Arizona Recount to Restore Trump as President Is Just the Beginning

Republicans of the Arizona senate have set out to prove that the three audits, reviews, and recounts of the state's 2020 presidential election came up with the wrong answer. It's always been a red state (1996 presidency excepted). Biden couldn't have won.

To uncover the fraud that must be the only explanation, yet another count of the 2.1 million ballots of Maricopa County was ordered by the state senate and is underway as we write.

Maricopa weighs in with two-thirds of the state's votes; its votes delivered the wins for Democrats Biden and former astronaut and now Senator Mark Kelly, so other counties were not considered. And only the election of Biden and Kelly are being analyzed. Apparently there was no fraud in any of the races around the state that Republicans won.

Recount taking place in the Arizona Veterans
Memorial Coliseum

The former president is, of course, ecstatic. He put out a "Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America" thanking "the brave and patriotic Republican State Senators from Arizona for the incredible job they are doing", admonishing Democrats for sending lawyers to Arizona…

"in an effort to stop this recount and full transparency because THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID! The Democrats are desperate for the FRAUD to remain concealed because, when revealed, the Great States of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, New Hampshire, and the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, would be forced to complete the work already started."

He concluded with "I predict the results will be startling".

Arizona's vote has been audited by federally accredited firms, twice, with a second audit ordered by the state legislature, and by a hand count overseen by both parties. Biden's win was certified unanimously by the Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County which has five seats, and four of them are held by Republicans.

This fourth count is not state supervised. Even so, the senate has authorized $150,000 of taxpayer money to cover part of the cost. No press is allowed other than the little known One America News Network (OANN) which is televising the proceedings. The audit is overseen by a private sector company out of Florida that calls itself Cyber Ninjas. You read that correctly. The company is run by Doug Logan, a QAnon believer who is in the “Stop the Steal” camp and backs conspiracy theories on social media such as the story that the US Army seized a secret computer server in Germany that held the real vote totals showing not only that Trump won the election, but that he swept with 400 electoral votes, and even won California.

In the Arizona count, Logan had his workers expose ballots to ultra-violet light to look for folds that would reveal we're not sure what. A search for bamboo fibers was next because hadn't former President Trump said, “Ballots will be printed by foreign countries...It will be the scandal of our times!".

Logan's company evidently got the auditing contract owing to a report he wrote at the request of Arizona's Republican Senate President Karen Fann to give reason for her cohort to object to certification of Arizona's vote in the U.S. Senate on January 6th. Along with onetime Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, on whose website his document was also posted, Logan believes that the software used by Dominion Voting Systems, the manufacturer of voting machines used in Arizona and a number of states, came from Smartmatic, and alleges that company was founded in Venezuela, had ties to Hugo Chavez, the country’s socialist dictator who died in 2013, and engineered its software to flip votes. There is no proof, Dominion doesn't use Smartmatic's software, and the two companies have filed suit against all who dreamed up and propagated this fanciful story including a $1.6 billion suit against Fox News. This is who is running the audit.

There are companies that manage the tricky business of recounts, but nothing on Cyber Ninjas' website says anything about this capability. A judge asked the company to submit its plans and procedures over concerns for ballot security and privacy but the company's lawyer refused, arguing that its methods are proprietary and needed to be kept secret.

"Clearly the documents that Cyber Ninjas has been ordered to file are confidential information…including that they constitute business information and concepts as well as operational information and records and reflect the know-how of the Cyber Ninjas."

As a consequence there are no safeguards protecting the ballots and voting equipment from being compromised. Without knowledge of how they will be treated, Arizona is giving custody of the state's ballots to QAnon.

Democrats filed a lawsuit to stop the recount saying it was illegal. The judge said he'd pause the count over the final April weekend while the merits of their suit were considered but came up with an insupportable invention, that the Democrats would have to put up a million dollars to cover any costs caused by the delay. The Democrats refused.

