Welcome to your vote 2022, I'm Liliana Soto.

For the next five Friday nights, we'll bring you information to help you make informed decisions.

On Election Day.

In addition to this program, you can always visit our website NEWS.AZPM.ORG For election information.

This week, we're not focusing on specific candidates or the ballot questions, as we will in future weeks.

But instead we are focusing on your vote.

We begin our look at voting tonight, with what voters in Tucson are thinking about the election and voting security.

Local government by design is something that people have a greater say in especially because we are.

Even if you are a semi-permanent resident, I am from out of state.

It's really important to partake in that kind of civic discourse, but also make sure you have a say about what's happening, even if you're only a resident for a few years.

Because local elections are what primarily affects you.

And through local elections you can hopefully enact greater change.

We will hear more from voters through our show.

For two years social media and the political world have been flooded with messages that the 2020 election was stolen or there was widespread fraud, despite the fact that multiple lawsuits and investigations have never been able to prove that the rhetoric continues to find out how all of their messaging works.

AZPM's Christopher Conover sat down with Dr. Kate Kenski, a political communications specialist at the University of Arizona.

So we have heard for two years the narrative that the election was stolen, there was fraud and all the things that go with that.

You're a communications specialist, especially a political communications specialist.

How does this narrative resonate for that long?

We don't always see narratives resonate like that.

Well, I think it's a confluence of factors I think first the outset, it's important to recognize that there is a notable percentage, a percentage of the American public that doesn't buy into the idea that Biden was legitimate, legitimately elected.

And so it varies by polls.

But if you look at polls over the past year or so, it comes down to about 58% of the of the people in the United States who are adults believe that he was legitimately elected.

And of course that leaves us a remaining notable percentage.

A lot of that is driven by party.

And so that we we see that if you're a Democrat somewhere between 90, 97% of Democrats believe that Biden was legitimately elected.

But if you go to the other side again depending on the poll and the time anywhere between 21 and 39% of Republicans believe that he was legitimately elected.

And so we have you know people who are disgruntled over the outcome they're unhappy.

I think that the reason why we see this, you know proliferate is we live in different media spheres.

And so we often hear the term echo chamber.

And I think that very much applies here.

Different streams of media sources focus on the story in different ways or you know, do or do not focus on the story at all.

There's a lot of media outlets that feel it was a resolved issue.

They're done.

They're not talking about it anymore.

There's others that are still, you know, catering in a sense to what their audience wants more information about.

And that would be continuing questions about whether or not the election was stolen.

This seems in some ways a new era in communications and watching this narrative move forward.

Is it because we have changed media outlets, we have social media, we have cable networks, we have networks that are just online.

Is this the new world we're living in that this type of narrative because of the echo chamber can just continue?

I mean, absolutely.

That that's a large part of it.

And I will say that it's important to recognize that the echo chambers we live in and I would say most people do live in an echo chamber of sorts.

They may not recognize that they live in an echo chamber because they feel like they're hearing things from different sources.

And most of us do incidentally, come across some information from the other side, but it's not balanced.

And we fail to recognize that balance through the clarification of social media.

We can in large part cultivate, you know, a sense of community around the ideas that we happen to believe.

And so we can choose sometimes consciously, sometimes not as consciously, you know, choose those ideas that resonate with what we want to believe.

Again, you study political communications.

Politicians must know this.

Are we going to see a change in the way they communicate as a result of the success of this narrative within a large segment of the population?

I mean I mean, absolutely.

And I think that where we're seeing some of that, I think that, you know, I would say going back, you know, even I know that we like to hinge a lot of things on Trump.

But, you know, even before that, we saw a change in the way that politics was you know, covered by different reporters.

And we saw politicians changing how much access they gave to, you know, what would have been, you know, mainstream media as they saw fit.

And that has only extended to the extent that the number of outlets has has proliferated during that time.

Sure.

We saw when President Obama was elected, everybody heralded him as the first social media president.

