And that the next election they lose was stolen and patriots need to storm the Capitol.
It has become subject to numerous conspiracy theories including one that state elections officials shredded ballots, fed them to chickens, and then had the chickens incinerated to cover up the evidence.
(Possibly evolved from this?)
Answering the OP, IF the recount concludes with ‘significant irregularities’ that look credible, it won’t put Trump back in office, or even invalidate the Arizona election.
In my opinion, what it might do is cause other states to do their own audits, and if they all found irregularities that were significant, the likely result would be the passage of more state laws similar to what Georgia has done before the 2022 midterms.
I have no opinion on the quality of the audit or the likelihood of finding anything, as I haven’t really paid it much attention. But there’s no way the U.S. would be headed towards any kind of ‘do-over’ election. I don’t think there’s any constitutional basis for that.
That’s funny.
I have to say I’m heartily sick of this kind of nonsense. I suspect a lot of Americans are as well and simply don’t want to pay attention. This “fraudit” has been going on for some time, and I’m only reading about that here now. (I read about it at Associated Press/Reuters but almost reluctantly.)
I basically held my breath until January 20th, and then decided to relax. I suspect that CyberNinja will release a “fraudit” claiming that Trump won Maricopa County in Arizona (funny how they didn’t “audit” Republican areas) and there will be some level of civil unrest. However it’s difficult to gear up for another political battle when we have no idea what will happen. I guess we’re just hoping it’ll end up like the dozens and dozens of court cases like “the Kraken”.
But it will be successful when it comes to the real goal of all this: Delegitimizing the election process as it now stands.
IF my aunt had wheels, she’d be a bus.
This is already answered in this very thread. See post 18 for an example. The audit is partisan bullshit and it’s being run poorly. They are counting more votes than they are getting (post 9), they are losing ballots, and have poor chain of control. By the time you posted your hypothetical, it was already shown to be wrong.
Care to try again?
“Look credible” to drooling OANN-besotted morons or the Congressmen utterly dependent on those droolers’ votes is one thing.
“Looking credible” to anyone with an ounce of intellectual or moral honesty is something very different.
Geez. Fucking. Louise.
At a public meeting last week in Cheboygan County, Mich., a lawyer from Detroit told county commissioners that the voting machines they used in 2020 could “flip” votes and throw an election. She offered to send in a “forensic team,” at no charge to the county, to inspect ballots and scanners.
In Windham, N.H., supporters of former president Donald Trump showed up to a town meeting this month chanting “Stop the Steal!” and demanding that officials choose their preferred auditor to scrutinize a 400-vote discrepancy in a state representative race.
And at a board of supervisors meeting May 4 in San Luis Obispo County, on California’s Central Coast, scores of residents questioned whether election machines had properly counted their votes, with many demanding a “forensic audit.”
The ramifications of Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the 2020 election are increasingly visible throughout the country: In emails, phone calls and public meetings, his supporters are questioning how their elections are administered and pressing public officials to revisit the vote count — wrongly insisting that Trump won the presidential race.
…
My bold.
I think you see how Sam’s position (“I have no opinion on the quality” because “I haven’t really paid it much attention”) leads directly to the inanity @ThelmaLou posted about.
It’s brilliant, in its reliance on the willful ignorance of the public.
And it highlights why the GOP is so steadfast in refusing to shut down the “Stop the Steal” rhetoric to the point of black-listing Liz Cheney. It allows them to let the crazies force through nonsensical “audits” which will undoubtedly produce “findings” that will lead directly to voting restrictions on the “wrong type” of voters.
And if it causes groups to rise up and storm government buildings after elections go the “wrong way”, well we already saw that happen and now the GOP is fighting tooth-and-nail to not even have an investigation of it.
If this goes on long enough you can end up with a significant chunk of the electorate literally not believing any election result is valid unless their party wins it. And I’m not entirely sure how you have a democracy in that environment.
So we’re left hoping for the best-case scenario - which is that this is all just more grift rather than an honest attempt to subvert American democracy.
I think it’s worse than that. This particular part of the effort isn’t about Jim Crow. It’s about a movement towards allowing state legislatures to appoint electors rather than deciding by popular vote, should the popular vote not go the “correct” way.
