Arizona Senate is “Auditing” 2020 Election Result – Sort of
The Arizona State Senate is conducting a behind closed doors audit fishing expedition that targets only Maricopa County which Biden won in 2020. The effort is backed by the Arizona GOP peddling the Big Lie to discredit Biden’s win. As if that’s bad enough, HOW it’s being done will most certainly yield a predetermined result, and is being given cover by the State Senate and the courts, all Republican controlled.
The fishing expedition is being conducted by a firm called Cyber Ninjas, whose founder, Doug Logan, has repeated and supported the conspiracy theories of the Big Lie. Worse, their is no oversight of the count by outside parties, the press is banned from observing, and the ballots are being housed in an unsecured room in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the Arizona State fairgrounds. Some members of the press have been able to get into the room and observed that workers were using blue pens which could be used to tamper with the ballots to change the votes. That’s against state law; all audits are mandated to be conducted with red pens to prevent tampering.
It gets worse: Yesterday, conservative judge Christopher Coury temporarily halted the count after Arizona Democratic party petitioned to halt the count. He expressed doubts about the process, but, and it’s a big but, he ordered the party to post a $1 million bond to cover any costs of a delay. That bond more than 5 times the amount budgeted by the State Senate for the audit. Coury’s effort to appear non-partisan is belied by the excessive bond he required of the Dems and they declined to post the bond. The judge is well known in Arizona for his conservative rulings and was the target of Dems in 2020 be removed for his ruling against an education reform measure on the ballot.
Arizona (along with Texas and other red states) shows the danger of extended single party rule including the courts. The effort to discredit the Arizona presidential election is brazen, and so far the courts are aiding and abetting the effort. There is no reason for this fishing expedition except to shore up the Big Lie to give the GOP more cover to pass voter suppression laws to tilt the balance in their direction. The effort is dangerous and anti-democratic.
That sounds as though the result needs to be challenged in court, however it goes. There’s too much opportunity, and too much incentive, for fraud.
1And we can trust their results because….? I am so tired of this idiocy and doubly glad I left Arizona 16 years ago. It used to be a pretty decent place to live.
2You wonder just how low red state gops and legislatures can go? We’re seeing it in Georgia, Arizona and others. The thing that is really scary are their intentions to pass laws like Georgia where the state senates can overturn election results they don’t like without any reason and have the cover of red state conservative judges. Has the feel of government led by a putin.
3OH, no oversight? Or anything else that REAL people do in such an event? OK. So they are just pretending. I especially wan tto see how they react when they can’t find or “fix” what they are after. My nickle bet is on them acting like little kids pasted by their own naughtiness.
4This is exactly what the Georgia law makes legal, and when the vote is not to the liking of the reps, they can change it. This stinks to high heaven!
5El Jefe,
6Thanks for posting a story about real election vote fraud.
The sole purpose is to gin up an allegedly professional report casting ‘grave doubts’ on the veracity of the election result to bolster their ‘Rigged Election Fantasy’. The current believers will buy it and the majority of America will mock them.
7Misposted to another thread:
Bumper cars for AZ republicans ~ children playing at vote rigging ~
Apr. 25th, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4i7b6RmXxE
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Republicans’ chaotic audit of Arizona ballots for Trump may blow up in their faces: GOP insider
full article:
https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/arizona-gop-2652771840/
8Why hire a Cybersecurity firm to hand-count ballots? Based on my knowledge of cyber warriors, the Cyber Ninja firm can expect to be hacked and harassed relentlessly.
9The AZ GOP’s action, taking physical control of the ballots they want to audit, invalidates whatever they say. At no point from the casting of a ballot to its counting should it be in the physical control of any one party without members of other parties present, observing what is done with that ballot. ANY one party. When they seized those ballots and carried them off to “audit” they changed the nature of the event from “audit” to “presumptive election fraud.”
Because history has shown that physical control of ballots without observation/supervision by outsiders WILL result in fraud–in marking, mutilating, losing–some ballots. It’s just too tempting. That’s why the rules have required bi-or-more-partisan persons *at the polls*, the securing of ballots in sealed containers, and any counting of ballots to be done in a bi-or-more-partisan groups. It’s just too damn tempting for persons passionate about their candidate to spindle-fold-mark-mutilate-or otherwise invalidate ballots helpful to a winner of the other persuasion.
I’m not saying the GOP has the only liars and crooks in the country. After all, I clearly remember Ballot Box 42 and various other tricks of the political trade enacted by Dems. NO PARTY should ever have sole control of ballots. Or the voting machines or whatever method is used. People are people, and hating to lose is not a one-party characteristic.
This isn’t an audit. It’s an attempt to commit election fraud.
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