active at the local level, said Shippensburg University political scientist Allison Dagnes.

One of the things Ive found interesting is that, on the Republican side, there is still a very Trump kind of candidate who is vying for attention. You saw that in national senate races, and you also saw that down ballot, Dagnes said. So when I look at the municipal races in an off-year election, when a community is still using Trumps name to say this is who I am, that I supported President Trump and I did not believe in the (Biden) election, it keeps the fire going for punch back against that wing of the Republican Party.

Dagnes suspects GOP efforts in state legislatures to mobilize support for laws that would restrict ballot access also may be fueling the efforts of liberal grassroots groups.

The local grassroots groups on the left do not seem to have the deep pockets that funded the Tea Party. Although theyve received some support from Democratic lawmakers, they seem anxious to be associated with issues instead of party politics.

Fueling the fight

Tracy Baton, of Pittsburghs Park Place neighborhood, is a social worker with a degree in community organizing who studied authoritarian governments in South Africa as a Fulbright Scholar. She organized the first Pittsburgh Womens March and is active in the Indivisible movement, a collective of grassroots political organizations.

Last year, Indivisible rallied small groups of supporters for the Biden-Harris ticket and helped push the Democrats to victory in Pennsylvania. This spring, in an effort to bump up turnout in the low-participation municipal primaries, Baton said they are reprising some of the same themes that inspired record turnout in November. That includes calls for racial justice.

Were telling people justice is on the ballot, Baton said.

She has been urging voters to educate themselves about the 39 candidates running for judge in Allegheny County and, most importantly, to vote.

If you care about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, you have to vote, Baton said.

Locally, Putnam said the covid-19 pandemic also appears to be playing a role in some of the grassroots efforts. She noted that some of the lead activists in VOW include current and retired health care workers who have connected with labor organizers.

Theyve been outspoken, lobbying for increased testing and vaccine equity. Putnam said the public health crisis is an issue that the pandemic brought to the forefront of the public conversation, along with questions about whether long-term care counts as infrastructure and how society will value those who do this work.

And issues, rather than party politics, she said, are fueling the grassroots efforts.

Deb Erdley is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Deb at 724-850-1209, derdley@triblive.com or via Twitter .

Excerpt from:
Grassroots groups that supported Biden remain active in Westmoreland, Western Pa. - TribLIVE

Had the case gone their way, Arizona would have seen the inauguration ofGov. Bradley James Burchfield, Phoenix Mayor Samantha Nicole Arrey and Maricopa County Sheriff Brian Steiner.

Those three were among the 20 people who filed a request with the Arizona Supreme Court that the past two general elections be invalidated and certain people who won their seats in those contests be tossed out of office. In their place, the group offered to install themselves as temporary caretakers until a proper election could be held.

The group initially filed its petition anonymously, its names under seal by its request.

However, the Arizona Supreme Court, in a Wednesday ruling, ordered the names be made public. A document was unsealed Thursday that revealed the names.

None appear to be recognizable political figures in Arizona.

Arizona Supreme Court at 1501 W. Washington St. in Phoenix.(Photo: Patrick Breen/The Republic)

QAnon appears at election audit: Did QAnon sneak in (or get invited) to Arizona's sham election audit?

The group filed the papers under the name: We The People of the State of Arizona. But a spokesperson for the group had said that was meant as a generic description, not a proper name.

The spokesperson said this group had no affiliation with the pro-Trump political group We The People, which has also been a champion of the Arizona State Senate-ordered audit of all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County.

This group had asked for anonymity for security reasons. In its filing, it said the members understood that their names would be public should the court act on the petition and entertain installing the members into public office.

Once in office, the group argued in a motion, their public stature "would have provided a measure of safety in itself."

The Arizona Supreme Court dismissed the case three business days after it was filed. It then gave the group a deadline to file a motion explaining why the individual's names needed to be kept from public view. After receiving that motion on Monday, the court rejected the request on Wednesday and ordered the names be made available.

The group's novel petition suggested that a slew of office holders who won election in the 2018and 2020elections, as well as the 2019 Tucson mayoral election, were holding their office improperly. The group offered a novel solution: to take the place of what it called usurpers until a proper election could be held.

The claim was rooted in a truth: The federal agency charged with certifying the two companies in the United States that audit election machines had not given a by-the-book certification for years. Both were still certified under federal law as their renewals were still working through the bureaucratic process.

A spokesperson for the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by the Help America Vote Act, said both companies have continued to have staff visit and assess the machines, ensuring their testing was up to accreditation standards.

Jack Cobb, the co-founder of Pro V&V, one of the groups, told The Republic that the problem wasn't practical, but political. His company was still operating up to federal standards, he said. But the board of political appointees simply hadn't voted to renew the certification, providing a final stamp of approval.

The Arizona Supreme Court said, in its ruling, that even if the requestwastimely, it could not entertain tossing out election results absent evidence that the errors pointed out by the group would have changed the results.

"The validity of an election is not voided by honest mistakes or omissions," the court wrote in its ruling, citing a case dating back to 1887, when Arizona was still a territory.

The court also pointed out that the petitionwas, by statute, meant to be filed by a county attorney or state attorney general, or someone with a viable claim to the office.

