The Daily Fuckup

Arizona’s 2020 election fight did not end when the votes were counted. It kept returning as a paperwork problem, a staffing drain and a political weapon — and when the state attorney general’s office released records in February 2023, those files showed investigators had found no factual basis for the sweeping fraud claims pushed by allies of former President Donald Trump.

The release said Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office turned over documents from the prior administration showing agents and support staff spent more than 10,000 hours on allegations tied to the 2020 vote. The office said it reviewed 638 complaints, opened 430 investigations and referred 22 cases for prosecution. In the records released by the office, investigators wrote that the claims they examined were unsupported and, in many cases, inaccurate.

That matters because false allegations do more than distort public debate. They consume time, staff and attention inside agencies that have to answer the same accusations again and again even after investigators have checked them and found no evidence to back them up.

Arizona’s records show that burden plainly. The state said its election integrity staff had to work through claims ranging from alleged dead voters and duplicate voters to pre-marked ballots and internet-connected election servers. The result was not proof of a stolen election. It was a documented trail of complaints, investigations and rebuttals that took thousands of hours to process and left the official record in the same place: no support for widespread fraud.