Oh look. They’re doing it again.
The Arizona Senate, apparently not satisfied with one recount, is close to signing a deal for its second review of Maricopa County’s 2020 general election ballots.
The effort would expand the ongoing audit and is expected to use a new and largely untested technology.
This second recount of all 2.1 million ballots would be done electronically, running the original digital images of ballots through a program that would count all votes cast for every race on the ballot. This is a different approach from the ongoing recount, which is being done by hand.
Senate Republican leaders are negotiating with Citizens Oversight, a California-based election transparency nonprofit, according to Senate liaison Ken Bennett.
Adding a second count is important for comparison purposes, Bennett said. The cost of such a deal is unknown at this point.
Actually, this will be the 4th recount, I believe. They recounted twice before the Republicans initiated their circus act and now they’ve destroyed the integrity of the ballots and tainted them beyond all recognition, even requiring the state to buy new voting machines since the wingnut yahoos have potentially wrecked them.
And now they are exporting this absurdity to other states. TPM reports:
Fueled by a shambolic election recount in Arizona, the audit-bug is spreading, and, with it, the fantastical belief that President Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat could still be reversed.
The Arizona exercise — ostensibly labeled an “audit,” though its procedures are questionable at best — was ordered by the state’s Republican Senate. It has been plagued with conspiracy theories, incompetency and dissent from within the state GOP. But it has also given Trump’s supporters hope that validating his false claims of mass fraud just takes a little more digging. In battleground states across the country, MAGA diehards are making increasingly loud demands for another round of review of the 2020 results, though the contest was dubbed by election experts and Trump’s own administration as a historically secure election.
Trump has cheered on the reinvigorated recount effort and lied about what it’s shown so far, including in a statement Monday about an audit in New Hampshire.
“Why aren’t Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans doing anything about what went on in the 2020 Election? How can the Democrats be allowed to get away with this?” Trump said. “It will go down as the Crime of the Century! Other States like Arizona, Georgia (where a Judge just granted a motion to unseal and inspect ballots from the 2020 Election), Michigan, Pennsylvania, and more to follow.”
The Arizona “audit” has attracted national scrutiny and plenty of mockery. The hand count of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots is being led by a cyber consultant who assisted in Trump’s allies’ 2020 reversal crusade.
But tune into the far-right Trump-aligned media sphere, and you see a different story. One America News Network — which is exclusively livestreaming the audit — has floated the expectation that the auditors are about to find mass fraud, while its correspondents have promoted a private fundraising campaign to help foot the bill for the recount.
Arizona Senate President Karan Fann nonetheless defended the cozy relationship her audit has had with the conspiracy theory-loving outlet
“Are you saying that OAN is not a credible news source?” Fann asked CNN, when grilled about the extensive access the platform has received.
But it’s not just OAN: Audit-mania has been a fixation of all corners of MAGA-media, as it has hyped up the possibility that such recounts will soon pop up in other states that Trump lost.
Steve Bannon, who’s hosted some of the activists involved in Arizona’s recount on his podcast, has also questioned Republican candidates for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race about whether they support an audit there.
“We need a full forensic audit in all the states where we had issues,” Jeff Bartos, one of the GOP candidates, told Bannon Friday. “And Pennsylvania certainly had issues.”
His opponent in the Senate primary, Sean Parnell, had brought far fetched lawsuits challenging the 2020 results and also told Bannon this week he supported a Pennsylvania audit.
Far-right outlets have also distorted the expectations of a legitimate review underway of a state legislative race in a small New Hampshire town, where discrepancies arose between the initial tabulation and a recount. The presidential race isn’t even being examined in the New Hampshire audit. The auditors have rejected claims of mass fraud, and instead are leaning towards a theory that the tabulation issue arose because of folds in the paper that created creases specifically over the part of the ballot with the state legislative race.
So of course, Gateway Pundit, another audit-obsessed fringe-right outlet, is now claiming that the auditors — all nationally known election experts — cannot be trusted.
We can yuck it up all we want about “Cyber Ninjas” and “bamboo in the ballots” but they are going to get the last laugh if this becomes an institutionalized partisan exercise and Republicans become increasingly convinced that Democrats cannot not legitimately ever win elections. Don’t think they won’t. They are very stupid.