We all know what an audit is.
noun
-
- An examination of records or financial accounts to check their accuracy.
- An adjustment or correction of accounts.
- An examined and verified account.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
Major corporations are regularly audited by independent accounting firms. The auditors are expected to be professional, courteous, objective, impartial, and accurate. GOP election “audits” are nothing like that, as I discuss below.
The GOP’s “audits” of the 2020 election aren’t part of our election system. They’re private affairs serving partisan purposes, have no status under election laws, are non-binding, and can’t change election outcomes.
The Arizona “audit,” widely derided by election experts as a sham, backfired on its GOP sponsors. It showed Biden with a wider lead than in the official results (see details here). (But if you think that put to rest Arizona Republicans’ “stolen election” claims, you’re deluding yourself, see story here.)
In Wisconsin, Republicans hired Michael Gableman, a GOP operative, to “audit” that state’s 2020 presidential election. Biden officially won Wisconsin by over 20,000 votes, well out of reach of a recount (but the Trump campaign paid $3 million for one anyway that gave Biden 87 more votes, which counted in the official results).
Gableman’s sham “audit,” like Arizona’s, aimed to discredit the official results. As I wrote here,
“[F]rom the beginning, he was on a crusade to overturn the voters’ will. … He’s a crank who found fraud where there was none, embraced debunked conspiracy theories, and was held in contempt by a judge and referred for lawyer discipline after refusing to answer questions in court about his secretive probe into the 2020 election.”
But what finally ended his “audit” was not his unprofessional behavior (watch video here), but party infighting. He tried to depose the GOP leader who hired him (see details here).
That was back in August. A month later Gableman is in the news again, this time for advocating violent revolution. Speaking at a GOP party dinner, he told the assembled Republicans that America’s “best days are behind us” because people aren’t willing to spill blood anymore, and called for “rebellion” against the government (see story here). He’s not an auditor, he’s a revolutionary.
Republicans will keep demanding election “audits,” but there’s no reason for them. The election system we have works fine, and has safeguards and avenues to appeal election results. Their Arizona “audit” was simply another recount of ballots that had already been counted and recounted, and despite its many flaws came up with the same result: Biden won Arizona by over 10,000 votes.
It’s not professional and impartial audits they want, but fodder for overturning elections. Their audits contribute nothing to fair elections. They’re not audits at all, but just another weapon against democracy.