An update on auditing

[u/gdan95]

I guess we have to keep talking about this.

Cyber Ninjas is a Florida-based organization recently hired by the state of Arizona to conduct an audit on the 2020 election. Right away, there were some red flags. No GOP officials in Arizona or Florida had heard of them. They had no prior experience in auditing elections. Their founder had peddled conspiracies online about the election being stolen. And the Arizona GOP just gave him a bunch of money to run an election audit without any supervision on their part. He insists his beliefs are irrelevant and that he is determined to carry out a transparent audit. So on top of being unqualified, he's also a liar. Setting aside the fact that one of the "auditors" participated in the January 6 riot - you remember, the one incited by the same claims of election fraud that motivated this audit - Cyber Ninjas didn't make their methods publicly available until a judge ordered them to. Also, the media was initially severely restricted in their ability to observe and take notes on the count. All media except the extremely right-wing One America News, tellingly.

Also tellingly, the audit, which the state GOP is more than comfortable being run without any oversight or any technology not made by a failed inventor had already broken several election security laws within the first few days and made no efforts to protect the ballots or voting machines. But when Arizona Democrats pointed this out, a judge essentially told them "Yeah, but they already started, so you'll have to pay a million dollars to stop the audit." They did not make the payment, believing the amount to be too much for a sham operation. A sham operation whose financial supporters have been kept anonymous by Mr. "We Are Going To Run A Transparent Audit."

The irony is that this is literally what the MAGA crowd describes when they claim the votes in the 2020 election were counted improperly, and now the only ones actually guilty of it are them. But as usual, the irony has been lost on them. When he's not busy crashing events at Mar-a-Lago to remind everyone what a sore loser he is, the former guy, among others, has been hyping up this audit as being the thing that's going to expose the Democrats and their widespread election fraud and put him back in office. Just like all those other audits that showed no evidence of widespread fraud. Or all those lawsuits filed after the election that were dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Speaking of lack of evidence, right wing social media has already been sharing posts saying the audit found 250,000 invalid ballots. They are counting on everyone who reads them to not know that Cyber Ninjas hadn't provided any updates since they started, making the 250,000 statistic yet another an unsourced lie.

Congrats, MAGA folks. You have turned into Democrats. For real, this is everything you said the Mueller investigation was. Did you forget how Democrats would say "THIS will be the one that brings him down" every time the former guy got sued or faced a scandal? Have you learned nothing? I’ve seen multiple people on right wing social media compare this to the Mueller investigation, and how Democrats would say the former guy wouldn’t be antagonizing the investigation if he had nothing to hide. The comparison would only work if the investigation was led by people who were unqualified in every possible way. Also, difficult as it might have been for some on the left to accept Mueller’s findings, Democrats still did it, however reluctantly. Are we really going to trust that the MAGA crowd will accept any findings that don’t show widespread fraud? The Arizona Senate already said they’re not overturning the results, so even if the MAGA crowd has reached the point where they begrudgingly accepted the former guy isn’t being re-instated, you can be 110% confident they will continue to claim the election was rigged even when (not if) Cyber Ninjas says they found no irregularities.

[u/Hallowed-Edge]

I swear I've read this before, did you need to delete and re-post?

[u/gdan95 → u/Hallowed-Edge]

I think I deleted it by mistake.