Tomorrow, Friday September 24 2021, the CyberNinjas will reveal findings of their long-delayed “complete forensic audit” report in a livestreamed hearing. The only people in attendance will be the two state senators who ordered the audit. No Democrats, no public, no questions.
Right-wing media is salivating. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast last night Boris Epshteyn promised bombshell revelations that would lead to calls for a complete canvass of Maricopa County and “full forensic audits” of Pima and Pinal counties, as well as “indictments” as early as next week.
State representative Wendy Rogers, who has staked her entire, brand-new political career on “decertifying the vote” has amassed 800-plus thousand signatures on a petition to that effect (state residency not required). Several Republican lawmakers are forming an “election nullification committee,” which came to light after a fracas at a John Birch Society event they were attending.
The hearing is poised to be a circus, with senate president Karen Fann under enormous pressure from her base to find wrongdoing. Several days ago former general and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn published an open letter to Fann reminding her that the future of the republic was at stake.
Fann may secretly rue the day she signed on to this endless, and endlessly voracious exercise in appeasing the base, but you would never know it from her twitter feed, which bears the signature taunting, boasting tone that Trump legitimized, and almost mandated, on that platform.
Earlier this week, when the Senate came to an agreement with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors over access to “the routers” which have become a rallying cry and object of subpoena [the agreement drops the subpoena in exchange for appointing a “master” and tech crew to examine the routers and report to the Senate; the Ninjas are not invited to the party and the county will eat the cost of replacing election equipment compromised in the audit process] — Fann triumphantly tweeted “we have the routers!!” and “Maricopa County goes home with its tail between its legs.” Mind you this is the largest county of the state she purportedly represents, and the Supervisors are members of her own party and political colleagues.
In a small taste of the abuse and backlash she will receive should “the audit report” not result in overturning the 2020 election and sending Secretary of State Katie Hobbs straight to Guantanamo Bay, her tweet was ratio’d with patriots calling her a liar and RINO for not obtaining the actual physical routers.
The subpoena for the routers, defied by Maricopa County until the state attorney general got involved, was a direct result of the *last* audit hearing, an “interim report” delivered in person to an empty hearing room, livestreamed and with only Fann and her sidekick as audience.
I watched that hearing and it was a clusterfuck. Doug Logan, ninja-in-chief, claimed many irregularities had been found. Incomplete inventory sheets in boxes and the like. Then he made much of “offsets” in the printed ballots for in-person voting that he claimed could have led to “bleed-throughs.” But the Big Reveal was from the machine-side examiner, subcontractor CyFir. The CyFir guy announced that after examining sets of daily vote totals he had discovered 74,000 “extra” absentee ballots, as in 74,000 more votes recorded than there were ballots sent out.
Karen Fann and henchman were horrified and, on the recommendation of Logan, who said more data was needed, announced that they would be issiung more subpoenas, most notably for “the routers” which might contain “the logs” that would blow this whole caper wide open.
Immediately following that hearing the Maricopa Board of Supervisors debunked the 74,000 “ghost voters” story. With no expertise in election processes, and none in Arizona recordkeeping, the Ninjas had compared apples to oranges. One form or report tracked absentee ballots sent. The other form recorded early votes per day, a combination of absentee ballots received and in-person early votes. The Arizona Mirror subsequently did a gorgeous piece of granular investigative journalism on this, tracking down the actual daily reports and also precinct-level in-person voting data, and comparing apples to apples for an almost perfect total. There was no extra 74,000 votes.
But the number was out there, repeated like a mantra in right-wing media, blogs, and tweets. Subsequently, although Boris Epshteyn and Steve Bannon touted the number for several days, most Republicans have gotten the memo to quietly drop the claim, but since only the “mainstream media” and Maricopa County itself have explicitly debunked it (and these entities are seen as corrupt, compromised, and complicit), people like Rudy Giuliani and My Pillow guy Mike Lindell continue to tout this “absolute proof.”
This is paradigmatic of the “stop the steal” movement. An incendiary, easily falsifiable, claim is made. Made with great fanfare, publicly, at an ersatz, entirely Republican “hearing” and livestreamed on YouTube to a hungry-for-fraud international audience. And when it is debunked the claimant uses it as rationale and leverage to demand*more* data, *more* access.
It happened in Georgia, at a hearing where Matt Braynard (most recently seen organizing the dud protest in DC on behalf of the “political prisoners” of the January 6 insurrection) alleged tens of thousands of votes from false addresses. A Democratic state representative confronted him, saying she went through his list and instantly recognized some actual constituents of hers. An address he had flagged as “people voting from post office boxes” was actually a large condominium full of actual registered voters with a postbox and mailing business on the ground floor.
