This Friday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) publicly condemned the so-called audit that has been unfolding in Maricopa County, Arizona, where Joe Biden was victorious last November and where Republicans from the state Senate have been leading what amounts to a wild goose chase in search of imaginary fraud. State Republicans subpoenaed materials from last year’s election from local authorities — some of whom have since condemned the audit debacle, and they’ve tasked a company called Cyber Ninjas, which has no previous election auditing experience, with leading the disgraceful effort.
As Cheney pointedly put it:
‘What is happening in Maricopa County is not an “audit.” It is an effort to subvert democracy.’
What is happening in Maricopa County is not an “audit.”
It is an effort to subvert democracy. https://t.co/TGPvj6a0MA
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) June 11, 2021
The Arizona “audit” has been running on conspiracy theories like the truly bonkers idea that fraudulent ballots may have been shipped in from Asia. Audit workers were at one point searching for bamboo fibers among the materials on the basis of that conspiracy theory. Where do they come up with this stuff? There has never at any point been any meaningfully conclusive evidence for any kind of systematic election fraud — let alone for bamboo fibers.
The Maricopa County debacle seems poised to produce an unreliable outcome. As Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) recently troublingly observed:
‘There’s really nothing going on here that gives any confidence that they’re going to produce a report that is valid. They’re not going to produce results that are going to be able to be replicated. They don’t know what they’re doing and they didn’t have a clue how long it was going to take them to do this.’
Trump himself has lauded the audit amid his broader continued false claims about the integrity of last year’s election, although again — no meaningful evidence of systematic election fraud in last year’s presidential race has ever emerged. No court anywhere in the entire country has ever accepted the idea that systematic election fraud was present and responsible for Joe Biden’s win. It’s not an open question.
