The Big Trump ‘the election was stolen from me’ Lie just keeps steamrolling along. This time, it has prompted a sham Arizona election audit to look for fraud where clearly none exists.
Politics
Donald Trump’s ego is so fragile that he will never admit he legitimately lost the 2020 presidential election. Instead, he will use every opportunity he can to inject doubt into the democratic process and sway public opinion that the election was fraudulent and that victory was stolen from him.
That charade is currently playing out now in an Arizona election audit that is nothing short of pathetic. At the insistence of Donald J. Trump, the Arizona Republican Party has hired a private firm to recount the Arizona election ballots for a 3rd time — a full 6 months after the election was decided and certified.
According to Forbes, the Arizona Republicans have paid $150,000 to a Florida-based security company called Cyber Ninjas to conduct a secret and extremely partisan Arizona election audit. Interestingly, Cyber Ninjas has zero election audit experience and its CEO, Doug Logan, is not only a MAGA/”Stop The Steal” proponent, but is also responsible for spreading the bizarre conspiracy theory that a company tied to very-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez rigged voting machines against Trump and cost him the election.
Logan and his team of amateurs are using UV lights to inspect every single ballot (for some undetermined reason), have shunned everyone from the press unless they represent a right-wing media group, and have even created the conspiracy that Antifa will attempt an attack on the facility to halt the audit and prevent the public from learning about the widespread fraud that propelled Joe Biden to The White House.
Although the Arizona Republicans have acknowledged that their recount won’t change the outcome of the election or remove President Biden from office, they are proceeding with the audit anyway just to appease the self-centered whims of Donald Trump.
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Also worth noting Trump is obsessed with the controversial Arizona audit and has told people he thinks it could undo the election. He was videotaped discussing the audit and has raised it with multiple callers and visitors to Mar-a-Lago. They may have discussed 2022 but…
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 5, 2021
Now, various voting rights groups, Democrats, and even some Republicans are blasting the audit as a sham and are calling on the federal government to send officials to monitor the clandestine operation and prevent it from running afoul of US election laws.
“It would be comical if it weren’t so scary,” said election law expert and University of California Irvine professor Rick Hasen.
“This ‘audit’ in Arizona is another step in undermining confidence in elections,” tweeted Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia who already battled false election claims by Trump. “This process is neither transparent nor, likely, legal. Any ‘findings’ will be highly suspect now that the chain of custody has been violated by partisan actors.”
Tammy Patrick, an elections expert at the Democracy Fund and former federal compliance officer for Maricopa County Elections Department, has determined that most of the steps being conducted by Cyber Ninjas don’t follow standard audit procedures.
“The things they are doing with UV lights and whether a ballot folded or type of ink used, none of those things are regular parts of audits — and here’s why: it tells you nothing,” Patrick said. “They are making assumptions on each of those things as if it would be an indicator of fraud or malfeasance or problems.”
Patrick added that the audit is “perpetuating this misunderstanding that there was anything wrong with last year’s election. There was no fraud found.
“There seems to be a predetermined outcome here that I think is really problematic,” she concluded.
The Arizona election audit is scheduled to continue into next week, however, election experts say a legitimate audit of this magnitude by a reputable firm would take months to complete and that there’s no way the Cyber Ninjas will come close to completing their goal.
Still, the fix is in. Donald Trump and the Republicans are continuing to look for trouble where there simply is none. Or, maybe they’ll invent some make-believe fraud simply for the bragging rights of being able to say “See, we told you so!”
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AP: Once a batch of ballots is counted, a designated person at the table makes sure the tallies of all three counters match. The ballots then are moved over to a second station, where workers photograph them and put them through a device resembling a scanner. The purpose of this station appears to be to verify the authenticity of the ballots. It reportedly relies on dubious technology from Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracy-theory advocate, that purports to verify the authenticity of ballots by checking the paper folds and ink. Auditors are also reportedly looking for traces of bamboo in the ballot paper, an echo of a baseless conspiracy theory that ballots were smuggled in from Asia. Even some people helping with the audit are skeptical of Pulitzer’s technology. “This guy is nuts,” John Brakey, an election transparency advocate who was brought in to help with the audit, told reporters on… Read more »