Tell people what they want to believe, and they’ll believe it.
From day one, the Arizona Senate GOP’s sham “audit” of 2020 Maricopa ballots was always about trying to give legitimacy for false election conspiracy theories. To conduct the “audit,” they passed over reputable companies and hired a Trump supporter who promotes those conspiracy theories. To be clear, none of the folks behind this have any interest in objectivity or accuracy; their aim is to construct a narrative in support of a predetermined conclusion.
One of the basic elements of an honest audit is you don’t reach conclusions, much less announce them, until after the audit is finished. But not these guys. The “audit,” which supposedly was to wrap up in May, is nowhere near being completed and may never be; but that didn’t stop the contractor from going on the air a couple days ago (Thursday, July 15, 2021) to regurgitate a previously-debunked false claim.
The claim is that more mail-in ballots were counted than voters requested. The short answer to that is the vote totals he’s looking at also include in-person votes cast at polling stations. (Read story here.)
This has been explained before. It’s being explained again. And will need to keep being explained, ad infinitum, because liars won’t let go of what they think is a good lie no matter how shabby it is.
It remains to be seen whether the “votes flown in from China” (see article here) will resurface in the final “report,” if there ever is one — that joke may be too big a stretch even from Trump true believers to swallow whole — but we certainly can expect more “findings” of the same or similar caliber as this one.
The bottom line is no reasonable person takes the Arizona “audit” seriously. It doesn’t matter what they come up with, because nobody will believe them, except those who want to believe.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t things Maricopa County election officials shouldn’t do differently. An obvious suggestion is to clean up their bookkeeping, i.e., counting mail-in votes separately from polling station votes, instead of lumping them together. The current practice invites misinterpretation of the data, followed by misunderstanding, leading to mistrust of election officials and election results.
But let’s be clear: That mistrust is being deliberately fostered by highly dishonest people with a partisan axe to grind and a gullible audience to exploit. The current practice makes that easier for them. That alone is reason enough to change it.