Braynard did not apologize. He was unashamed. He calmly said that if the state had given him more complete data these issues would not have occurred.
Last week a wildcat citizens’ group out of Arizona released their preliminary report of the amateur canvass they’ve been conducting. From a tiny sample size they extrapolated tens of thousands of “ghost voters” and “lost votes.” On right-wing media they revealed their big “get” — people voted from vacant lots!! The cover of the report, available online, featured a picture of one of these lots.
Thirty seconds on Google Maps and reporters discovered a large house on that lot. A house containing real people, actual registered voters who actually voted. The replacement vacant lot they hastily photoshopped fared no better: vacant now, it used to be a mobile home site.
But calls of “it’s the canvass not the count” have been coming from Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon for months, since it has become backchannel-known that the Maricopa Audit itself will not be dispositive of any proof of fraud.
The less they find the more access is needed to find what they are sure is being hidden.
In Pennsylvania two weeks ago state representatives went straight for the jugular. After an internal power struggle in which “election integrity” issues were summarily removed from the bailiwick of an overly grandstanding representative, and reapportioned to an appropriately subserviant buddy of State Senate President Pro Tem Jake Corman (who was under intense pressure, and who may well have thought he had done enough to appease the base when he caved to Giuliani and Eastman and sent a letter to VP Pence rescinding certification of Pennsylvania’s electors in early January) — an obscure subcommitee issued subpoenas *for all registered voters’ data, including address, date of birth, driver’s license and social security numbers* — to be handed to unspecified third parties for unspecified processes with unspecified security guarantees.
The Democrats instantly sued, of course, as had the Maricopa County supervisors, but any entirely appropriate and justified resistance to this endless witch hunt is seen by the fraud-hungry as proof positive as guilt.
“What are they hiding?” “Only guilty people don’t want transparency.” “If they really thought Joe Biden got 81 million votes they would WELCOME a chance to rub it in our faces.”
The fact that the goalposts keep moving, that the method of “the steal” keeps morphing, that absolute proof dances tantalizingly out of reach, is no deterrent.
The belief the election was stolen is an article of faith. It predates and transcends proof or process. And it is a gut-level certainty.
Over and over I have heard and read that it is simply impossible Biden won. Trump had rallies with tens of thousands of people in the middle of nowhere! Biden had a few chairs in an empty lot. Trump had truck caravans and boat regattas and yard signs and bumper stickers. No one has yet to meet someone who demonstrates any enthusiasm about Biden. The *obviousness* of this disparity is I believe the driving force and ground certainty of the never-ending fraud hunt. It will never be disproven.
So tomorrow we will hear some incendiary claims. Some of them will be immediately debunked, but the damage will have been done. Some will be vague enough to admit neither of proof or disproof. Some (from former Arizona secretary of state Bennet) will be legitimate scoldings that certain I’s weren’t dotted, certain T’s weren’t crossed (probably to do with packing content slips and unique identifiers on duplications of spoiled ballots and the like — artefacts of a unique election that included unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots, unprecedented levels of voter participation, and unprecendented scrutiny).
A man affectionately known in election-fraud circles as “Dr. Shiva,” a man with no election expertise who is best known for falsely claiming he invented email and most recently notorious for spurious presentations at Mike Lindell’s South Dakota “Cyber Symposium,” but who has nonetheless been tasked by the state of Arizona with inspecting ballot-envelope signatures, will certainly declaim nefarious goings-on.
But most of the findings will point in one direction: we cannot say for certain the election was stolen but we have found enough to know *we need more data and we need more access.*
It will be necessary to call for a complete canvass of Maricopa County. It will be necessary to audit and canvass other counties, nay, the entire state. State senators and representatives and candidates for governor and secretary of state are lining up to call for more audits, more data, more access, right now, as we speak.
Appeasement doesn’t work. Jake Corman in Pennsylvania tried to slow-walk “election integrity” and Steve Bannon broadcast his office phone and email, telling millions of viewers to become a “forcing function.”
One of the Maricopa supervisors attempted to placate the wildcat patriot canvassing group by telling them sotto voce he didn’t trust the Dominion machines either and maybe “they” did it by dead voters. They recorded him, and after eight months of his solidarity with his fellow supervisors to uphold the vote, the process, and the result, the Gateway Pundit released that recording, Project-Veritas-like, this week, forcing him to resign and profusely apologize to his colleagues for overheated speech he now disavows but which perfectly bolsters the secretly stolen election narrative that only gains steam as the 2020 election recedes in time.
The most powerful and energized wing of the Republican Party has staked their political future on the fraud movement. Explicitly. And, in the most truthful statement to come out of Mike Lindell’s shindig, as one of his presenters said, “It’s almost better we didn’t have the packet captures; this movement gains energy when we’re fired up to find more.”
