{"id":121816,"date":"2021-09-24T19:08:58","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T19:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/?p=121816"},"modified":"2021-09-24T19:08:58","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T19:08:58","slug":"even-the-arizona-gops-fake-election-audit-failed-to-find-evidence-of-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/politics\/even-the-arizona-gops-fake-election-audit-failed-to-find-evidence-of-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Even The Arizona GOP\u2019s Fake Election Audit Failed To Find Evidence Of Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"

A GOP-led \u201caudit\u201d of the 2020 election results in Arizona\u2019s largest county found no evidence of widespread fraud, voting irregularities or miscounted ballots, according to a draft report of its findings <\/span>reported by KJZZ<\/span>, a Phoenix public radio outlet.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, the audit recorded <\/span>99 additional votes<\/span> for Joe Biden in Maricopa County compared to last year\u2019s official count, and 261 fewer votes for Donald Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

GOP leaders are scheduled to release the findings of the review Friday afternoon, but the leak of the draft report has already rendered that announcement anticlimactic. The results are clear: Even an \u201caudit\u201d specifically commissioned and designed to bolster Trump and the GOP\u2019s baseless claims of fraud and malfeasance couldn\u2019t produce any evidence to support those assertions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWas there massive fraud or anything? It doesn\u2019t look like it,\u201d Randy Pullen, a spokesperson for the audit, <\/span>told KJZZ<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The draft report states that \u201cthere were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvass results for the county,\u201d according to KJZZ.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Arizona audit, to be clear, was never a legitimate review. Its findings, whatever they ended up being, were never going to offer definitive proof of anything that did or did not occur during last year\u2019s election. But that it couldn\u2019t produce something\u00a0<\/em>to back up Trump\u2019s claims is an\u00a0embarrassing result for Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R), who commissioned the review \u2015 and for the litany of Republicans who <\/span>flocked to Arizona<\/span> to study the process, which <\/span>broke nearly every rule<\/span> of legitimate election audits, according to nonpartisan election officials who observed it in person.<\/span><\/p>\n

Polls have shown that\u00a0<\/span>half of Republican voters<\/span> believe Trump\u2019s lies that the Arizona \u201caudit\u201d would find sufficient evidence to help return him to office, an outcome that is constitutionally impossible. The audit was also the subject of intense interest on far-right online forums, where some users finally began to realize this week that the audit\u00a0wouldn\u2019t live up to their hopes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump, meanwhile, seemed unaware as of Thursday night that the audit hadn\u2019t found anything, judging by his\u00a0excited statement\u00a0about \u201cwhat the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The draft report suggests that the Cyber Ninjas audit will still seek to cast at least some doubt on the election. And Republicans in other states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are still pushing forward with plans to conduct similar reviews of their own 2020 election results. On Thursday, Texas election officials<\/span> announced<\/span> that new \u201cforensic audits\u201d \u2014 a term Republicans essentially invented to describe these reviews \u2014 would take place in four Texas counties. It\u2019s all but certain that those, too, will fail to find any evidence of widespread fraud, which legitimate audits and hand recounts of elections across the country have shown did not occur in significant fashion during last year\u2019s contests.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf Trump and his supporters can\u2019t prove it here with the process they designed, then they can\u2019t prove it anywhere,\u201d Benjamin Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, said on a conference call with reporters Thursday. \u201cAnd that should be a huge warning to the other state legislators who might think it\u2019s a good idea to go down this path.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Arizona \u201caudit\u201d has been <\/span>plagued<\/span> by<\/span> problems<\/span> from the outset. Republicans in the state Senate hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no election experience, to manage the undertaking. <\/span>Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan<\/span>,\u00a0and others involved in the undertaking, had spread many of Trump\u2019s <\/span>baseless conspiracy theories<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The review was funded in part by <\/span>a QAnon conspiracy theorist<\/span>, and two QAnon adherents <\/span>helped generate support for it<\/span>, according to Media Matters. The effort also <\/span>drew funding<\/span> from former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump lawyer and election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, and correspondents from the right-wing One America News Network.<\/span><\/p>\n

