Coup update!

Maricopa County “forensic audit” by Cyber Ninjas

The 1/6 Select Committee has been busy since last we spoke.  Politico reported yesterday that Bernard Kerik told the committee that former Army Colonel Phil Waldron is the person who first proposed that Trump issue an order for the military to seize all the voting machines and election equipment in the entire country.  You may recall Kerik as the disgraced former New York City police commissioner who was convicted of eight felonies and spent four years in federal prison before being pardoned by the former President.  Waldron is best known as the “author” of a 38 page PowerPoint presentation that proposed that Trump declare a national emergency and have the military seize all ballots as well as recommendations that Vice President Pence refuse to accept electoral ballots from battleground states and turn the election over to the House of Representatives.  The PowerPoint was turned over to the 1/6 Committee by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, with whom Waldron met in the White House “at least 10 times” between November 3, 2020 and January 5, 2021.  The three-page executive order directing the military to seize voting machines and other records was turned over to the 1/6 Committee by the National Archives after Trump lost his appeal to the Supreme Court claiming executive privilege.

The other big Coup-related development was a report by CNN that Trump lawyer John Eastman refused to answer 146 questions of the 1/6 Committee by invoking his right under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.  Eastman, you may recall, was the author of yet another document proposing a way for Vice President Pence to refuse to certify electoral ballots and throw the election into the House.  Eastman also refused to provide the Committee with emails it sought under subpoena.  A judge in California held a hearing yesterday about the Eastman emails and ordered them turned over to the court to determine if any were subject to lawyer-client privilege.  Eastman’s lawyer claimed at the hearing that his client was working as a lawyer for Trump when he met with the President and Vice President on January 3 in the White House, as well as when he was present in the Willard Hotel “war room” on January 5 with Rudy Giuliani and Bernard Kerik among other Trump lawyers and associates.  Eastman also admitted that he was working for Trump as he briefed several hundred state legislators on plans for overturning the election when he was traveling around the country with Giuliani after Trump lost the election.

The 1/6 Committee appears to be circling the White House plans to involve the Department of Defense in seizing voting machines and records, zeroing in on just how far those plans progressed and who wrote them.  They seem most interested in the who-how-why-and-when of misusing the United States military in a political conspiracy to overturn the election.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to take a look at how big a job the military would have had if Trump had signed the executive order to use active duty, reserve, and National Guard troops to seize the infrastructure of the nation’s presidential voting system.

I decided to take Maricopa County, Arizona as one example because a so-called “forensic audit” of the voting machines, ballots, and other election records was carried out last year under the orders of the Republican-led State Senate.  All the vote tabulators, which were manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, were seized, as well as the paper ballots voters filled out which the tabulators counted.  You will recall that a company called “Cyber Ninjas” was hired to conduct the audit, which ended up taking six months.  The “audit” not only re-certified Joe Biden as the victor in Maricopa County and in the state of Arizona, it awarded him something like 300 extra votes which were discovered to have been undercounted.

Maricopa is a large county of nearly 4.5 million residents.  Just over 2 million of them voted in the election of 2020, so there were at least that many ballots, including mail-in, absentee, and military ballots.  Some 385 vote tabulators were used by the county.  We know that number because Maricopa county had to trash the tabulators that were in the possession of Cyber Ninjas and order new ones due to the fact that the county had no way of knowing whether they had been tampered with. 

Arizona has a total of 15 counties.  Presumably, if the so called “forensic audit” had been extended to all of them, it would have taken that much longer.  What about the other battleground states where Trump challenged the election results with lawsuits, in at least one of them another “forensic audit” is still in progress?  Pennsylvania has 67 counties; Wisconsin has 72; Georgia has 159; Nevada has 17; Michigan has 83. 

Michigan is another interesting example if you’re considering the size of the job the military would have had if the Department of Defense had been ordered to seize all election equipment and records.  According to the website of the Secretary of State, Michigan’s election system is administered by all 83 county clerks, as well as 280 city clerks and 1,240 township clerks.  The 1603 county and local election officials oversee even more precincts where ballots are filled out by voters and counted.  I couldn’t find a list of Detroit precincts or even the total number of them, but I did find a list of voting location changes.  A total of 32 voting locations were changed, involving 84 precincts.  Going by the precinct numbers on that document, there appear to be over 500 local precincts in Detroit alone.

Detroit is in Wayne County, which has a population of 1.7 million.  Working with an estimate of 500 precincts, that works out to 3,400 citizens per precinct.  Michigan has a population of about 10 million.  If precincts average 3,400 citizens, that means Michigan has about 2,900 precincts in all.

So if every precinct has at least two voting machines, a very conservative estimate…well, you do the math.  Even if the Army could manage to load 25 voting machines on one truck, that would mean they would need nearly 250 trucks --  just to carry the voting machines.  Paper ballots are another matter.  Photographs of the Maricopa County “forensic audit” showed at least 100 people working in a huge convention-center type facility.  The sides of the enormous room were lined with pallets loaded with stacks of paper ballots.    

The number of soldiers necessary to do the “assessment and analysis” of voting machines, ballots, and other election records for all 50 states and territories including Puerto Rico called for in the Trump executive order would have to be in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.  In other words, in addition to such a mobilization of military personnel and equipment for a political purpose being illegal, it would be utterly impossible as a practical matter within any kind of reasonable timeframe.

You have to wonder what Giuliani, Kerik, Waldron, Meadows and the rest of them were smoking in the days leading up to January 6 when they were generating plans and proposing executive orders and holding press conferences at places like Four Seasons Total Landscaping across the street from the “sex shop” and next door to the crematorium.  Maybe the 1/6 Committee can put that question to a few of the witnesses it is still waiting to interview.