His campaign was the one based on timing that really use social media successfully for the first time.

So, you know, he very much did.

And, you know, you can cultivate your audience, you know, through that that social media.

I think it's also important to recognize, again, that sometimes people do get information from the other side.

But there is a difference between listening so that you can gather information because you want to argue it versus listening to understand.

And a lot of times, I think that listening to understand is often missing from, you know, people across the political spectrum, spectrum.

For politicians or professional communicators who want to either break this narrative or whatever the next narrative is that comes up because of the echo chambers.

Can narratives be broken now?

I mean, I think that still remains to be seen.

I think that what's impressive and not necessarily a positive way about the current situation is that we've had congressional hearings on the topic Those hearings garnered about 18 million viewers, you know, listening to them, you know, consistently about, you know, January 6th.

And you know what that meant And yet, we still have a very strong narrative.

One of the powers that media have is to prime certain issues over others.

And so sometimes they shape the way we act in the way we decide to vote, not by telling us something that, you know, we don't adopt, but by focusing on certain issues over others.

And in this case, it's really hard to break a narrative when there's an audience that wants to hear about it, because media are financially driven right And, you know, it's just it's hard to break that.

So they cover it and it makes it really hard to respond.

The other thing I should add is that a lot of people have a hard time distinguishing between facts and opinions.

And, you know, we do try to teach this in our education system.

You make a claim that doesn't make the claim true.

We need evidence behind it.

But because we turn to different sources, what we consider evidence to believe or not believe, those claims can be very different.

You talk about teaching.

Is there a an age gap here?

Those of us who have earned our gray hair versus the students here on the campus of the University of Arizona, do they get these facts differently these different groups?

I mean, I would say they do, but I would say the problem that we're facing really is more general.

I think there there is a human proclivity to want to believe that which favors your side.

There is a proclivity to want to discount the other side when it doesn't go your way.

That's human.

And so now we have a wide variety of media.

We get to choose where we consume our information.

There isn't that, you know, the public square where we meet where we can debate out facts together.

And as a result, we're being, you know, trained to to basically stay in those echo chambers.

All right.

Dr. Kate Kenski, thanks for spending some time with us.

Thank you.

The result of the 2020 election are a topic that comes up often on the campaign trail this year.

And that is most evident in the race for Arizona's Secretary of State, where a strong election denier is taking on the person who oversaw elections in a county that's been central to claims that the election is rigged.

Arizona Public Media check the claims of the Republican candidate for this race in this fact check from Arizona Public Media.

Steve Jess.

Do you find it kind of odd that the Democrats aren't doing a happy dance over winning?

Well, when you when you steal something that's not really a win.

That's a fraud.

Mark Finchem has been a supporter of claims that the 2020 election was rigged and that former president Donald Trump was the rightful winner.

Since the early days of that conspiracy theory, Finchem spoke at a Stop the Steal rally the day before the January 6th insurrection and was present at the rally on the sixth, though there's no evidence to show that he entered the U.S. Capitol building.

In his speech, Finchem said a full forensic audit was needed At that point, ten Arizona counties had hand-counted a sample of ballots to ensure tabulations by voting machines were accurate.

State law allows for counties to authorize such audits at the request of local political parties.

If a county did not have an audit, it's because the political parties opted not to provide members for a hand count election board.

Then there was the audit ordered by the Arizona Senate and completed by Cyber Ninjas, an online security firm with no election audit experience.

State Senate President Karen Fann used the term full forensic audit when responding to emails sent to her by voter groups threatening recall efforts against her and other Republicans over their handling of the 2020 election.

Even after those audits confirmed that Biden won Maricopa County and the state as a whole, Finchem continued to push claims that the election was stolen and that people who had supported or worked for former President Donald Trump, like his former campaign attorney Cleta Mitchell, were working to uncover evidence.

