By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Like athletes who don’t want to wait until late in the game to start scoring, political operatives aim to establish their narrative rapidly, whether true or false, before the other side starts framing a picture for the public.
Even before Donald Trump could start building a conservative agenda in the White House, fierce Democrat foes falsely blasted him as a Russian agent, conspirator, and traitor — who shortly came under official investigation. Trump and his staff probably used up at least as much time fighting against this fusillade as trying to deliver on his proposals.
Likewise, even before the long-awaited Arizona Senate’s audit report of the 2020 Maricopa County election was released to the public on September 24, a leak by someone apparently opposed to it on September 23 aimed to dismiss its results.
While the audit concluded that the numbers of votes cast for Joe Biden and Trump were about the same as previously reported, it significantly said tens of thousands of these votes in just Maricopa County potentially had been cast illegally — far more than Biden’s reported narrow winning margin throughout Arizona.
The bottom-line question wasn’t how many pieces of stiff paper were marked for Biden and how many for Trump, but how many of them were legal. Like, it’s not how many wads of dollar bills you carry, but how many aren’t counterfeit.
The Phoenix area’s liberal NPR station, KJZZ (91.5 FM), gloated: “The announcement was a blow to Trump’s supporters — and even the former president himself — who’ve latched on to the so-called Arizona audit as evidence the election was rigged. . . .
“But the report . . . threw cold water on the grandest claims of fraud, as [Senate President Karen] Fann confirmed the authenticity of draft copies that were leaked to the media, including KJZZ, one day earlier,” on September 23, the radio station said.
However, national conservative talk-radio host Charlie Kirk said media wanted to ignore the statistic of more than 55,000 ballots “potentially cast illegally, against Arizona state law.”
Kirk described the audit report as a “bombshell” that Democrats wanted to defuse by getting out first only the “topline” numbers of total votes for the two men.
If Biden had won Arizona by 500,000 votes, or only 100,000 votes, Kirk said, there’d be no issue here. But it’s different with a margin of less than 10,500.
He also said that although Maricopa is the most populous county in Arizona, it was the only one examined in this audit, while all of the state’s other votes were unchallenged.
Senators who sought to have the audit had long said they weren’t trying to overturn the 2020 election, but to see where improvements and security were needed for the future.
Guesting on Kirk’s program, OAN reporter Christina Bobb, who spent extensive time here, said the audit didn’t even extend to include questions like people voting unauthorized from hotel addresses. She said the leak was a Democrat one.
However, conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on September 28, “I’d be very surprised if any Democrats had access to advance copies of such a sensitive report. So any leak was far more likely to come from a Republican trading access for who knows what.”
As details of the audit were reviewed upon their release, Senate GOP officials and auditors repeatedly said it wasn’t complete. One large reason was the refusal of the majority-Republican Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to cooperate to the extent requested.
The presentation in the Arizona Senate chamber lasted more than three hours. Its findings were forwarded to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, for investigation.
In turn, Brnovich’s office informed the county supervisors that they were to preserve all relevant 2020 election information in light of “the expectation the review may lead to further investigation or litigation.”
Senate President Karen Fann began “this historic moment” in the chamber by noting the poll finding that 45 percent of Arizona voters didn’t trust in the election, and the Senate’s request to work with the Maricopa supervisors on the integrity issue.
“I’m very disappointed to see that Maricopa County refused,” Fann said, adding that after the supervisors first agreed to cooperate, they went into an executive session, then said no. “They even went so far as to sue us,” she said.
Seated just to the right of Fann, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Warren Petersen said that “unfortunately” this was “an incomplete audit” because of “obstruction” and the county’s refusal to cooperate.
Both Fann and Petersen are Republicans.
Shortly after the presentation ended, Petersen was on the air with Phoenix-based KKNT (960 AM) radio talk host Seth Leibsohn. Petersen said the political left wing put “millions” of dollars into opposing the audit.
There still are a lot of questions, Petersen said, adding that he would raise questions with reporters which they ignored.
“It’s like these reporters are scared of it,” Petersen said.
One of his major concerns, he said, was “the churning of the logs” so that it wasn’t known who was logged on with access to county voting equipment. Also, he said, he worried about duplicate ballots and ballot envelopes without voters’ required signatures.
Asked by Leibsohn to summarize his reaction, Petersen replied, “The headline would be, ‘We still have an incomplete audit’.”
