Arizona Republicans have commissioned a controversial “audit” of Maricopa County’s ballots to “prove” their state’s electoral votes were stolen. Don’t believe what they come up with. This is a partisan charade with ulterior aims.
The Republican county supervisors refused to endorse it. County election officials, CNN says, have already “conducted two audits and found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and other issues.” The state’s Republican governor was attacked by his own party for certifying the election.
The company they hired, which calls itself “Cyber Ninjas,” is run by a Trump supporter who promoted false election conspiracies. He won’t say who’s doing the ballot counting. Independent observers aren’t allowed and restrictions have been put on journalists.
“Outside election experts have expressed alarm over Cyber Ninjas’ lack of experience in the elections space, the seemingly haphazard security plans to secure the ballots and machines, the dearth of information about the audit procedures, and the limited access for nonpartisan election observers,” CNN reports.
“This is not like any audit I’ve ever seen,” the director of a nonpartisan organization called Verified Voting said. “If it intends to be perceived as fair-minded and credible, they’ve made some bad mistakes.”
Arizona’s secretary of state told CNN, “I have been avoiding calling it an audit, to be quite honest with you, because that’s not what it is. They have been making this up as they go along. This is just a fishing expedition by people who are determined to find something wrong. There is absolutely no validity to this.”
So what’s the point of this? I can think of at least three: (1) Republicans are raising a lot of money from gullible supporters by continuing to push election falsehoods; (2) they’re also using these false claims as an excuse to enact more voter suppression laws, and (3) it’s red meat for the Republican base, who believe against all evidence and logic that the election was stolen. Here’s a fourth: Having stirred up those angry mobs (watch video below), it’s now too dangerous for them to back down.
Read the CNN story here.
Update (4/26/21): A new judge has been assigned to hear the Democrats’ lawsuit to stop the “audit” (read story here).
Update (4/30/21): Audit workers drive cars with Trump bumper stickers (read story here); security volunteers posing as cops stop a reporter from entering (watch video here).
Big fun in Maricopa county! Democracy at work. Not a page from the Spanish election of1936. Finally proven to have been stolen? The real conundrum of that election is about half the population supported the left, about half supported the right, and there was no middle. Things got ugly perhaps because this was not a majority over a small minority (the Jews in Germany), nope this is 1/2 the population taking the other half.
This isn’t “democracy at work,” it’s an effort to undermine democracy. If the people behind this unnecessary and unprofessional “audit” supported democracy, they would acknowledge that Biden won the election, and wouldn’t be passing laws to restrict voting. If you look up “conundrum,” it means “a question or problem having only a conjectural answer.” Who won Arizona’s electoral votes is not conjectural. Even given squishy meanings of “right” and “left,” you are wrong about there being no middle; polls show more voters identify as “independents” than Republicans or Democrats. Things got ugly when gangs of sore losers became violent mobs. The election was fair, there was no fraud, and elections are how we decide who governs in this country, so they don’t have a legitimate grievance.