Cleta Mitchell has launched the Election Integrity Network, and she is going to key states, I think eight different key states where we know that election fraud, election irregularities, whatever you want to do, discrepancies, you use the word you want to use but the elections were rigged and she is going to those states to implement a strategy that is about building election integrity, infrastructure And he used terminology often associated with those in Trump circles, such as Steve Bannon's term, "flood the zone".

I'm a fan of the West Virginia model, which is absentee ballot opt in.

In Arizona, we have flood the zone with fake ballots.

Finchem claims have continued even after his primary and on media outlets that are not right leaning or pro-Trump.

He continued his attacks in the Arizona Clean Elections debate, which aired September 22nd on the Arizona PBS program Arizona Horizon.

But knowing what we know today, there are certain counties that should have been set aside as irredeemably compromised.

Maricopa County was one of them.

Yuma County was one of them.

We have so many votes outside of the law that it begs the question what do we do with an election where we have votes that are in the stream but should not be counted?

It is of note that his criticisms of 2020 are mostly aimed at Maricopa County, his Democratic opponent in this year's election, Adrian Fontes, was the Maricopa County Recorder in 2020 and oversaw a vote counting in that election.

Results from that same election saw Fontes lose his office as County Recorder to Republican Steven Richard by 4,600 votes.

You can hear more of this fact check and other looks at candidates statements from the AZPM Fact Check podcast, which is available on our website, iTunes, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts from new episodes are added every week.

Questions about the integrity of the election and not limited to just candidates for political office.

They were also part of the discussion by the legislature this year.

Christopher Conover sat down with AZPM Senior Political reporter Andrew Oxford to talk about that.

Andrew, we are used to hearing about audits and recounts and things like that, especially the last two years in Arizona.

Some changes in election law.

This year, we can probably expect more recounts.

That's right.

And I should be clear, we're talking about recounts, not audits, the things that are standard practice in counties after each election.

Recounts in Arizona, we don't tend to have a lot of because Arizona law is very particular about when a recount is triggered.

It depends on the race.

But in a race for legislature, for example, under old laws there would only be a recount triggered if two candidates are within 50 votes.

When you consider how many votes can be cast in a race like this, that's not many that's a really close margin So the legislature passed a law this year that changes that margin to say that a recount is triggered if two candidates are within half of one percentage point.

Which obviously is more than 50 votes.

So we're probably going to get more recounts as a result.

What was the legislature's thinking in making this change?

This was sponsored by Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who's a Republican from Scottsdale.

And she argued that this would really help improve voter confidence, ensuring that there was a second look at races that are closer, especially this being a swing state, where you do see a lot of really high stakes and hard fought races that do get very close.

Counties, though, have raised concerns about this.

It's not necessarily a cut and dry matter.

Election officials are concerned that by changing this margin, having more recounts, it's going to put a lot more work on counties, on election officials departments that aren't necessarily well resourced to begin with, and could also mean that we actually have to wait longer before we have a resolution to elections.

I was going to ask you about that.

Those of us who watch elections in Arizona, we're used to not necessarily knowing the results on election night.

It takes time.

This sounds like this could really stretch things out.

What's the timetable for a recount?

We haven't had a statewide recount since.

I think it was about 2010.

Right.

I think there was an initiative measure that went back that was recounted and granted that was statewide, but it took between a week or two.

And like I said, it was costly.

Counties are concerned that they have to do more of this work.

It could add to the logistics of putting on an election in the first place.

Now, you mentioned when we started this, we're talking about recounts, not audits.

Just so people understand, audits are already in the law and we're not necessarily talking about the audit that the State Senate ordered for the last election.

But walk us through a little bit some of the audit laws that already exist.

Sure.

So after an election, county officials will get together with representatives from the different parties and do a sort of sampling of the ballots, an audit where they take a selection of the ballots cast and actually go over them by hand with the recounts that I'm talking about, these automatically triggered recounts.

This would not be by hand.

This would be done generally, not by hand.

This would mostly be done by putting the ballots back to machines not a sample, but rerunning the ballots.

That's one of the big differences here.