One reporter, Jen Fifield of The Arizona Republic did gain entry by signing up as an observer. Interviewed on Rachel Maddow's show, she says training was negligible, cell phones were not allowed, nor photos, nor note-taking. Fifield did observe that people handling the ballots were given blue pens, which, along with black, are readable by ballot scanners. They are supposed only to be given red pens which are not. One cannot erase a blue/black circle already filled-in by a voter, but a ballot can be rendered invalid by, say, filling in the Trump circle as well as an already filled-in Biden circle, resulting in the scanner kicking out what had been a Biden vote as an invalidly filled out ballot.

Fifield pointed this out to Logan, who first thought her wrong, then substituted red and green pens, but when Fifield applied again to be an observer after her first six-hour shift, she was refused re-entry.

Trump's plan was to declare victory on election night. Voters who went to the polls in person were correctly assumed to be mostly Republicans, so Trump would be in the lead that night. Mailed-in ballots, assumed predominantly to be from Democrats, were yet to be fully counted. Trump was therefore incensed at Fox News spoilers for calling Biden the victor in Arizona, doing so at 11:20 on election night with 27% of the vote still to be counted. When in the days following Fox apprised viewers that Trump's claim of winning the election was not true, the president denounced the network for having forgotten “what made them successful, what got them there” calling himself "the Golden Goose". He bestowed his favor on Newsmax and OANN. That's how OANN, which had always been for Trump, saw opportunity and overnight became a Trump propaganda dispenser.

OANN has tossed aside all principles of impartiality in news coverage, instead contributing to help cover the cost of an audit that aims to show Donald Trump won in Arizona. News host Christina Bobb even has her own political group called "Voices and Votes" and openly went fund raising. She asked the far-right firebrand lawyer Lin Wood to pitch in. Wood, a high-profile medical malpractice lawyer, often paired with fellow lawyer Sydney Powell in their claims that the election was stolen. Wood had his group, Fight Back, contribute $50,000. Cyber Ninjas is not revealing the source of the rest of the money.

Wood seems to have embraced every conspiracy theory. Just days ago at a rally in South Carolina — he's running for office — Wood flashed the QAnon "Q" sign with his fingers and proclaimed "Donald J. Trump is still president of the United States of America, and don't you forget it. Eighty million people said 'we the people, we pick Donald J. Trump'". That, of course, was Biden's vote count; Trump's was 73 million. He has made nonsensical claims linking Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, says Barack Obama is a Muslin, and thinks former Vice President Mike Pence should face "execution by firing squad" for failing to stop the certification of Biden's election victory on January 6th.

Wood is in league with Logan. He told Talking Points Memo that Logan was staying at his South Carolina property late last year when Logan and others were investigating 2020 election fraud. When in April Wood learned that Logan was leading the audit team, Wood said “He is a man of God, he will reveal the truth”.

It will come as a surprise if Cyber Ninjas reports anything other than Trump won after all. They are in a mission assigned by the Arizona senate to right the terrible wrong of handing electoral votes to Biden. The giveaway of what the audit's outcome will be was what the company lawyer additionally said to the judge, that Cyber Ninjas "expects to have similar business opportunities to undertake such work for other governments around the country". Why would they so expect if there was the possibility of coming up with nothing in Arizona?

Sure enough, a circuit court judge in Antrim County, Michigan, just said he will allow a dozen technology and election experts, Cyber Ninjas included, to pursue claims of fraud in opposition to the secretary of state's election report that determined mistakes in Michigan voting results were no more than human error.

In "Why Do We Let the Big Lie of a Stolen Election Stand?", we argued for requiring all Trump campaign lawyers to present their evidence of fraud and irregularities in the sixty-plus cases they filed before a publicly televised commission. Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have blinders on, though, preoccupied by her desire for a commission on the January 6th insurrection, which will be redundant of so much that has already been examined, while doing nothing to overcome the belief that the election was stolen. She fails to see that the House will certainly be lost if no action is taken and the Big Lie is allowed to live on.