Arizona Fraudit Prepares To Land It Like Hindenberg

Great job, fellas!

What are the odds that the Arizona fraudit fraudsters are going to give the 2020 election a clean bill of health when their report drops Monday? Slim to none, right?

It's been 72 years since a Democratic presidential candidate won Maricopa County, so when Joe Biden carried it by 45,000 votes, Republicans knew something was up. Never mind that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema kicked Martha McSally's ass to the tune of 60,000 votes in the 2018 midterms — if their guy lost, there had to be cheating, the GOP reasoned. And they weren't about to be convinced otherwise by a half dozen official recounts and audits saying otherwise. Fake news!

So Republicans in Arizona's state Senate went looking for someone who'd give them the answer they wanted, and they found Cyber Ninjas, a Florida company with approximately zero election experience, led by Doug Logan, a Trump supporter who appeared in a batshit film alleging the CIA rigged the election for Biden. And Logan delivered, haring off after bamboo fibers in fake "Chinese" ballots and making numerous false public pronouncements suggesting that he'd discovered massive fraud.

In one particularly egregious screw up, he testified to the state Senate that he'd discovered 74,243 "mail-in ballots" that had no record of being sent to voters. Except he'd commingled mail-in ballots with votes cast in-person at early voting centers, which were never mailed, of course. Logan also made spurious claims about misaligned printing and thin paper, recycling debunked Sharpiegate claims about ink bleeding through to damage ballots — which was fucking rich coming from a guy who let his so-called auditors loose on the ballots with blue and black pens, in violation of every protocol meant to prevent tampering with the votes.

In fact, as Secretary of State Katie Hobbs noted in her pre-buttal released yesterday, the so-called audit was characterized by a lack of transparency and shifting standards and procedures which virtually guarantee a result that cannot be replicated, much less evaluated for accuracy. Which is kind of the point, right? If, as Hobbs claims, Logan's dipshits "consistently made errors in the data collection" and "were encouraged to flag ballots as suspicious," then Logan can pull a Lindell and barf out several hundred pages of gobbledygook claiming to have found hundreds of thousands of "suspicious" ballots. And no one will be able to "prove" he's wrong because the dataset will be so corrupt and nonsensical that it can't be engaged with in any meaningful way, so the Overstock loon and those One America hosts who funded this bullshit exercise will have gotten their money's worth.

Meanwhile the blast radius from this bullshit bomb keeps widening. Yesterday, the state's appellate court ruled that the Senate had to cough up records relating to the audit, and couldn't escape public records laws by delegating their authority to an outside vendor.

"The requested records are no less public records simply because they are in the possession of a third party, Cyber Ninjas," the Arizona Court of Appeals wrote, ordering the Republican legislators to hand over the documents to public interest advocacy group American Oversight by August 31.

And Maricopa County told the Senate to cough up $2.8 million to cover the cost of voting machines that have to be junked after Logan's goons reached up the ass end of them and did God only knows what .

Even Republicans are backing away from this stinker, as Politico notes. Check out this 38-page personal essay from Maricopa County's Republican Recorder Stephen Richer detailing his anguish at finding himself in the crosshairs of a lunatic conspiracy theory flogged by his own party.

I didn't want to be in the spotlight. Truly.

I ran on the platform of making the "Maricopa County Recorder's Office Boring Again." I sought to competently, fairly, lawfully, and quietly manage the three duties of this office: public recordings, voter registration, and election administration.

To that end, I declined every media opportunity upon taking office on January 4 until May 14, 2021.

But I am human. If you prick me, I bleed. And if you consistently defame me and the people in my office, I eventually fight back.

 How could those leopards eat MY face? 

If there is a silver lining to this debacle, it might be that the ignominious flameout will discourage other states from embarking on fraudits of their own.

"We're not in a very good spot right now," Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano whined to radio host Pat Ryan after three counties declined his request to spend millions of dollars replacing their voting equipment so that Doug and his pals could molest it. "I put my name out there to get it done, and I've been stopped for the time being. If there's a way I could do it without being stopped, a way around this momentary impediment, you know I would find it."

Not with a bang, but with a whimper ... followed by years of whining and internet conspiracy theories that will never die.

[ Politico ]

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