They are no longer trying to overturn the 2020 election. They’re trying to overturn the 2024 election that they are expecting they will lose if it comes down to a fair fight.
That’s my take on it too. I think they’ll issue “findings” about 2020. It will play very well for their base. But they’re not trying to change the outcome.
But what kind of information are they obtaining now about the intricacies of the voting system(s) they’re “auditing”? And how will this knowledge benefit their efforts to manage the outcome of the results from future elections?
They’re not winning on platform. They’re not winning on gerrymandering. They’re not winning on disrupting the mail. They’re not winning on other voter suppression techniques.
I think they’re learning how the voting mechanics work. This knowledge may be the goal of this audit. And it will explain why they will do this in other friendly states in the near future. It will be interesting to see if additional voting restrictions are implemented later during the current administration’s term.
Y’all know that this audit is costing Arizona taxpayers $150,000 that they are paying the Ninjas. Oh wait, there are ancillary costs too . . .
The price tag just went up another $6 million.
You’ve all read about the chicken-shit security with which they’ve protected the ballots; leaving them and the computers sitting out unattended; schlepping boxes of ballots all over the place (into that warehouse with the bathrooms open to the pubic?), and the lack of careful chain-of-custody controls.
Well, they haven’t been handling the actual Dominion machines any better. The AZ Secy of State now says they are all compromised and must be decertified and not be used again. That’s going to cost $6M to buy (actually, lease) new ones.
Oh no! How will we ever know IF the recount concludes with ‘significant irregularities’ that look credible??
That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re laying groundwork to contest future elections and to take extreme measures because they know that they are increasingly at a disadvantage in free and fair elections once you leave their gerrymandered districts.
But this is the important thing:
Former President Trump on Thursday slammed “weak” Republicans who don’t want to talk about the audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Ariz.
During a sit-down interview with One America News Network (OANN), Trump reiterated his unsupported claims of election fraud. The former president told OANN reporter Chanel Rion that Republican voters want to know “what’s going on in Arizona.”
“That’s all people ask me. They say ‘what’s going on in Arizona?’ They want to talk about the election fraud. The weak Republicans don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said. “The weak or stupid or RINOs [Republican in name only], call them whatever you want, and yet the Republican voter that’s what they want to hear.”
…
Blahblahblah.
They’re never going to find any “significant irregularities”, because there aren’t any. They’re going to find themselves in the same position that Kemp and Raffensperger were in.
If there was a way those Georgia Republicans could’ve found the votes Trump needed to win, they would’ve. But it’s not like they could just announce “Hey, we found 11,870 votes!” and everyone would reply “Cool Beans, Trump won!” They would’ve had to find a verifiable problem with one or more precincts and they’d have to provide a credible scenario, one that withstands scrutiny, to explain the revised vote count.
The recount is going to follow the “Obama’s birth certificate” investigation playbook. It’s not ending anytime soon. No results will every be released, but they’ll leak all sorts of “you won’t believe the fraud we’re finding” rumors. It will never finish, in the sense that the people conducting the audit will say “We’re done, here are some results”. They’re just going to keep coming up with increasingly ridiculous procedures, like checking ballots for intergalactic space dust, and it’ll go on through the summer at least. The “investigation” will keep getting shadier and the proposed methods more intrusive - until someone will finally manage to successfully sue to stop it ( I’m going to predict that will happen late summer/early fall). I think they’ll come up with a scheme to go door to door and interrogate voters, and that’ll be the last straw for the judiciary — but it might be something else.
Then once that happens, the narrative will shift to “the Deep State shut down the investigation because they’re afraid of what we were finding.”
Everything they are doing is political revenge taken straight from the “if you hit us we’ll hit back ten times harder” philosophy of political abuse.
The Democrats dared to suggest that maybe Trump cheated ? We’re going to claim THEY cheated! You investigated Trump’s kid, we’ll smear Biden’s kid! You claim Russia helped us, we’ll Ukraine helped you!
It’s just more of the Trump theatre of abuse, and part of the grift. It’s the grift that gives me hope, because the metric for their political decisions is always “how can we get the maximum amount of money out of our hard-core supporters?”, not “how can we win the next election?”. If it wasn’t, Trump would be President today.
It’s the grift that keeps on grifting…
I am so stealing this. @ThelmaLou
My cake day prezzie to you. 