Trump and his cronies continue to openly lie that the Arizona "audit" really proves that Trump "won" the state in a fantastic example of national gaslighting, with the point being to normalize the idea that elections can't possibly be truly fair and accurate in order to normalize overturning them in the years ahead.
The Cyber Ninjas failed to prove fraud in the Arizona 2020 election, but former President Donald Trump's election fraud crusade is now proceeding as if they'd won -- pushing for more "forensic audits" and restrictive voting in that state and elsewhere across the country.
Trump's allies are already demanding a new review of another Arizona county won by President Joe Biden. They are launching more partisan ballot reviews in other states following the Arizona playbook after passing laws making it harder to vote earlier this year. And they are calling for decertification of Arizona's 2020 election despite the lack of fraud, as part of a larger effort to validate Trump's "Big Lie" and undermine the 2020 election results.
The lesson they're taking from Arizona's Maricopa County ballot review is not that they failed and should stop, but rather that they should try to avoid the negative scrutiny that hounded the Cyber Ninjas' review and "do it better" in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, even if there's no evidence of fraud, said Sarah Longwell, a conservative publisher and executive director of the conservative group Defending Democracy Together.
"It has nothing to do with auditing votes," Longwell told CNN. "It has to do with creating a cloud of suspicion around the elections and keeping their fraud narrative front and center."
The partisan ballot review in Maricopa County released last week reaffirmed Biden's victory. But Trump and the Arizona GOP officials who backed it ignored that conclusion and the highly problematic nature of the review itself, run by a company inexperienced in election audits and which failed to follow standard auditing procedures, and instead touted other issues raised in their report -- even though they were quickly rebutted by election experts and county officials.
Similar election "audits" already are moving forward in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Texas' secretary of state's office announced a "full and comprehensive forensic audit" in four counties hours after Trump fired off a letter to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott demanding just such a review.
The partisan reviews of the 2020 election results have come after a host of Republican-led state legislatures enacted restrictive voting laws, frequently citing Trump's lies as reason to enact new measures in the name of "election integrity." Eighteen states, including Arizona, have enacted laws this year that make it harder to vote, according to a tally by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law.
In one sign of how much the falsehoods about the 2020 election have become linked to the GOP's identity, a recent CNN poll found that nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said "believing that Donald Trump won the 2020 election" was "very" or "somewhat" important to their definition of what it now means to be a Republican.
The ground is being primed for a situation in the upcoming elections where a Democratic candidate in a red state wins a relatively close election, and that election is overturned on "fraud" and given to the Republican. It will probably happen in 2022, and it will definitely happen in 2024 when it comes to state electoral votes for President.
Republicans are now defined by the belief that the 2020 election was "stolen" and so they will not just accept but demand that the election be stolen right back in the years ahead, a hundredfold.
Democrats don't seem to be even considering that this is where we are going.
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