It's a Miracle! 281 "Dead" People in Arizona are now Alive!

Washington Post: AZ Attorney General says No Dead People Voted in 2020 Election

The Cyber Ninjas are a gift that keeps on giving--to Democrats in the state of Arizona.  This group, headed by known Trump supporter Doug Logan, was commissioned by the state senate, at the instigation of its president, Karen Fann, to perform an "independent" audit on the ballots cast by over 2 million registered voters in Maricopa County, the state's largest.  The reason was that Republicans just could not wrap their minds around the fact that the county, which flipped from red to blue in 2020, helped Joe Biden flip the state and pick up its 11 electoral votes.  

There was perhaps nowhere else in the country where the lip flapping, shrieking and screaming about "massive voter fraud" was louder, and absolutely nowhere else where the conspiracy theories and claims of how the election was "stolen" were more outlandish, absurd and baseless.  There was "sharpiegate," a baseless accusation claiming that voters had wrongly been instructed to mark ballots with sharpies, which bled through the paper and caused counting errors. No evidence ever turned up to support that accusation, but how stupid would someone have to be to believe that only Republicans who voted for Trump were duped into using a sharpie on their ballot?  

Uh, don't answer that question.  

A Genuine, Authentic, Live Reality Show and Comedy of Errors

So, Senate President Karen Fann recruited Doug Logan and the Cyber Ninjas, and paid them taxpayer dollars to conduct a "neutral, independent audit" of Maricopa County's ballots.  Not the whole state, mind you, just Maricopa County.  Neither Logan, nor any of his Ninjas, had ever conducted an election audit before, or, in fact, any audit of any kind.  This was done after two other legitimate, independent audits had been conducted on statewide ballots, generated by the closeness of the final vote total, conducted by experienced election auditors who knew what they were doing.  As is always the case, the independent, thorough professional auditors did catch some voting irregularities, including several attempts to commit fraud.  

Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes.  The independent auditors identified about 20 cases of voter fraud or irregularities, almost all of them by Trump voters.  But Fann wasn't satisfied and insisted on further waste of taxpayer dollars.  

Give credit where credit is due, the media outlets in the state documented the disaster from the moment Logan stepped foot in Arizona.  The Cyber Ninjas thrived on the conspiracy theories emanating from the Trump campaign, including believing that ballots were stuffed into the counting machines from China, and could be detected with special cameras which would show microscopic bamboo fibers.  If that sounds like second rate science fiction, that's because it is.  No such cameras, or ballots, exist. Needless to say, they found nothing.  

It is, in fact, accurate to say that the Cyber Ninjas didn't find anything, at all.  They were fortunate to find the boxes of ballots.  They couldn't operate the computers with the county's voter database, after repeated instruction from the county clerk's office.  They had no idea how to put ballots back into boxes after they ran them through the counting machines, which they were also unable to operate without assistance.  They took far longer than their estimated time, running into scheduling problems and had to relocate from the Veteran's Memorial Coliseum, the aging, crumbling former basketball arena where they set up and violated numerous state laws in moving the ballots.  They somehow managed to mess with the programming of several counting machines, invalidating their results and costing the county taxpayers thousands of dollars to replace them.  

Months after the original deadline was set for completion, pressure was building on them to produce a report.  Costs of the pseudo-audit had run up to over $6 million and they had nothing, and I mean literally nothing, to show for it.  A partial report, which said virtually nothing, and which claimed to have discovered that Joe Biden actually got several hundred more votes in Arizona than was originally reported, was delivered to the Senate. Was that a ruse, to make them look legitimate? But a final report never got there.  The Cyber Ninjas, after consuming more than $8 million, declared bankruptcy.  

Dead People Can't Vote, and in Arizona, None Did

There were some allusions to inaccuracy of the addresses of registered voters, and claims that some addresses were actually just open desert, alluding to possible fraud.  However, since the Ninjas were using five year old GPS maps, multiple subdivisions that had been built since their maps were published, had been built, accounting for over 70,000 of the votes they claimed came from "open desert."  The current maps, provided to them after this big goof was uncovered, showed neighborhoods and subdivisions that had been developed and built since the date of their outdated survey.  The only possible source of any fraud at all, in the information they provided, was the charge that 282 people who signed the voter roster and cast a ballot, were actually dead.  

Now 282 votes, even if all of them had been for Biden, would not be nearly enough to change the outcome of the election, close as it was.  But what this lone piece of "evidence" does for the Trumpie cause is cast doubt in the minds of those who already have a predisposed bias about the accuracy of the election and undermine the whole process, along with confidence in the officials, Republican or Democrat, in charge of the election itself.  $8 million is a high price to pay for such a small piece of "evidence," but given the stark absence of any evidence to support any of Trump's claims about election fraud, it was all they had.  

But, after the charge was levelled, the state attorney general, a Republican, Mark Brnovich, investigated each claim.  Every.  Single.  One.  And what he found was yet another example of the monumental stupidity and inexcusable incompetence of Logan and the Ninjas.  Brnovich found that at least 281 of the 282 people the Ninjas claimed were dead were still very much alive, most were still active registered voters and all of them had cast ballots in 2020.  

Because Trumpies are never wrong, and can never admit to making mistakes, we can come to only one conclusion.  Maricopa County, Arizona, has been the scene of the greatest and most miraculous resurrection ever to take place in the whole history of the world.  Jesus is known to have resurrected at least two people, other than himself, from the dead during his ministry.  But somehow, somewhere, someone resurrected 281 residents of Maricopa County, Arizona after they had died, and then, while dead, somehow managed to vote before being brought back to life.  

Monumental Stupidity

I love that expression.  Yes, Karen Fann and the Cyber Ninjas are well described by it.  But so are media outlets in Arizona who speak as if the Cyber Ninjas were legitimate, and who reference anything they did, out of the very little that they ever reported, as factual.  This is, in fact, one of the most egregious and serious attempts at subverting American democracy, undermining confidence in our electoral process, and destroying our constitutional republic, that occurred anywhere in Trumpland after the 2020 election with the exception of the January 6th Trump Insurrection.  Everyone involved in it, and anyone who helped make this look legitimate in anyone's eyes, has betrayed everything we stand for as Americans.  

Arizona's Republican faction may well be the single most backward, provincial, profoundly ignorant group of Republicans anywhere in the country, worse even than Texas, Alabama or Florida.  Dominated by a religious sect that believes God is a man with thousands of wives who lives on the planet Kolob somewhere out in the universe, haunted by the ghost of Barry Goldwater, and emerging from a 2022 primary with some of the more crazy extremists from the lunatic fringe of the GOP on the ballot, the choice in 2022 may be more of one between sanity and insanity, reality or fantasy, democracy or fascism, than anywhere else in the country. 

On a more positive note, I believe change is coming to Arizona and 2020 was just the beginning.  It's been building for more than a decade.  Helped along by the cruel extremism of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who motivated thousands of mostly Latino voters to register and oust him, and then continue to show up and keep him out, and by economic growth that is attracting a stream of new residents across the Colorado River from politically liberal California, the Democrats have emerged with a slim, but growing majority of voters while the GOP declines in voter registration in the state. Much of the GOP decline is due to the defection of white, college educated women from the party, noticeably accelerated by the recent Dobbs decision of the Supreme Court.  The polling data looks great for both Katie Hobbs' run for governor, and for Mark Kelly to keep his Senate seat, and, thanks to Fann and the Cyber Ninjas, to capture the majority of both houses of the legislature.  

Stay tuned.