“Ten Idaho legislators … have signed a letter calling for an audit of 2020 election results in all 50 states,” a Spokane newspaper reports here.
“The letter was originally written by Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican,” the story says, adding, “Rogers alleges fraud and inaccuracies were shown through ‘multiple audits and canvasses in multiple states’ but does not detail what the fraud and inaccuracies are purported to be.”
Because she can’t, because they didn’t, because it didn’t happen. But I digress.
“We have come to the conclusion that all 50 states need to be forensically audited,” the letter says, which also calls for “scrubbing” voter rolls. I’ll skip over the latter, because it’s a different subject.
Also, I don’t need to go into detail how they arrived at that conclusion. By listening to liars like Fox’s Tucker Carlson, conspiracy peddlers like Mike Lindell, and of course the big Kahuna himself, Donald Trump. None of whom have any evidence to back up their claims of a stolen election, because there isn’t any, because it didn’t happen. Trump lost because America’s voters, by a 7 million vote margin, don’t like him.
The letter raises a bunch of fascinating questions:
- Who is the letter addressed to?
- Do Idaho authorities intend to conduct these “audits” themselves?
- What is the legal authority for Idaho to “audit” other states’ election results?
- What legal authority is there under the laws of other states to conduct such “audits” at all?
- Who will conduct these “audits,” and who will supervise them?
- Who will control reporting of results?
- What quality controls will be in place?
- And last, but not least, who will pay for these “audits”?
On that last point, if we use Arizona as a template, their bungled fake “audit” (which ended up confirming the certified results) cost around $5.7 million for one county, not the entire state, so let’s just assume an average cost of about $10 million per state times 50 is $500 million and that’s probably on the low side.
Seems to me the people who want the “audit” should pay for it, meaning Republicans, and specifically Idaho Republicans, and if this scheme is adopted by their legislature as official Idaho policy then by the State of Idaho and its taxpayers. That works out to about $750 per household in additional taxes every election, based on U.S. census data (here) of the number of housing units in the state.
It’s unrealistic, of course. It’s fantasy, based on a fantasy. But that’s pretty much everything Republicans think, say, and do nowadays.
Final thought: Election administration costs hundreds of millions of dollars. If you create a parallel audit system, you double that expense, and in every case it will merely confirm the original results. How cost-effective is that? Which inevitably leads to the question, how smart is that?
Somewhat related story: A Boise TV station reports that one of the letter’s signers has “posted a meme on Twitter appearing to advocate violence against journalists, educators, conservationists, the state’s largest university and other organizations ahead of an upcoming election in November.” Read about that here.