The-Ave.US

The circus at an Arizona fairgrounds has ended, but the controversy hasn’t.

As this month came to an end “the auditors stopped the counting and returned the ballots,” but a “report” is still weeks or months away, the Associated Press reported on Saturday, July 31, 2021 (read story here). And when it’s issued, nobody should believe it.

Even some Republicans are shaking their heads. “A conservative Republican senator withdrew her support, calling the process botched.” Another GOP senator commented, “Not even a shred of being salvaged at this point. They’ve botched it at so many points along the way that it’s irrecoverable.”

The Associated Press noted that “a majority of the Senate, which commissioned the audit, is now against it.”

Republicans eager to discredit the 2020 election hired a private company with no experience, run by a Trump supporter who’s vocally promoted false election conspiracy theories, to conduct the “audit” of Maricopa County ballots. Two-thirds of Arizona’s population lives in that county, which includes Phoenix.

Here’s a partial list of reasons to ignore the “audit” results:

• The company “broke rules for counting ballots”
• Audit workers used “blue pens in violation of a fundamental rule of election administration. Blue and black pens are strictly prohibited near ballots because those are the colors voters are told to use, creating the potential for workers to manipulate the count”
• The “auditors chased conspiracy theories,” e.g., examining ballots with UV lights, and looking for bamboo fibers to prove ballots were flown in from China
• A defeated Trump elector “was among the workers counting ballots”
• The “only audit leader with substantial election experience was locked out of the building”
• The “review’s Twitter accounts were suspended for breaking [its] rules” against “platform manipulation and spam”
• The audit was paid for “by supporters of Donald Trump who were active in the former president’s movement to spread false narratives of fraud”
• Experts have called the audit “a deeply flawed, partisan process”

By trying too hard to discredit Maricopa County’s results, the Republicans discredited themselves. But they don’t seem to care. This was never about overturning those results; contrary to what some Trump diehards believe, the election is settled and Biden is America’s legal president until January 20, 2025.

Rather, it’s about undermining confidence in future elections, partly to create an excuse for GOP-controlled legislatures to ignore the voters’ choice and appoint presidential electors themselves. This is part of the GOP’s larger efforts to seize power by such means as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and overthrowing elections. Some even support the idea of a military coup (even though our military leaders would never go along with that).

Long ago, our forebears agreed to settle political differences with ballots, not bullets. That’s the system they handed down to us, which was interrupted but not destroyed by the southern states when they saw the slavery abolition movement as an existential threat to their economic system, social hierarchy, and way of life. Although it survived that and has proved resilient through a tumultuous history of economic crises, world wars, and existential threats from abroad, any political system based on “the consent of the governed” is inherently fragile, and is at risk of failure if a major faction or party refuses to abide by its ground rules.

That’s the situation we face today, and it goes beyond sour grapes. Republicans are threatening to smash that system if they don’t get their way. They’re doing this at a time when America faces powerful foreign adversaries, ruled by totalitarians, who interpret our infighting as American weakness, and exploit it to argue that democracy and freedom don’t work. Such perceptions could encourage further human rights abuses, bolder aggression, and set the stage for miscalculations that might lead to a third world war.

Those are the ultimate stakes raised by the challenges to democracy here at home, in addition to threatening our own freedom. Our most fundamental right of all, the right choose who governs us, is on the line. The rest of the world is watching to see how we sort it out. They’re thinking if democracy can’t work here, where can it? We have a responsibility to ourselves and the world to make sure it does. That necessarily begins by defending our elections against assaults like this one.

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