Maricopa County Letter Regarding The Arizona Audit: Read It For Yourself
The “Arizona audit” as covered by One American New Network (screen grab)
Maricopa County officials have had enough of the Arizona audit, defying state Senator Fann’s demand to keep dancing in this clown show.
The Republican-dominated Maricopa County board of supervisors Monday denounced an ongoing audit of the 2020 vote as a “sham” and a “con,” calling on the GOP-led state Senate to end the controversial recount that has been championed by former president Donald Trump.
In a fiery public meeting and subsequent letter to state Senate president Karen Fann, the board members said the audit has been inept, promoted falsehoods and defamed the public servants who ran the fall election.
Calling the process a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” the five members of board — including four Republicans — asked the state Senate to recognize that it is essential to call off the audit, which officials have said is only about one quarter complete.
“It is time to make a choice to defend the Constitution and the Republic,” they wrote, adding: “We stand united together to defend the Constitution and the Republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for the truth.”
In a calculated show of unity, they were joined by the Maricopa’s other elected officials: the sheriff, a Democrat, and the Republican county recorder, who leads the elections office.
“Our state has become a laughingstock,” the county officials wrote. “Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.”
The pushback by Maricopa County officials amounts to their most vehement protest yet of the recount, which began in late April and is being conducted in Phoenix by a private Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive has previously echoed Trump’s false allegations that fraud tainted the 2020 election.
Jointly, the county officials agreed that they would refuse to attend a meeting that had been called Tuesday by Fann to discuss what she had termed “serious issues” with the vote that Cyber Ninjas claims to have identified.
“I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process. Finish your audit and be ready to defend what you’re finding in a court of law,” said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers (R), at the public meeting.
Read Maricopa County’s letter to the Arizona audit for yourself here:
arizona audit
The “audit” is exactly the partisan fraud we expected. The only surprise is the extra helping of incompetence.Report
The incompetence was completely predictable. Every one the fever swamp nut balls screaming about all the fraud stealing the election are as clueless as they are gullible.Report
In my opinion the audits don’t go far enough. If we don’t test for moon dust how can we be sure ballots weren’t flown in by the reptilians?Report
Only a quarter done? Let me guess, Trump is profiting on the ‘controversy” and when it dies so does the that income stream?Report
It is probably too much to hope for that this represents a movement toward sanity, but even as an isolated example, it deserves praise.Report
It represents a Republican led election board (4-1 R/D) that doesn’t feel like being thrown under the bus by abject morons.Report
Kind of like Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor.Report
Well a growing number of Arizona Republicans are saying this makes them look like idiots, so that’s something I guess.Report
I skimmed through the County’s detailed response to the problems the Senate Republicans claimed were found. An overall flavor of experienced hands lecturing some newbies came through clearly. I particularly liked the part where they said, basically, “Yes, look at those file system discrepancies. They are not consistent with your assumption that files were improperly deleted. They are, however, entirely consistent with the assumption that after you cloned the individual hard drives, you misconfigured the RAID array they are used in.”Report
Oooh, that’s a wrinkle I hadn’t considered. “We couldn’t find any evidence of fraud, so through our incompetence, we introduced some!”Report
It is not an audit. The audits have occurred. This is paranoid-fever-dream right-wing BIG LIE and BIG CON stuff to find ways to make sure Democrats never win elections in purple states again.Report
You’re assuming a much higher level of intelligence and foresight than I’ve observed.
I think a significant percentage of the population expects reality to care about their beliefs. I want this to be true, ergo it must be true.Report
Only because people who claim to lead them keep telling them we can in fact change reality to meet those beliefs. Said folks then get pissed off when said change doesn’t occur and because of their individual pride they won’t dare admit they were wrong and so double down on leaders who keep selling them intellectual snake oil. Thus you have elected state legislatures passing always to restrict voting and funding “audits” run by conspiracists because that’s how they keep power.Report
Let us all hope it’s Trump’s fault and goes away when he dies or whatever.
But while Trump is special in how far he’s taken this, politics-as-religion-irrationality is a human thing.Report
‘That guy over there pointing a gun at you? Don’t worry, he’s a really lousy shot.”Report
There is a bit of a veiled threat of defamation lawsuits in that letter. How serious is that? How much are the “auditors” protected by the “public official” thing?Report
I would think their more immediate concern is that the federal DOJ has taken an interest. Being hauled into federal court and told “Show your work, in detail” is likely to end very badly for Cyber Ninjas and their subcontractors. That can be easily justified on the grounds that the Ninjas are responsible for meeting all of the federal election materials retention and security laws while the materials are in their possession.
