War Breaks out in…Arizona
It’s all out war right now in Arizona, specifically Maricopa County, where Republicans have been presiding over an audit shitshow of the 2.1 million ballots from the 2020 election. We’ve talked about the sham that was cooked up by the Arizona State Senate, where they decided that it would be a really good idea to pander to Trump by pretending to count ballots and look for Chinese bamboo in the paper. The Arizona secretary of state has opposed the audit from the beginning, and now the Maricopa Board of Elections has weighed in with an open letter to the senate demanding that the audit be halted immediately. The letter was sent after Karen Fann, president of the senate, accused the board on Twitter of deleting the entire data base from the 2020 election, which, of course, is completely false.
Jack Sellers, the chairman of the elections board, both in public statements and in the letter ripped Fann, senate Republicans, and especially the “auditor”, Cyber Ninjas, for their incompetence. He also has refused to answer any more questions and demands. Here’s a quote from Sellers in that regard:
Jack Sellers, chair of Maricopa county board of supervisors, ends meeting by saying he is not responding to any more requests from state senate on Arizona audit. "Finish your report and be ready to defend it in a court of law," he says.
— Sam Levine (@srl) May 17, 2021
I had the opportunity to read the letter today and it’s a long, but fantastic read. Once choice paragraph I reproduce here:
“Next, let’s consider the County’s two separate forensic audits conducted in February of this year. You suggest that the Dominion proprietary password would have been necessary to conduct those audits. You are correct: it was. The forensic audit firms that the County hired, Pro V & V and SLI Compliance, are both accredited by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission as voting system testing laboratories. Because of that accredited status, signifying that these firms are specialists who have expertise with voting systems and understand how to audit them, Dominion Voting Systems provides Pro V & V and SLI Compliance with the necessary passwords to audit their machines.
Your chosen “auditors,” the Cyber Ninjas, are certainly many things. But “accredited by the EAC” is not one of them. Regardless, we cannot give you a password that we do not possess any more than we can give you the formula for Coca Cola. We do not have it; we have no legal right to acquire it; and so, we cannot give it to you.”
So Republicans are eating their own. Sellers and the Maricopa County Elections Board see the handwriting on the wall. They KNOW there was no material fraud in the election and KNOW that Arizona Republicans are walking straight off The Big Lie cliff in subservience to Trump. They KNOW that this shitshow will most certainly make all Republicans look like idiots, and they’re trying stop it before that happens.
I believe the Dems should take a different strategy. They should demand that the “audit” be completed, then demand that the results be made public and laid down next to the original count and the two recounts. Only then could everyone see what a sham this whole thing was and will show the Republicans for the morons that they really are.