You said it was sponsored by Republican Michelle Ugenti-Rita Was this bipartisan when it passed or was this one of those election bills that was strictly on party lines?

There was some bipartisan support.

But like I said, you also heard a lot from election administrators that pointed out that this could put a lot of extra work on a county departments that are not particularly well resourced at the moment.

All right.

Well, thanks for explaining what we will probably all be dealing with here very, very shortly.

Well, we'll see how it goes.

We now go back to Arizona voters to hear what they think about election integrity.

No, I'm completely confident.

I don't think that I think the last election was free and fair, open and fair.

And there wasn't any problem with it.

So I certainly am.

And also voting I will vote by mail and I expect to do that again and did that last time.

And I don't think that's a problem either.

Challenges to the 2020 election still linger as well.

Many now call the big lie, since courts and investigations have proven time and time again that there was no widespread fraud bipartisan leaders in some of the states where those questions are still pushed.

Including Arizona are coming together to try to drown out that noise.

Christopher Conover sat down with former Arizona Congressman Ron Barber, a Democrat, and Phoenix Republican Don Henninger, who are both working with the Carter Center to clear the air.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming in and joining us.

Let's start with why you're here.

The Congressman, you've been retired for a while.

Well, I guess the retirement didn't stick because here we are again.

Tell us a little bit about what you two are doing with the Carter Center.

Well, you're right.

I retired in December, and that was it.

I was going I was going to retire from political life and be a recovering politician.

But then I got a call from the Carter Center in Georgia, Jimmy Carter's foundation, and they asked if I would head up, along with a Republican colleague, an effort in Arizona, an initiative in Arizona, actually, that's in four states, Arizona, Georgia and Florida and North Carolina.

And the whole purpose is to put out accurate information, facts that will push back on disinformation, misinformation and outright lies about the election process.

We're also very concerned about threats of violence and actual violence.

We saw that in 2020 And we know that extremist groups are gearing up to do that in 2022.

So our goal is to with help of a lot of people in our network to defend the accuracy transparency and safety of our election process and also with help from particularly from the religious community faith leaders to push back on political violence.

Don why get involved in this.

You're a Republican.

You've had a notable career in Phoenix.

A lot of people up there know you.

Why get involved with this?

Well, plain and simple.

I'd spent 35 years as a newspaperman and as a journalist.

One of the things that's primary of what you're all about is facts and accuracy and information.

I'm also a community guy.

I've been involved in our community for a long time, so I care about our community.

So those two things combined.

When I heard about the Carter Center opening and had a chance to talk to him about that, I said, This is right up my wheelhouse as a journalist, as a community concerned person.

This is exactly the kind of work that I'd like to do.

And I was I wasn't quite retired, was retired from the newspaper business, but wasn't quite retired from life in Phoenix.

But this was an initiative.

As soon as I saw the opportunity for, I said, I need to do this.

So how do you to combat this narrative that the election was stolen, that there was widespread fraud and all the things we've been hearing for two years?

Well, first of all, a lot of that is just plain nonsense.

And what we've gotten in with Don working the northern part of our state and we work in the southern part is recruit people across the political spectrum.

We have political operatives, candidates, former elected officials, across the range of political points of view.

We have religious and faith leaders, which is an incredibly incredible group.

We have business leaders and we have people representing community nonprofits that are involved with planning and developing and in our state.

These are all now members of our network.

We call it the Arizona Democracy Resilience Network, and they are helping us reach out to people in their networks to promote what we're trying to do, which is accuracy around the polling, pushing back on misinformation, as I said, making sure that the voices of the local elected officials are heard because they are credible people, too, and to make sure that we do everything we can to prevent political violence.

We've seen a lot of chatter on the Internet among extremist groups in Arizona who are ready to rock and roll if certain candidates lose and if their right to protest.

It's not their right to commit acts of violence or threats of violence, which they did in 2020.

We need trusted messengers from all walks of life.

And that's what we're building together.

