A week ago Friday, as the Legislature was churning toward adjournment, a group calling itself the Washington State Tea Room showed up in the Capitol with hand trucks bearing boxes of paperwork for the governor, the leaders of the House and Senate, and the attorney general.
The boxes held thousands of signed “lawful affidavits” from people around the state demanding two things: a forensic audit of the entire 2020 Washington general election and an end to the mask mandate and the emergency rules in place in the state for COVID-19.
It was the result of nearly a year of what Tea Room founder Brianna Mattes called an independent, “very hush-hush” movement that involved signing sessions around the state. They managed to collect thousands of the signed documents, about evenly divided between a forensic audit of elections and an end to COVID mandates.
Whenever the boxes are opened and perused, state officials will basically find thousands of signed statements with pages of constitutional quotations to support their demands.
One demand is a Cyber Ninjas “forensic audit” of the entire 2020 election. Remember that Cyber Ninjas conducted an audit of the presidential and U.S. Senate race in Arizona’s Maricopa County. After about eight months and $9 million, it found some anomalies but no proof of fraud or a stolen election – and 360 more votes for Joe Biden. After being fined by a judge earlier this year, the company said it was shutting down.
Mattes said the point is that some people in the state have doubts about the election. “I don’t care who won,” she said. “If people in Washington state want to talk about this, we should talk about it.”
House Speaker Laurie Jinkins said Friday in an email that the Legislature has no statutory authority to conduct an independent audit of elections, although it could pass legislation that gave it the power.
“But neither former Secretary of State Wyman, a Republican, or current Secretary of State Hobbs, a Democrat, has indicated any need for such a thing,” Jinkins wrote. “In fact, they’ve both confirmed that our 2020 election was safe, secure and accurate despite attempts to undermine this fact.”
And what Jinkins didn’t say – the Legislature has gone home for the year, so it couldn’t do it before 2023.
The other demand, for an end to the mask mandates, may seem to have evaporated on Saturday, as the mask mandates for most indoor settings was lifted. But Mattes said they could be reinstated later despite what she said has “absolutely no science to back it up.” She also questions Inslee’s use of emergency powers for a pandemic, as opposed to an attack or natural disaster.
The attorney general’s office also is still reviewing the Tea Room’s documents, but Brionna Aho, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bob Ferguson, said the concerns about the 2020 election and COVID health and safety protocols have been raised in previous court challenges.
As far as Inslee’s COVID proclamations, 45 lawsuits have been filed challenging the emergency orders issued. “The courts have been clear: these policies are lawful and constitutional,” Aho wrote.
Mattes makes a point that government officials have an obligation to listen to the people’s concerns and redress their grievances. It is equally true, however, if you want the government to listen and then do something about it, you should know something about how government works. And if you’re bringing up something they’ve already addressed, they’re going to repeat what they said before, so you’d better have a new argument.
Rather than collecting thousands of signatures on photocopied “affidavits” and delivering them six days before the Legislature adjourned, the Tea Room might have spent last fall urging like-minded people to contact their legislators about election security and mask mandates, and been involved in public hearings on those topics throughout the session. It might not have satisfied them, but they would have been better armed when coming to the battle.