If asked to guess how this will end, with a whimper: the AZ legislature will adjourn sine die before the audit concludes, the subpoena authority expires with the session, and all of the materials will be returned to Maricopa County. Maricopa County sues the Ninjas not for defamation (as no final report issues), but for the costs of recertifying the voting machines and conducting their own audit that the materials are intact.Report
Thing is, with a DOJ investigation, that’s the Biden DOJ, and they can play martyr and coverup to the hilt. I mean, I think it’s real, and it’s trouble for them, but it’s still good copy.
A defamation suit from other Republicans is a very different deal.Report
This was always going to end with Cyber Ninjas declaring fraud.
How they’ll declare fraud will depend on where they get their first hard “no”.
No you can’t continue, we’re wrapping this up? “They stopped us just as we were uncovering the real fraudulent ballots. They fact they didn’t let us continue PROVES we were onto the fraud. Otherwise, what’s the harm?”
They were told “no” to being allowed to look at Dominion source code? Same answer.
Told “no” about access to router logs? Somehow it was hidden in the routers.
The fact that they have every freaking ballot, which is human readable and human countable, and could just…tally it up by hand and thus verify the tabulation machines and the count — is just never mentioned. Instead it’s all “looking for bamboo fibers”.
But as I said — they’ll declare fraud, and that fraud will be wherever they weren’t allowed to look. Even if the state ultimately just drew the line at cavity searching random voters.Report
TL:DR – its easy to catch fish in a seafood marketReport
Instead it’s all “looking for bamboo fibers”.
Yep. For the most part, the Big Lie has settled not on the ballots being miscounted (billion dollar lawsuits from the people who make the counting machines will do that) but instead on the notion that tens/hundreds of thousands of fake ballots were introduced into the process at some point in some fashion.
In AZ this is playing out in the search for watermarks under UV lights and for bamboo fibers. In Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, there were lots of photographs taken in bad light showing what was purported to be fake ballots inserted into the process to be counted.
In a sad sort of way it’s amusing to see the claims that people who are too dumb to run anything else in government are so clever they can forge 50,000 ballots and insert them into the counting stream without triggering any of the audit checks.Report
IIRC, the conspiracy theory that fake ballots were smuggled into Arizona started on election night when some of the moronic protestors screaming about the count (I think in Arizona they wanted the count to continue? What they thought the people in the building were doing I don’t know) saw a van unpacking equipment and decided it was ballots to alter the count.
it was a rented van for one of the news teams sent in to cover the protests, and was full of the equipment they’d flown in.Report
What sort of stupid theory is it that China, when forging US ballots, would make them out of bamboo pulp?
Yes, _some_ paper in China is made from that, or that and wood pulp mixed together, and China is trying to ramp that up because it’s easier and cheaper than traditional wood. In fact, there are some places in the US looking into using bamboo also, considering how fast it grows.
But…China still makes plenty of paper from traditional wood, and when you _forge_ things, you probably are going to want to start with the thing you can make that matches what you are forging, instead of the thing that doesn’t.
In fact, ballot paper is slightly complicated, on purpose, and thus it would generally have to be custom made to start with. So why would you involve bamboo at all?
Also…it seems rather unclear if you actually _could_ distinguish bamboo paper from wood paper under a UV light. That’s…not how wood pulp works. You could probably do a _chemical_ analysis pretty easily, but pulp is pulp, especially if bleached like almost all paper is.
*quickly does research*
Oh! One of the people pushing this is Jovan Pulitzer, failed inventor and actual scammer, who claims to have developed a process to allow that. And that’s what they’re using.
Jovan Hutton Pulitzer (That’s not his actual name, he changed it to pretend to be a ‘Pulitzer’.) is best known for inventing the CueCat. Yes, that free barcode reader that he gave out to everyone, that could only read scrambled barcodes, ending up in a bunch of lawsuits from his nonsensical business plan. (Correction: Apparently just a bunch of _threats_ of lawsuits, no actual one filed, because the concept was so dumb.)
So the scam is, come up with a completely broken nonsense detection system and assert the paper has bamboo in it, despite the fact it does not and what actually happened is the light was slightly different or something.Report
Exactly! The ongoing theme is all of these players are so clever they can get past all of the audit triggers, but so dumb that they’ll use the wrong paper for the fake ballots.
+1000Report
The test:
Bring a koala in and see if it eats the ballots.Report
No, panda.