We probably have 150 people now of influence in our network, including a lot of faith leaders.

And we need people who are willing to accept what the facts are.

And then within their own spheres of influence be ought to be able to take this message forward and so we can tell people what's really going on.

You both have mentioned faith leaders not necessarily a group we always hear about in politics.

Why the emphasis on faith leaders?

Who is a more trusted messenger than your faith?

Leader?

If you're in a congregation or a temple or whatever, who do you really turn to for information?

What we've discovered in building this faith network is the appetite among faith leaders for our cause is amazing.

They really believe in what we're talking about because they realize that our democracy is in danger and the bedrock of our communities are at stake here.

And so they've been surprisingly, I thought they would be receptive, but they've been surprisingly receptive.

They've helped us to deliver a faith statement that we aim to make public.

Maybe have a press conference and certainly get that out to the media that's coming from them about why this effort that we're putting forth is important.

Yeah, faith leaders really do have credibility and well, when we've done some polling and we've had focus groups and what we've learned in those activities is that it's the message is important, but almost more important is the messenger.

If the messenger is someone you trust is credible and you're more likely to accept what they have to say, and the in addition to all of this, we have developed five principles that we hope candidates will be guided by in their election campaigns.

And that's part of what we're trying to get out, is we believe these things are necessary to restore our democratic norms because they've been shredded people, lots of people, not a majority, but lots of people don't trust the election process anymore because it's been so discredited by lies and outright misinformation.

So what we're trying to do is say these five principles should guide you, and we want to make sure we have a lot of people endorsing those principles in all four states.

So what are the five principles?

Well, I've got them in front of me.

I want to make sure I got them right.

The first is an honest process.

Which means we want candidates to cooperate with election officials to adhere to the rules and regulations and refrain from knowingly propagating false information.

We want a civil campaign, and this is something that I've been interested in forever.

When I ran for office, when Gabby ran for office, we said that civility is a key foundation of what we're all about and to conduct yourself in a civil manner, which means you don't threaten and harass and we've seen harassment, particularly of election workers, secure voting.

You know, people say voting is not secure.

Arizona has been using mail in ballots for at least three decades.

And now about 85% of Arizonans vote that way.

And people want to attack that system, which is really convenient and easy, particularly for people who are limited in their transportation abilities and all that.

We want to make sure that that's supported fair oversight.

We want them to parties to train, poll workers to be fair and nonpartisan.

And lastly, and this is the one that I think is probably the most critical of all, and that is we want trusted outcomes.

So when a candidate gets to the end of the road and the election is called, if they disagree with the call, they're entitled to litigate to go through the recount process if it's available.

And then once that's over, the election is won or lost and you're supposed to accept the outcome.

And that's what happened in your last election.

You did in often 30 votes, I think 163 votes initially my opponent was ahead of me on election night and that that required an automatic recount.

And we had attorneys who came in to help us make sure it was done properly.

And at the end they actually actually gained three or four points.

So three or four votes.

So 167 I lost by in the end out of one quarter of a million votes.

It was sad and disappointing, but to my way of thinking, you lose, you lose and you say it so I called up my opponent, Martha McSally, and I said, Congratulations, I wish you all the best.

That's what we want candidates to do because that has not been happening.

We need to really push back in a significant way and say saying you lost, saying you won rather when you clearly lost.

It's not OK. We've got to adhere to a system where the losers admit to losing and the winners accept their win.

And consider the candidates that already are on the record of saying if they lose it will be because of fraud.

Yeah.

And so they won't accept it.

This is before the election, so that's already set up.

Yeah, that should be noted that that our work now is is important for the midterm election coming up in November.

We're also intending to keep this project very much alive and well all the way through the next presidential election in 2024, when it may be even more important to do the work that we're doing there in the coming weeks, we'll bring you interviews with candidates and discussions about ballot issues.

You can find this show and all of our election information on the elections section of our website.

I'm Liliana Soto.

Thanks for joining us.