By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Like marks on ballots themselves when they’re recounted or audited after an election, the meaning of “the Madhouse on McDowell” could be understood in more than one way.
The big “madhouse” arena at the Arizona State Fairgrounds on West McDowell Road here originally meant a place of crazy excitement when the Phoenix Suns Major League Basketball team made Veterans Memorial Coliseum their home from the late 1960s through the early 1990s.
The Suns were growing Phoenix’s first major-league sports team and gave some rabid fans an object for their affections other than the various well-established, formidable Sun Devils teams at Arizona State University, in suburban Tempe. Major-league football, baseball, and hockey arrived here later.
But a “madhouse” also might indicate a focus of boiling anger, which has turned out to be the way certain mad media view the audit being conducted of the 2.1 million November 2020 ballots in Maricopa County, which has Phoenix as county seat.
Maricopa is by far the most populous of the state’s counties, most of them large in area but rural in population. Although Arizona is the sixth-largest state in square miles, it has only 15 counties.
Media, often having a leftist slant, resolved that Democrat radical Joe Biden’s supposed presidential victory here in 2020 should be left alone rather than be more closely examined in the audit sought by the Grand Canyon State’s Republican-majority Senate.
Like some other battleground states, Arizona’s narrow win for Biden seemed hard to explain unless a person noticed other factors like the powerful McCain political machine, which survived the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, supporting the Democrat nominee. Both widow Cindy McCain and McCain’s former Senate teammate Jeff Flake strongly endorsed Biden.
However, leading backers of the audit said they weren’t seeking to overturn the declared election result, but to lay people’s doubts to rest and to see if technical improvements were needed for future elections.
Perhaps the ballots that Maricopa County’s other voters and I cast have turned out to be the focus of unprecedented national attention for political consequences from the Grand Canyon State.
In an April 26 video, Arizona GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward, D.O., said that “the nation’s eyes are focused right here on Arizona,” with the fight continuing not only in court but also the arena of public opinion, with Democrats “and their cronies in media” waging nationwide propaganda to stop the audit.
Raquel Teran, Arizona Democratic Party chairwoman and a state representative, said, in part, “We are calling on Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich to put an end to this madness and protect our election systems from conspiracy theorists.”
Both Ducey and Brnovich are Republicans.
Not so strangely, the executive editor of the liberal-slanted Arizona Republic, the state’s largest news platform, was as strong in his language against the audit as was Democrat Teran.
On April 24 the conservative national Just the News website headlined, “Bias alert: Top Arizona newspaper editor says election audit in hands of ‘conspiracy theorists’.”
The story said executive editor Greg Burton “claims the state’s ongoing election audit in Maricopa County has been ‘bought and sold’ and is in the hands of ‘conspiracy theorists,’ incendiary remarks from a supposedly neutral journalist overseeing coverage of the event. . . .
“‘It’s clear this audit has been bought and sold by hyper partisans intent on sowing doubt,’ Burton said in a Republic report. . . . ‘Senate leaders have throttled legitimate press access and handed Arizona’s votes to conspiracy theorists’,” Just the News quoted Burton.
Burton makes appeals in the declining Republic for more people to subscribe to it, without acknowledging that its slant may be a reason for keeping them away.
Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, wasn’t optimistic that positive results would come after “huge voter fraud during the election.” Haney told The Wanderer on April 27 that it’s like a politburo rules the nation instead of the people.
A politburo is the executive committee of a nation’s Communist Party.
“I think we’re living under a politburo government, politburo institutions, politburo bureaucracy and business industry…controlled by the leftists of our country and the world,” Haney said. “. . . And nothing is going to change.”
He said maneuverings against the audit are “disinformation or distraction,” following “huge voter fraud during the election….And they’re seizing all the chokepoints that used to be our constitutional republic, and they’re cutting it off. And we, as the underlings, can’t do anything about it.”
In an April 26 video that included GOP chairwoman Ward, Ken Bennett, the liaison for the audit, said that despite claims to the contrary, this is the first “complete forensic audit” of the results.
Previously, Bennett said, there was “kind of like a logic and accuracy test” that only checked on how voting machines were working at one specific point in time, but didn’t see if a thumb drive was plugged in at another point, or the Internet was connected.
Typical of media misinformation, a Wall Street Journal story posted April 27 said in its first sentence that this audit is an “extra review…despite prior audits having confirmed President Biden’s victory in the state.”
Bennett, a Republican, previously was Arizona secretary of state, whose job includes serving as chief election officer and certifying state election results. He said that as soon as Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, asked him to be the liaison to the Senate for the audit, he phoned the state Democratic Party to ask them to name a co-liaison, but he was turned down.
If the Democrats won’t officially participate, “that’s their own choice,” he said. Some Democrats are involved in the audit, Bennett said, but only as individuals.
On this same video, Ward said this isn’t a Republican audit, “it’s an American audit.”
An article by The Epoch Times posted April 28 said: “John Brakey, co-founder of Audit USA and a progressive Democrat, was appointed by Bennett as assistant liaison to try to stem some criticism from the left of the audit. Brakey told reporters that the 2020 election was not audited before.”
President Trump kept an eye on the audit from his side of the nation, viewing it as very important and urging in emails that it continue in the interests of accuracy.
On April 28 Trump emailed: “Over 100 Democrat lawyers were sent to fight against this audit. The results will be very interesting for the U.S.A. and the world to see! Why are the Democrats fighting so hard to hide the facts? I know why, and so does everyone else!”
Continuing In Court
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on April 27 that he didn’t think Democrats actually wanted to stop the audit because that would make them look bad.
“The audit will likely last longer than 10 days, but that may not matter,” Querard said. “The Senate has jurisdiction and the courts are likely to pay deference to that. For the Democrats, they are more interested in muddying the reputations of those conducting the ballot as a way of eroding confidence in its results.
“I don’t think they actually want to stop it at this point, because then it looks like they have something to hide,” he said.
The audit began April 23 and is expected to conclude by the time the audit’s lease of the coliseum expires on May 14.
Querard said he didn’t think Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin wanted to stop the audit. “I don’t. Most judges prefer the safe route, and he’d likely be overturned on appeal in any case. It is the Senate’s audit to run how they want, and that separation of powers likely wins the day.”
Martin had been appointed to Superior Court by Democrat Gov. Janet Napolitano, an open-borders leftist whom Barack Obama quickly named to be his secretary of Homeland Security when he began his first presidential term in 2009.
As of April 28 Martin declined to put a temporary restraining on the audit. Proceedings were to continue in his court the following day, when this issue of The Wanderer went to press.
An April 28 Associated Press story quoted Bennett: “We are going to be able to tell every Arizonan in a few weeks that they can have complete integrity and trust in their elections, or we have some parts of the election that need to be improved.”
On April 19 the Gateway Pundit website, which closely followed the attempts to have an audit, said it appeared that the Maricopa County Board of 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).”
The Republican-majority supervisors fought against turning over the ballots to have the audit, but a Superior Court judge said the State Senate could proceed with it.
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