In its ruling, the court said that "nothing in the statutes Petitioners cite grants them a private right of action to remove office holders and sit in their stead."

Elwin "Buz" Slade, a real estate agent in Tucson, who was part of the group, said he had a feeling the petition would be tossed out by the Arizona Supreme Court, continuing what he sees as a decades-long pattern of government corruption.

"Big money controls everything," Slade said during a phone interview on Thursday. "And if you have money, you get to pick who gets to be in office."

Slade, in the court filing, was contesting the seat held by Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos. Slade said he was tapped to be sheriff mainly because he looked the part. "I'm just a big guy and they said, 'You should be sheriff,'" he said.

Though as a young man he protested the Vietnam War in Tucson, Slade said the last Democrat to earn his vote was former President Jimmy Carter. He said he was active in the Tea Party movement, and held fast to his conservative beliefs even in the hostile heavily-Democratic area of Pima County in southern Arizona.

Slade said he was vocal about his politics and would talk "ad nauseum with friends until they told me they don't want to hear me."

If he were sheriff, Slade said he would have done the basics. "I would have listened to my deputies, enforced the law,"he said. "Yeah, I would have been a good sheriff."

The group asked the court to oust four statewide officeholders: Gov. Doug Ducey, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, State Treasurer Kimberly Yee and the Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman. It also sought to boot four members of the Arizona Corporation Commission, the mayors of Phoenix and Tucson, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, and six state lawmakers, including the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives.

The group said it targeted as many office holders as there were members of the group willing to take their place in office. The group said it chose the offices strategically, knowing the transition would be a difficult time for the state but that having ordinary citizens in these key places would keep the state running as smoothly as possible.

The group spared Attorney General Mark Brnovich in its court case, according to Slade, because the group didn't have any lawyer who could have replaced him.

Although the same machines the group found problematic were also used for the 2020 election for U.S. President, the group did not seek redress for Arizona's electoral votes being awarded to President Joe Biden and not former President Donald Trump.

The group had filed its action with the Arizona Supreme Court anonymously, using only initials. In the filing, it included a series of documents that contained the individual members' names, dates of birth and home addresses, which the group said was intended to show all were qualified to hold public office in Arizona.

The court, in its ruling on Wednesday, ordered that a copy of those affidavits be unsealed, with the addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers redacted.

The court said that the group's concerns about security could not overcome the requirements set out in the Arizona Constitution, state statute and the rules governing the courts.

The court said that "the public's right to know the identities of Petitioners outweighs their desire to proceed anonymously."

Although the group referenced a provision in the state constitution that said no person should be disturbed in their private affairs, the court said, in its ruling that members' effort "to unseat publicly elected officeholders through this Court is not a private affair."

Two people involved with the effort have communicated with The Republic only through email, denying requests for interviews by phone.

However, both spoke on an online talk show hosted by former state legislative candidate Liz Harris, who has provided thrice daily updates on the audit ordered by the Arizona State Senate of the 2.1 million votes in Maricopa County. The interview took place on May 11, the day the state high court dismissed the case.

Daniel Wood was the 2020 Republican candidate for Congress representing District 3.(Photo: Arizona Secretary of State)

Maricopa supervisors frown on audit: Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and elected officials speak out against Senate Audit

Rayana Eldan, whose name, along with Daniel Wood, a 2020 Congressional candidate, were the only two used in the court filing, said that she started looking at the problems with the election in January or February.

"We're not contesting a county or a couple of votes here," Eldan said on the show, which has since been removed from Harris's Facebook page and made private on YouTube. "We're basically saying the entire state wasn't treated fairly and their rights were violated."

Eldan said the court's rejection of the lawsuit for not being timely did not allow for the situation at hand, with someone like herself, unversed in minutia of election law, finding a major problem through their own research weeks or months later.

"We found fraud," she said. "We found problematic things at the very top level. It's interesting the way they framed it and so easily dismissed us and told us we weren't in compliance."

Eldan described herself, through most of her life, as "kind of a hippie environmentalist. I'm not a longtime MAGA Republic person," she said, using the acronym for the Trump campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.

"I'm just kind of a person who got sick of seeing my heart misappropriated by both sides," she said. "The identify politics thing."

Had the petition been successful, Eldan would have been temporarily installed as the mayor of Tucson, the state's second largest city.

Wood, who has announced his intention to campaign for Congress again in 2022, said on the show that the group came together after hearing a speech he gave at a district meeting. He described the group as ordinary citizens, not affiliated with any recognized or established group.

"This has nothing to do with any organization, has nothing to do with some kind of plan or Q," he said, referring to the QAnon conspiracy theory that imagines Trump was preparing to dismantle and arrest a global cabal of politicians and celebrities engaged in crimes against children. Wood posted about the QAnon conspiracy during the 2020 campaign and told The Republic he followed Q's writings and had found some truth in them.

Wood said that he had first learned of the certification issue in the spring of 2020, but realized the issue would have been too much for him to tackle on his own.

"In my mind," he said, "I was thinking borderline treason."

The 20 names and the seats they contested were:

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Court names the 20 people who wanted to toss Arizona elections, put themselves in office - The Arizona Republic