“The effort has gone far slower than expected, and only a fraction of the ballots have been counted. The audit will stop Thursday evening, then packing will begin and continue into Friday, said Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state who is serving as the Senate’s liaison to the auditors.
Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the state’s top election official, has asked the Senate to detail its plans for keeping ballots secure while they are in storage.
Meanwhile, Senate President Karen Fann sent a letter Wednesday to Jack Sellers, chairman of the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, requesting that county officials publicly answer questions at the Senate on Tuesday, but she stopped short of her threat to issue subpoenas.” yahoo news.
https://news.yahoo.com/arizona-senate-republicans-sign-lease-174301823.html
Hey Yahoo, is this a news story or an opinion piece?
………….”Republicans have hired Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity firm, to oversee an unprecedented, partisan review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county. They are conducting a hand recount of all 2.1 million ballots and looking into baseless conspiracy theories suggesting there were problems with the election, which have grown popular with supporters of former President Donald Trump………….”
1. Unprecedented
2. Partisan review
3. Baseless conspiracy theories
4. Suggesting there were problems
5. Popular with Trump supporters
The report on the machines used for the count in Antrim County, Michigan, and the way the machines were used, shows minor errors that did not affect the result of the Presidential election and some potential loopholes that were, however, not exploited. Not entirely a clean bill of health but as close as makes no odds.
https://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Antrim_720623_7.pdf
If these findings are applicable to elections in other contested areas then the conclusion must surely be that focussing on the counting process itself is a red herring. The real problem lies in the harvesting of mail-in ballots, the fraudulent use of mail-in ballots, and the difficulty of achieving accurate lists of voters entitled to vote.
An opposing view is given here –
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/03/democrats-mail-in-voting-2020-election-analysis
How to judge which view is correct? Any complete review of any election is in practice not possible so it comes down to gut feeling. Having seen what looked like the decisive effects of the harvesting of postal votes in a couple of constituencies in England in the now distant past – again no proof! – and given the no holds barred commitment of activists during elections, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid the conclusion that mail-in voting is simply too liable to fraud to be safe. And if it were safe, too untrusted by the electorate to be useful.
And that given the staggering amounts of money that were washing around in the recent American elections, the passions that were aroused, and most of all the damning and largely successful measures taken to suppress enquiry after the event, it’s quite likely that the American electorate got a President it hadn’t in reality voted for.
The chance of these recounts and the microscopic analysis of ballots and machine code finding widespread fraud or just errors is damned near nil. I think the main purpose is to keep the Trump base energized with the myth of a stolen election.
Beyond that, the potential problems of mail in ballots are real. Harvesting unmarked ballots would obviously be fraud and could be carried out on a scale that would make a difference in a close election. Even the collection of properly marked and sealed ballots is a problem if the harvester is intent on discarding those ballots. The need for even well meaning ballot harvesting could be eliminated if the US Postal Service was more robust and reliable. DeJoy did his best to cripple the USPS for the last election.
Mail in ballots does negate the effect of limiting the availability of a sufficient number of working voting machines in a sufficient number of polling places for an election. The fact that voters have to stand in line for 7 or 8 hours to vote calls out for some kind of workable solution, either more polling places, more reliable voting machines and more poll workers (mostly volunteers) or more reliable mail in voting procedures. A combination of both is the best solution.
Maintaining accurate voter roles is an altogether different problem. Purging of the roles is a widespread tactic of mostly Republican officials to control the kind of people who are allowed to vote. Georgia purged over 100,000 voters in one day before the 2018 elections simply because they didn’t vote in previous elections. That was 8% of the electorate. The courts ruled against Georgia in that case.
TTG
If nothing seriously fraudulent will be found in Arizona then why is the Democrat establishment so upset by the process?
The process seems to be designed to drag out for months with the primary purpose of keeping the stolen election myth alive. So far they wasted time looking for phantom watermarks and bamboo fibers rather than physically counting the ballots and comparing them to the numbers on the voting roles. I seriously doubt the Republican will accept the recount if no fraud is discovered.
TTG
Will you accept the result if serious fraud is detected?
If fraud is found, then there was fraud. I’d accept that. Perhaps we should also look at the much closer 2016 election for indicators of fraud.
I have been a volunteer poll worker several times. My father ran a polling place out of the garage. I was raised on civic duty.
Last shift I looked around the room, after the demands of the required all day vigil, and saw only members of the “greatest generation” who still believe in civic volunteerism, or known local public sector union members. I also concluded it would be very easy for only a very small handful of dedicated dishonest player to corrupt the mission.
The training is tough, the complicated details to follow are daunting, and poll working no longer an old man’s game. The useless county election monitors that roamed in from time to time were just pushing the clock.
There was nothing but good old WASP values of integrity and public service holding the polling sites together, and those qualities are now fading from human memory.
“More poll workers” is not the answer. We have lost civic duty and honest broker participation – and somehow we have to keep building this country on this material deficit. And now thoroughly embedded “electronic voting systems” that cannot be scrutinized nor dislodged.