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Product will enter, product will appear, an official said who will not give his name, as he pointed to stacks of cardboard boxes of ballots sealed closed with tape matching the team colors lined with both sides of the stadium floor.
The data in the black box, he added, pointed to a black monolith of a server in the middle of the floor, with blue ropes spilled like silly strings that could track ballot test results.
This is the scene in the election audit ordered by the Arizona Senate of Maricopa County, the fourth largest province in the country, where 2.1 million ballots were cast and where Trump, in his disbelief and anger was lost to Joe Biden by a margin of 45,109 votes. Not conducted by state election officials but by a Florida -based company called Cyber Ninjas, it is widely seen as a dream fever of an effort to expose and eliminate the perceived voter fraud that Trump has denounced and of his supporters since Election Day, locking a large area of the country into an endless cycle of relitigating the 2020 vote.
It’s easy to dismiss it as a sideshow, a bizarre epilogue to an election that some Trump supporters are still willing to admit. But democracy experts and election officials have warned that the audit here speaks to a dark and disturbing current mistrust that GOP leaders are committing. It is a carefully cultivated environment of paranoia that destroys confidence in national political processes and could lay the groundwork for the more fierce challenge of election losers in 2024 and beyond.
Maricopa County ballots elected during the 2020 general election were examined and narrated by a contractor working for Cyber Ninjas in Phoenix. Matt York / Associated Press
This process is damaging not only Arizona elections, but democratic self -governance, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. My main concern is that we will find ourselves in a perpetual half-state or the province or the country that denies that legitimately elected voters have the power to govern.
Rejected by the courts and proven wrong by the recount, Trump supporters say to themselves that Arizona will be the first domino to fall in a series of election investigations that will overturn the 2020 election result decided by President Biden . Trump, who has sent statements encouraging forensic audits to Georgia, New Hampshire, and Arizona, told friends he believes he will be returned to the Oval Office this summer. And while that idea seems pure delusion, the effects of the ripple from auditing here are already obvious as state lawmakers and other Republican officials from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alaska, and elsewhere is heading to Phoenix and bring the fibers of conspiracy theory back to their supporters at home.
I have to tell you, I was impressed, Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano said, in an interview with the right -wing blog The Gateway Pundit, after touring the Arizona site last week and before he held a rally with his own state Capitol calling for an audit there. It is a model for any audit in any country or around the world.
Pennsylvania has no plans to roll out ballots in the November election, in which Biden defeated Trump in Quaker State by 80,555 votes. But Republicans are pushing for efforts to re -evaluate election results in many other states, a process that maintains an unfounded narrative about election fraud, benefiting the former president.
In Wisconsin, the state’s conservative House spokesman hired three former law enforcement officers and an attorney to investigate tips about the previous election, though professional election managers completed their work months ago. Trump himself took out an audit of a local race in New Hampshire to make unreliable claims about wider election fraud. His supporters are trying to arrange a push for an audit in Michigan, while election skeptics have been successfully indicted for a forensic audit in Fulton County, Ga., Though that case is currently bound in court .
If you’re against an audit, you’re part of the corruption, said Garland Favorito, a well-known conspiracy theorist in Georgia and a plaintiff in that case, after he visited the audit in Arizona. He spoke in a sight-seeing interview with right-wing news outlet One America News Network, which referred to the reference to Maricopa to be released as an American audit.
The audit here is the latest example of how Trump supporters have driven the mainstream election machinery to pursue a fake narrative about the previous election and how much power this narrative has.
While most Republican congressmen have acknowledged that Biden is in fact president, oblique references to irregularities in the voting process pushed by the likes of House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik provide a full hug of conspiracy theory of state parties and local activists supporting sham audits or even running for their office itself on a fraud detection platform. One of Trump’s visible allies, former national security adviser Michel Flynn, suggested the U.S. needed a coup, and a recent poll found nearly 30 percent of Trump supporters believe he will be returned as president this year.
Typically, audits are a standard fixture of the electoral bureaucracy immediately after voting, a dull process carried out by civil servants who barely get any notice. In Georgia, ballots were audited in November before election certification. But the audit at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix was unique. It began with the mandate of the Republican-controlled state Senate, which subpoenaed 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County about the strong opposition of Republicans running the Board of Supervisors there, and handed over to Cyber Ninjas , a company with no reputation for conducting election audits and whose founder openly questioned the election. The Senate covers a small portion of the cost, but a review of the Guardian newspaper and OpenSecrets, a group that monitors money politics, found that most of the effort is paid for by undisclosed donors, some with connections. to Trump.
I have full support for him and a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud, Senate President Karen Fann wrote in an e-mail released earlier this month, according to in the Arizona Republic. In another e-mail, the paper reported, he acknowledged that Biden had won and said the audit was to forgive people’s suspicions about the election system, or to find ways to improve it.
Experienced audit observers and experienced election officials said that what was happening at the coliseum, where a sign for the WNBA basketball team Mercury said Mad House was our home, can hardly be called an audit. In addition to ballot-counters, there are many tables where people with gray T-shirts check ballots under a camera; the security presence included the Arizona Rangers, a civilian auxiliary force with no real law enforcement powers.
To critics, the purpose of the workout does not appear to include discovering who people will vote for in 2020.
Ballot counting is cyclical, but ballots are still being checked. Audit officers did not respond to e-mail questions about when a final report might be released. While the audit report has done nothing to change the outcome of the 2020 election, there are concerns that its release could further fuel Trump supporters ’anger at his disappearance, which has sparked a violent attack. at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
With their lack of techniques and inconsistency, and everything they do, they create an environment that is primarily about cooking books, which we’re absolutely sure that’s what they intend to do, the Arizona Secretary of State said. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who defended the security of the 2020 states vote and is now running for governor.
I don’t know if I can emphasize enough how much a block of voters in our state, and from across the country, really believe I stole the election, which is tantamount to committing infidelity, Hobbs added. This is very dangerous.
Outside the stadium, in a parking lot baking 108-degree heat, a group of demonstrators cheered the volunteers as they counted the votes and unfurled a banner calling Hobbs and the Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County incarceration.
It shows he won Arizona probably in a landslide, said Kelly Johnson, a 60 -year -old lawyer with a revolver in his hip who traveled here from Southern California. We also believe Trump won in California, and won big.
Larry Grafanakis, a Glendale resident who recently showed up outside a federal courthouse in Phoenix to support the so-called QAnon Shaman who was arrested after he entered the capitol as the Jan. 6 strike failed, came to the demonstration with three granola bars and a couple of Trump flags.
I just came from inside, counting the votes, Grafanakis said, who said he trained a few hours and came six or seven times to help count. If they don’t add, then we do it again sometime.
This is important for the world, he said, because some of his fellow demonstrators were upset at the presence of this reporter, whom they asked to leave.
Just below the block, a graffitied message on a sign showed what the entire election state had already proven. LOST TRUMP, it said, with a sad face.
Jess Bidgood can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jessbidgood.
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