Unless the ballots are made from eucalyptus?Report
I know koalas eat eucalyptus and you know koalas eat eucalyptus, but not only do the Cyber Ninnys not know that, they’re missing fingers from trying to pet the cute teddy bear.Report
Touche!Report
If you point out that an entity that is all knowing, all good, and all powerful doesn’t make any sense, you should expect the goal posts to be moved.
This is clearly an irrational belief. This sort of thing is why we have the legal system’s rules of evidence and so on.
We have true believers and people who cater to them. Now the good news is the legal system forces lawyers to back up their arguments if they’re made in court. Thus with all these allegations of vote problems, the scum who are enabling this either don’t go far or don’t dare to.
So assuming the “Ninjas” are scumbag enablers and not true believers, telling them the eye of the law is on them is a lot.Report
I still want to see this rolled into the Dominion defamation lawsuits so the Arizona Senate has to issue a public apology that can then be used for subsequent Democratic campaign ads.Report
Arizona senate Republicans have to sign the apology and I’m right there with you. No AZ Democrat voted to do this.Report
While you’re at it, Judge Kavanaugh would like his rep back.
The political class gets to make lying allegations.
They also get to be stupid and ignorant about their jobs.Report
Hs has a rep: He likes beer.Report
Nothing Arizona Senate Republicans are doing is even in the parking lot of the ball field of ignorance about their jobs. They are intentionally attempting to throw a no hitter blindly from behind a 1978 Chevy Impala with a busted tail light in the cheap parking because their power is threatened by larger then normal turnout and amore diverse and probably more informed electorate. They have thrown in with Team Trump, and have no way to extricate themselves without job and power loss and tons of embarrassing egg on their faces. They are not, however ignorant.Report
We can add that in as separate flaws then.
The political class gets to make nakedly self serving appeals (vote for me and you get free stuff) and make impossible to full fill promises (at the extreme, telling different groups opposite things).Report
dude – you realize Republican politicians are trying to take apart representative democracy to instill permanent minority male rule, right? That’s not a nakedly self serving appeal or impossible to fulfill promises.
Try again.Report
Are you talking about them trying to implement Sweden’s (etc) rules for showing ID before voting?
If so, then maybe hyperventilating and excessive rhetoric isn’t appropriate? If not, then what are you talking about?Report
gee really? Georgia’s Republican legislature passing a law saying they get final say over election counts rather then the secretary of state of locally election boards doesn’t strike you as trying to instill permanent minority rule? Or Iowa purging voters after missing a single election? Or Utah purging voters with no notice, no minimal cross references and no audit requirements 10 days after a death notice is posted? Or arizona preventing local election official from conducting voter registration drives off government property? Or New Hampshire purging voters based on third party data in clear violation of the National Voter Registration Act? Or Texas threatening local election officials with financial penalties for not purging voters on a schedule that pleases Republican legislators?
And frankly voter ID is till a solution looking for a problem. How many faked ID voters voted this election? The last? The one before that? I mean the colorado guy who killed his wife and voted her mail in ballot for Trump after she was dead didn’t need to fake her ID now did he?Report
We have ten to twenty percent of the nation who believes the election was stolen. It’s too late to prevent Biden from taking office, so there is a lot of pressure on the political class to make sure future elections don’t get stolen. That’s not the same thing as “no elections”.
The politicians are virtue signaling. My expectation is Georgia will hand back authority after the attention goes away. The last thing politicians want is to have to certify or not-certify the other side’s victory.
How to handle irrational beliefs is an issue. Since most of the country isn’t crazy and presumably is appalled by this, my expectation is they’re losing more votes than they’re gaining here. I wouldn’t vote for Trump if he runs again.Report
Because they are represented by a political party and media outlets that have fed the lies for 4 decades about how is and isn’t a legitimate American and who should and shouldn’t hold power.
Just as I have yet to see a President of either Party cede back power claimed by a predecessor I have no faith this will occur as you describe. Especially in the South, politicians know their voters will overwhelming back them for taking this stance.
Given that Trump is as popular as ever, and that the Party is purging all opposition to him, I would not yet agree with this assumption.Report
What is your impression on what they think about “who should and shouldn’t” hold power?
My general impression is the answer is always “my side”.
Politicians have a history of avoiding politically painful duties.
Huh? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/blog/meet-press-blog-latest-news-analysis-data-driving-political-discussion-n988541/ncrd1229191#blogHeaderReport
We could insist that the political class doesn’t get to do that, but no one in the political class would stand for that, so…Report