Noting that all the findings were being given to the state attorney general, Petersen said, “There are laws that appear to be broken” and “people doing suspect things.”
Querard, the GOP political consultant, told The Wanderer: “The audit was never going to get access to everything it needed, so they did what they could with what they had. As a result, both sides got some of what they wanted.
“Democrats will focus on the vote count and repeat over and over that Biden won Arizona,” Querard said.
“Republicans are going to focus on breakdowns in procedures, things that need to be fixed before 2022, and are alarmed at reports of ballots without signatures, etc…
“Remember, the audit wasn’t about Trump or Biden, it was about the integrity of the entire election,” he added. “So the goal isn’t to find X-thousand votes, it is to find out what was done right and what was done wrong…
“But yes, the liberal effort has been to discredit the entire process along the way so that no matter what was found, they could bury it,” Querard said.
Drawing to a close of the afternoon’s long presentation, Fann said all the audit information is at the website azsenaterepublicans.
com.
There’s an “audit” tab at the upper left.
Proof Of Discrepancies
Among many reactions at the extensive, unofficial “Republican Briefs” blog here, conservative GOP Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers enumerated figures including 23,344 mail-in ballots voted after people had moved from their registered addresses, and after their deadline; more than 17,000 duplicate votes; 9,041 mail-in voters returning more ballots than they were sent, and 3,432 more ballots cast than people who voted.
“In other words,” Rogers said, “yes, there WAS fraud! Any one of these discrepancies would be enough to merit decertification. Any one of them would make the audit worthwhile. So now we have proof of discrepancies sufficient to overturn the 2020 official election results in Arizona.”
Election-integrity specialist Shiva Ayyadurai spoke from Massachusetts to the Senate session about anomalies on ballot envelopes, including the “verified and approved” stamp for voters’ authorized signatures being stamped right into empty signature boxes.
Ayyadurai also demonstrated that some printed ballot envelopes, with their triangle pointing to where the voter should sign, had the triangle overlaying the “verified and approved” notice.
How was it possible that the approval notice, which presumably was put on the envelope after it was printed, was partly behind the printing that already had been done?
Information technology specialist Ben Cotton noted that investigators never were provided with the computer routers, which would show if there was unauthorized access to voting systems.
Even though the routers had been subpoenaed by the Senate, the board of supervisors refused, insisting that they weren’t needed by the auditors, and that to provide them would expose sensitive unrelated information.
Fann concluded the presentation after more than three hours, “Prayers and blessings to everybody.”
Zuckerbucks
A news report posted September 25 by the Arizona Sun Times, citing technology specialist Ben Cotton said, “One of the most startling findings came from Ben Cotton….He said hundreds of thousands of election files — which the Maricopa County supervisors refused to allow the auditors to examine — were deleted the day before the audit began, a violation of federal law which requires federal election records to be retained for 22 months.
“Although the name of the account that deleted them was not tied to a specific election worker, Cotton said there is video of the person who accessed those servers at that time,” the Sun Times story said.
As the September 24 date to issue the report had drawn closer while significant information still was lacking, John Shadegg, a former Arizona congressman regarded as having ties to the establishment, was announced to be a “special master” to obtain more facts.
However, they weren’t quickly produced.
Querard, the GOP political consultant, told The Wanderer on September 28, “John Shadegg may discover more or gain access to information that will allow other experts to report additional findings, but we have no idea how long that may take.”
One of the five county supervisors, Steve Chucri, announced he was resigning after a September 21 report at the Gateway Pundit website said Chucri early this year criticized the election’s integrity — even though his public posture was to defend the election, as did his colleagues.
Chucri didn’t deny having criticized the election. However, announcing his resignation, he said, “The comments I made were during a very turbulent time. My colleagues have every right to be both angry and disappointed with me. I should not have made such statements and offer my colleagues heartfelt apologies.”
Back on April 19, the Gateway Pundit website, which closely followed the attempts to have an audit, said it appeared that the Maricopa County supervisors “accepted almost $3 million in Zuckerbucks in 2020 — grant money dumped from progressive Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan’s foundation — as well as from other Big Tech billionaires and radical philanthropists — into the hands of somebody in Maricopa County through a 501(c)(3) ‘nonpartisan charity,’ the Chicago-based Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL).”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress