When governments buy goods and services, they usually do so through a bidding process, but not always.
“No-bid” contracts earned notoriety under George W. Bush, where the term became associated with cronyism, political favoritism, and corruption — the most prominent example being the taxpayer billions showered on Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, during the Iraq War (see a few other examples here).
Enter Arizona, where a GOP state senator is on a mission to discredit the Democratic votes that gave her state’s electoral votes to Biden. She hired a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist to conduct an “audit” of Maricopa County’s ballots.
No-bid contract? Ya sure, you betcha! Because the last thing she wants is an honest recount (there have already been two of those).
“In early March, a Boston-based vote-counting firm called Clear Ballot Group sent a bid to Arizona’s state Senate to audit the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County,” ABC News says (here). “The firm has conducted more than 200 such audits over 13 years in business. ‘Our level of comparison data is unmatched,’ Keir Holeman, a Clear Ballot Group vice president, wrote to the Republican-controlled Senate. He never heard back, he says.”
Of course he wouldn’t, and didn’t, because accuracy isn’t wanted.
“Instead, the state Senate hired a small Florida-based cybersecurity firm known as Cyber Ninjas that had not placed a formal bid for the contract and had no experience with election audits,” which has run a “process that … so deeply flawed it veers into the surreal. … Experienced vote counters have watched the process in shock.”
Someone who knows elections came up with this analogy: “If I give you 20 M&Ms, and you want 30, you can keep counting it, but you did not get 30 M&Ms,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a former Department of Justice voting rights attorney and elections expert. “This is not an effort to find the truth.”
Of course it’s not. It was never intended to be. This farce has only one purpose: Bolster GOP election lies.
State Sen. Fann’s sham “audit” has pitted Arizona’s Republicans against each other. She has even threatened to arrest Republican officials in Maricopa County for not cooperating with her sham recount to her satisfaction. Some of those Republican officials have spoken out, complaining that Fann’s clumsy “audit” is making a “laughingstock” of Arizona and she has “defamed” local election officials. The Arizona GOP’s state party chair, Kelli Ward, has sided with Fann.
Meanwhile, the “audit” itself is behind schedule, over budget, and collapsing into disarray. With only a third of the ballots examined in the time allotted for the entire project, it has been evicted from its rented state fairground facility to make way for high school graduations, the ballots are now sitting in semi-trailers, and the “audit” may never be completed; it’s on the verge of collapse.
Which would be a good thing, because you know what the “auditors” are going to claim: The election was stolen from Trump in Arizona with ballots flown in from China, brought in by UFOs, or whatever.
It wasn’t. Biden got more M&Ms than Trump, because the majority of voters in this country — and in states owning a majority of electoral votes — aren’t people like Fann (above right) and Ward (left).