The Big Lie, Con't

The Trump Traveling Circus And Hate Show comes to Arizona today, and the topic is going to be wall-to-wall attacks on the 2020 elections with The Big Lie.

 

In this narrative, truth doesn't merely take a back seat. It gets tossed to the side of the road. 

Take last week's GOP briefing at Arizona's state capitol, where Doug Logan, lead contractor on the review of ballots in Maricopa County, said "we have 74,243 mail-in-ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent," and 11,326 people whom he said were not on the Nov. 7 voter rolls but showed up on the final roll of voters on Dec. 4. 

Election experts, analysts and reporters quickly debunked Logan's claims online and in news stories, noting they seemed to be based on Logan misunderstanding or misstating how the voting process worked. 

But that didn't matter. Within minutes, and in the week since, Donald Trump and a slew of GOP election conspiracists trumpeted these supposed findings across social media as "proof" the election was stolen. And candidates touting their fealty to Trump were quick to tweet, re-tweet or otherwise post Logan's debunked claims and call for more audits. 

From the start, with Arizona Senate President Karen Fann hiring the Cyber Ninjas firm, a little-known firm inexperienced in election audits, run by a man who'd repeated wild conspiratorial fraud claims; to the review being funded with great secrecy by private, likely partisan sources; through the company initially handing auditors blue pens until a reporter pointed out they could be used to change how ballots are read; to, more recently, contractors sending reams of vote data off to a mysterious cabin in Montana, in the latest portion of the audit, the Arizona vote review has been fraught. 

There could scarcely be a deeper canyon than the one between how election experts see the audit and how Trump-backing GOP candidates describe it. 

"Was this deliberate from day one for fundraising?" asked Harri Hursti, founder of Nordic Innovation Labs, and a data-security expert who recently completed a conventional election audit in New Hampshire, about the Arizona vote review. "This whole thing is theater ... it's all smoke and mirrors and theater." The New Hampshire audit, by contrast, found that a borrowed folding machine in the town of Windham caused 400 ballots to be improperly counted, but that there was "no basis to believe that the miscounts found in Windham indicate a pattern of partisan bias or a failed election." 

Trey Grayson, a Republican and former Kentucky Secretary of State, co-wrote a recent report on the Arizona audit for the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit focused on fair and secure elections. It detailed huge flaws in the audit's processes, poor security, high levels of built-in error and other problems. 

"If you are a Republican who has concerns about this election, you shouldn't trust the outcome of this review in Arizona," Grayson told CNN. 

"Routine audits of vote counts are important," said Mark Lindeman, acting co-director of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election-integrity nonprofit that earlier this year worked with Georgia on a full hand count of its vote and with Pennsylvania on a risk-limiting election audit. Both indicated that the original results were substantially accurate. 

But in Arizona, he said, "The problem seems to be that Trump lost, and that's what they're trying to fix; but that's not what audits do." He called the procedures Cyber Ninjas and the other subcontractors in Arizona are following bizarre, adding, "It's a process that can only raise more questions, muddy the waters ... None of it makes much sense, except as a way to increase doubt." 

Maricopa County's GOP-led Board of Supervisors also has termed the Arizona Senate's audit unnecessary, with board chairman Jack Sellers last week issuing a statement that, "It's clear the people hired by Arizona Senate leadership to supposedly bring integrity to our elections are instead just bringing incompetence." 

But many of the GOP candidates and lawmakers visiting Arizona, who have eagerly fomented lies about the 2020 vote, and embraced vicious and radical rhetoric about those who disagree with them, dismiss such criticisms. 

"I don't care what a GOP board says; you have a lot of RINOs occupying positions they should not be in," said Oklahoma's Lahmeyer, using the term for "Republicans in name only." Lahmeyer, who touts his endorsement from disgraced former Gen. Michael Flynn, and hopes to unseat GOP Sen. James Lankford in 2022, termed Lankford "a traitor," for voting on Jan. 6 to certify President Biden's victory. As of June 30, Lahmeyer reported raising just more than $250,000 to the Federal Election Commission. Lankford's FEC reports show he'd raised $2.3 million as of that date. 

"Absolutely," the election was stolen from Trump, said Gray, the Wyoming lawmaker challenging Cheney. Trump has regularly attacked Cheney for voting to impeach him and for rejecting his claims the election was stolen, scurrilous claims and nonsensical rhetoric Gray eagerly echoed. "We've ... got to expose the truth, got to stop the fake news media, Liz Cheney and the coalition of radical socialists," he said. 

Jones, the former Georgia lawmaker, has called Gov. Kemp "a traitor" for rejecting election fraud claims. Asked about his visit to the Arizona audit and his claims of fraud in Georgia, Jones said, "It has helped my campaign. From day one, I've talked about things I described as violation of the Constitution, the procedures followed in counting absentee ballots." His fundraising website specifically asks for contributions to "ensure that Georgia's elections are never stolen by Democrats again."

 

Understand that the audits will never, ever end. Never. They will keep going until "the truth is found".  They will keep going until they justify violence and election theft by Republican lawmakers "decertifying" 2022 elections. And at the center of it all is Ringmaster Trump and his Circus of the Damned.

The Big Lie forever!