Arizona Audit Effort Encounters Opposition
What happened?
The Republican-controlled State Senate of Arizona won a lawsuit to obtain the ballots of millions of Arizonans living in Maricopa County and hired a company called Cyber Ninjas (really) to audit the ballots and report back irregularities if any are found.
The Ninjas, having never audited an election before, asked the County for routers and a laundry list of other things and then got busy checking each ballot for... traces of bamboo (we’ll explain below!).
The list of groups and officials opposed to the audit has grown steadily. For reasons--ranging from improper handling of the ballots to implications for law enforcement to the national embarrassment it has become for the state of Arizona--the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Republican sheriff of Maricopa County, Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Republican lawmakers in the State Senate, including at least one who initially supported it, and the U.S. Department of Justice, among others, have come out against the audit.
How was it covered?
Center/Least bias: Associated Press. Reuters.
Right bias: Wall Street Journal. National Review.
Left bias: Washington Post. New York Times. CNN.
What related misinformation circulated? The calls for the audit are essentially based in a false understanding--or perhaps a hopeful misunderstanding--of how the election was conducted.
The elected officials who launched it appear to be genuine in their belief in the misinformation that has surrounded the broader election, and Arizona in particular. For example, the president of the State Senate wrote a letter in early May asking the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to answer questions on three “serious issues,” but the letter prefaces its questions by asserting things that are patently false.
Former president Donald Trump issued a statement rephrasing one of the letter’s incorrect claims about a “database” being deleted before auditors got their hands on it. (Turned out the auditors had configured it wrong, which one of the contractors more or less admitted--a nuance that didn’t get as much attention after being made known as the original false claim!)
The people who are paying for the audit (only the first $150,000 was appropriated by the Arizona State Senate) still maintain that the election was massively fraudulent and seem to hope the audit will produce evidence of their prior belief.
The company conducting it is led by people who have publicly promoted known, debunked conspiracy theories about the election. As have some of the people serving as advisors to the audit officials. A state lawmaker who lost his election in November, and who later spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally and was seen at the storming of the Capitol on 6 January, is one of the people checking the ballots.
The online community most vocally supportive of the audit are influencers of the deepest corners of QAnon, who all promote the wider false narrative that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. The theory is that 40,000 ballots, enough to flip the state to Biden, were brought to Arizona from China--hence the bamboo fiber fixation--and that when this is discovered Arizona’s electoral votes will return to the Trump column and other battleground states will follow like dominoes. Trump himself has picked up on this notion and hinted at it in recent public remarks.
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