The future of American elections is happening right now in Arizona

One political party is "auditing" the victory of the other. One guess which party is behind this scam.

How about this:  The Republican controlled Arizona state senate has ordered that an audit be conducted of part of the election that took place in the state last November.  Which part, you ask?  Why, the part of the election won by Democrats, of course!

Are they auditing the ballots of all voters in the state?

What have you been smoking, anyway?  Of course not!  They’re just auditing the ballots in Maricopa County, the county that was crucial to Biden’s 10,457 vote victory over Trump. 

Are they auditing any of the counties carried by Trump?

There are 15 counties in Arizona.  Trump carried 10 of them.  Not one of those counties is under audit.

How about any of the down-ballot races in Arizona, say, for congress, or the state house of representatives, or the state senate?  Are they auditing any of those races? 

Nope.  Apparently, the other races that were decided on the Maricopa County election ballots are all okay.

You mean, they’re just auditing the votes cast in the presidential race?

According to what we know about the audit, the only votes about which there are any questions are votes cast by Democrats for Joe Biden.  All those ballots cast by Republicans in counties carried by Donald Trump and other Arizona Republicans like Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, both of whom are right-wing loons with connections to the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, well, those ballots were just fine.  Nothing to see here, folks!  All those votes for the drooling Gosar and the conspiracy-maven Biggs, they’re totally legit!

So how are they doing this audit?  Are they following Arizona and federal election laws, like the hand-recount that was done after the election in November by state election officials overseen by both political parties? 

No.  The Democratic Party is not involved in this audit at all.  The audit is being done by a private company from Florida called Cyber Ninjas (yes, you read that right) owned by a man by the name of Doug Logan, who has – previous to being hired to conduct the audit – posted numerous conspiracy theories about how the election in November was stolen from Donald Trump. (Yes, you read that right, too.) In fact, the Democratic Party of Arizona has filed a lawsuit to stop the audit.

What is the status of that lawsuit?  Has the audit been stopped?

Smoking those funny cigarettes again, I see.  Of course not.  The judge hearing the suit ordered that the Democratic Party would have to put up $1 million as a bond pending the outcome of the suit if they wanted a stay.  The Democrats refused, and the audit is going forward.

Does the judge have any conflicts of interest in the case?

Funny you should ask.  He’s a Republican (of course) and recused himself from the suit today because the lawyer for Cyber Ninjas worked as a so-called “extern” in his office at the courthouse.

So how are the voters of Arizona going to be assured that their ballots will be counted accurately?

They won’t.  The lawyers for Cyber Ninjas and the state senate Republicans today filed a motion asking that all hearings in the lawsuit be closed to both the public and the press because (1) Cyber Ninjas says they must protect its “trade secrets,” and (2) the senate Republicans say the election laws don’t apply to this audit because it has been ordered by the state senate, a separate branch of the government which doesn’t have to follow laws intended for the executive branch, which runs elections.

Got that?  The two entities involved in the audit, the Cyber Ninja firm, which has no previous experience in auditing elections, and the state senate Republicans, similarly inexperienced in auditing election results, say election laws don’t apply to them.

So, there must be some way to oversee this audit, some way to insure the integrity of the ballots – the original ballots by the way – and the voting machines, which after all belong to the state, and thus to the tax payers and voters of the state, isn’t there?

Actually, no there isn’t.  The ballots and the voting machines – all of which were checked and audited by state election officials not once, not twice, but three times after the election in November and then stored away securely since then – were delivered to a sports facility called Veterans Memorial Coliseum last week, and they haven’t been seen by the public or anyone in any official capacity since.  They are completely under the control of Cyber Ninjas, and Cyber Ninjas isn’t letting the press or the public into the coliseum to watch what they’re doing.

Who is doing the actual counting of the ballots and analyzing the voting machines to make sure they’re accurate?  If Cyber Ninjas hasn’t done this kind of thing before, who have they hired to do it for them?

They won’t say, so we don’t know who they are using to do the ballot counting and voting machine analysis. 

Are they allowing representatives of the Democratic Party and Republican Party to observe what they’re doing inside the coliseum?

There you go puffing on those funny cigarettes again.  Of course not.  Because the Republican controlled state senate is paying for the audit, presumably they have someone on site to watch out for their interests.  But nobody else is allowed in there.

Who is paying for the audit?

Funny you should ask.  The Republican controlled state senate is paying $150,000 to Cyber Ninjas, but the owner of the company has said the audit will cost more than that, and he is not saying where he will get the additional money.  It is known that a fundraiser was recently held to raise money to pay for the audit, but the state senate Republicans will not say who was at the fund raiser, or who contributed money.  One American News Network (OANN), the right-wing online site that is so far right it makes Fox News look like leftists, is raising money online for the audit, and so is Sidney Powell, the lawyer who filed many of the lawsuits trying to overturn the presidential election results (including one called “The Kraken”) and lost every one of them, has announced that she is raising money for the audit. 

So is there any guarantee at all that this audit is being conducted fairly and legally?

Huh?  Haven’t you been listening?  Cyber Ninjas could have hired its so-called “auditors” from the membership lists of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, and we would have no way of knowing about it.  They could be using people who are all registered Republicans and members of the Arizona Republican Committee leadership, and we wouldn’t know about it. 

How long until we know the results of this so-called “audit”?

Well, the Republicans from the state senate have rented the Veterans Memorial Coliseum until May 14, but after that, the venue has a whole bunch of high school graduations scheduled to take place, so we don’t know how long this thing is going to go on.  Election experts have said that counting 2.1 million ballots and analyzing the voting machines for Maricopa County will take much longer than that.  What they’ll do when the high school kids kick them out is something we’ll learn down the road.

If they deign to tell us, that is.  They might, they might not.  So far, the whole thing is a “trade secret” we have no right to know anything about.  Welcome to the future of American elections, folks, courtesy of the Republican Party.