Arizona State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican, says that the current audit of Maricopa County 2020 general election ballots "makes us look like idiots."
He is right.
Even though there were absolutely no indications of any reason to conduct an election audit or recount in Arizona following the 2020 election., and without a single piece of evidence to justify it, Arizona's legislature compelled the state's taxpayers to underwrite the expenses for four separate audits, complete with plenty of observers from among the extremists and conspiracy theorists, along with a recount. What those independent auditors found--all experts in election audits, all non-partisan and committed to the accepted principles of election audits, all verified by even the extremist and conspiracy theorists who observed--was that Arizona's 2020 election outcome was accurate. The recount produced an additional handful of votes for both candidates, fewer than a hundred total, which actually boosted Biden's total by about 50 votes. That's not unusual, even in an election as close as this one.
But the auditors found absolutely no evidence whatsoever of fraud, and not even as many of the quirks and "irregularities" that accompany a typical election, largely because a much larger percentage of the population used the mail-in or drop-box route, which eliminates the "irregularities" that occur with the various methods of voting in person.
Facts and solid evidence, however, are not the modus operandi of Trump supporters. Operating on a philosophy of "lie until enough people believe it to create doubt," the repeated and redundant requests for "audits" would not be satisfied until an auditor could be found who, in spite of the evidence, would obfuscate the facts to create doubt. The auditing firm, called "Cyber Ninjas," which alone should have given the good senator pause before they made his Republican colleagues look like idiots, and which indulges in ridiculous conspiracy theories, claims that they have a special piece of equipment that can detect the presence of "bamboo fibers" indicating that the ballots may have been inserted into the pile from China or Southeast Asia.
That's where Boyer drew the line. And I agree, though believing something like that doesn't just make you look like an idiot, it qualifies you for club membership and the card.
Boyer and other senators could have prevented this embarrassment by simply refusing to demand yet another audit after getting more than conclusive evidence that there was no voter fraud and that Biden got more votes in Arizona than Trump did. Period. But they waited to see which way the wind would blow and when it became a hurricane against the idiocy of the Cyber Ninjas and the whole conspiracy theory fraud, they jumped on the bandwagon headed the other way. Too late, but they're trying and you have to hand it to them, they have confirmed that Trump lied about a stolen election.
The "Cyber Ninjas" with their comedy of errors, have simply underlined the fact that there was no voter fraud and that Maricopa County in particular did an outstanding job of managing an election as free of error as any in the country. The "comedy of errors" includes the fact that they are so inexperienced at auditing, well, just about anything, that they can't competently manage the information they need to conduct their audit. They claimed that the county deleted an entire voter database, but the county didn't delete anything. the database is right where they filed it. The incompetent auditing firm can't figure out how to access it, which should be the first indication that they do not have a clue about what they are doing. They apparently do not have anyone in their group who can follow instructions. They claimed that the storage boxes had inaccurate numbers of ballots stored, but, oops, the county says they never requested to see the logs which list the boxes, by number, and the ballots they contained. They have them, every box accounted for accurately and exactly according to the log.
It's pretty obvious the intention in hiring the "Cyber Ninjas" wasn't to get an accurate audit of the election, it was to continue to sew doubt about the accuracy of it and to keep feeding the lie, as Senator Boyer pointed out to Arizona voters. If they really had any genuine, real evidence that there was any kind of "fraud," even with the tiniest fraction of the ballots, we'd be hearing about that now instead of their magic bamboo-fiber detecting microscope or the fact that many of the absentee ballots appear to be machine folded. It's good that they noticed that, since absentee, mail-in ballots in Arizona are machine folded before they were mailed. They've also violated just about every state rule that applies to election audits, including being caught with dozens of black pens and sharpies in the counting rooms, a big no-no, and of leaving piles and boxes of ballots opened and unattended, also an audit-violating practice.
And now, against the rules of legitimate election audits in Arizona, they are packing everything up because the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the audit is laid out, is being used for a while to host high school graduation ceremonies. Such an interruption invalidates what they've done up to this point, which isn't much, at least, it does under real audit practices and rules. But this isn't a "real" audit and these aren't "real auditors." So just let that sink in.
Maybe they think they can pass this phony audit off in Arizona, a state where many people think God lives with his many wives on the planet Kolob and requires you to wear sacred underwear around everywhere you go. What's the next thing they will announce about the audit, that it appears some of the ballots were dipped in green cheese by moonmen?
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, four Republicans and one Democrat, along with the Republican voter registrar and the Sheriff, a Democrat, probably brings more credible criticism than Senator Boyer. Calling the audit a "sham" and a "con", they've pointed out the inept mistakes of the auditors, saying that it has promoted falsehoods, defamed the public servants (mostly Republicans) who ran the fall election. Calling the accusations of voter fraud by Trump and his campaign "the big lie" they have told the state senate that this "sham" is "harming all of us" and have called on them to put a stop to the audit.
"Our state is becoming a laughingstock" they said, in a letter that the Republican County Recorder also signed, along with the sheriff and the supervisors. It passed that milestone when the state Senate hired Cyber Ninjas.
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