The review spent months chasing conspiracy theories \u2014 like the idea that some ballots had been printed on <\/span>paper that included bamboo fibers<\/span>, which supposedly meant they had been mailed from China and were part of a scheme to manipulate the results \u2014 and <\/span>breaking basic procedures<\/span> for how to <\/span>handle<\/span>, <\/span>transport<\/span>, store, count and mark ballots during an audit or recount process. Its practices, some which potentially <\/span>violated<\/span> federal election laws<\/span>, <\/span>compromised the integrity<\/span> of Maricopa County\u2019s voting machines, which will now have to be replaced.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cyber Ninjas and the Arizona GOP also repeatedly <\/span>missed their own deadlines<\/span> for finishing the review and releasing its results, something they are finally expected to do Friday at 4 p.m. EST.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNobody has ever released what they believe to be good news at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in the history of the United States or any other place on Earth,\u201d David Becker, executive director of the Center for Elections Integrity and Research, told reporters Thursday. \u201cSo it\u2019s clear how they view the credibility of the report.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Arizona \u201caudit\u201d was never likely to produce evidence of actual widespread fraud or malfeasance. Legitimate election audits and hand recounts of ballots had validated the official results and found no proof of widespread fraud, and there has been no significant fraud reported in Arizona, or anywhere else in the U.S., in any recent election.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But unearthing actual fraud was never the point of the review, which Trump called for \u2015 and GOP leaders went forward with \u2015 primarily to cast doubt on Biden\u2019s legitimate victory in November\u2019s election.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that sense, the audit may have accomplished its goal. Dozens of Republican lawmakers at the state and national levels flocked to Phoenix to observe the audit, turning the need for similar sham reviews in other states into something close to conservative orthodoxy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite (or perhaps because of) their failure to produce any evidence of fraud, leaders of the audit still claim to have unearthed proof of sloppy procedures and other problems in how Maricopa County conducted its elections, according to KJZZ. The draft report still perpetuates claims similar to some of Trump\u2019s, saying that it found Maricopa County counted some ballots from voters who moved before the election and that there were computer-related issues with the county\u2019s servers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pullen, the spokesperson for the auditors, told the station they could have produced even more such evidence, had Maricopa officials not blocked many of their requests for information.<\/span><\/p>\n

The issues the report cites, though, are based on misunderstandings of actual election law and practices, one lawyer\u00a0told The New York Times. And given the audit\u2019s litany of problems and procedural mishaps, Cyber Ninjas\u2019 claims and findings shouldn\u2019t be treated as comparable to those an actual election audit might produce, Ginsberg, the Republican election lawyer, said Thursday.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a designer audit,\u201d Ginsberg said. \u201cIt bypassed all the commonly accepted standards of objectivity and reliability.\u201d<\/p>\n

The major risk of the Arizona audit, <\/span>state Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told HuffPost in June<\/span>, was that it would further delegitimize elections in the minds of many voters, especially those already prone to believe Trump\u2019s claims of fraud. And the supposed issues that Cyber Ninjas says it uncovered may find an audience among hard-line Republican lawmakers and in a right-wing media ecosystem that continues to push Trump\u2019s lies,\u00a0as Trump and his allies cling to their conspiracies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Friday morning, Trump insisted in a statement that the audit had \u201cuncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD,\u201d and called on Arizona\u2019s attorney general to investigate it. Former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R), who is running for U.S. Senate in 2022, said in his own statement that \u201cArizona must decertify\u201d its election results, and dismissed as mere \u201cspin\u201d the reports that even Cyber Ninjas couldn\u2019t find fraud.<\/p>\n

Republicans and conservative media will also likely shift their attention to so-called \u201caudits\u201d in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those audits are in their nascent stages. Pennsylvania Republicans this month <\/span>subpoenaed the personal information<\/span> of voters across the state to determine \u201cwhether or not they exist\u201d \u2015 a request that could lead to the release of sensitive personal data, including driver\u2019s license numbers, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Texas secretary of state\u2019s office <\/span>announced Thursday<\/span> that it would conduct \u201cfull forensic audits\u201d of 2020 election results in Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant counties. Texas\u2019 38 electoral votes ultimately went to Trump, but Biden won some of his largest margins in the state in Dallas and Harris counties. He narrowly won Tarrant County, and Collin County was the site of one of the state\u2019s <\/span>largest shifts away from Trump<\/span> last year.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are <\/span>three ongoing audits in Wisconsin<\/span>, only one of which is being conducted by the state\u2019s nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. Conservative lawmakers are seeking another \u201cforensic audit\u201d of the election, while state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican whom Trump has attacked for supposedly not doing enough to overturn his loss there last year, also launched his own audit. Taxpayers will foot the $700,000 bill for that review, even though audits of elections across the state, and hand recounts of presidential results in two counties, turned up no evidence of fraud.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ginsberg said it\u2019s unlikely that the Arizona results will force Republicans in any of those states to have \u201ca eureka moment\u201d that causes them to cancel their audits. The best hope for now, he said, is that they will realize the damage Trump\u2019s election conspiracies are doing to their own electoral prospects, and \u201cease [their] foot on the gas pedal.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no reason to think that will happen immediately, or even before the next election. Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem (R), one of the audit\u2019s <\/span>most enthusiastic supporters<\/span>, is now running for Arizona secretary of state. GOP election skeptics in Georgia and other states are likewise looking to climb to higher levels of power.<\/span><\/p>\n

The audit itself may be over, but the lies that drove it are still the principal animating feature\u00a0of\u00a0Republican politics. Cyber Ninjas\u2019 predictable failure to surface even a shred of fraud likely won\u2019t do much to change that.<\/span><\/p>\n

RELATED…<\/h3>\n

Source: Read Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A GOP-led \u201caudit\u201d of the 2020 election results in Arizona\u2019s largest county found no evidence of widespread fraud, voting irregularities or miscounted ballots, according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nEven The Arizona GOP\u2019s Fake Election Audit Failed To Find Evidence Of Fraud - Fin2me<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/politics\/even-the-arizona-gops-fake-election-audit-failed-to-find-evidence-of-fraud\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Even The Arizona GOP\u2019s Fake Election Audit Failed To Find Evidence Of Fraud - 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