The Arizona Recount's Happy Ending Does Not Justify Its Existence

[marmar]

All Is Not Well That Ends Well in Arizona
Just because the new count of votes in Maricopa County confirms Biden as the victor doesn’t mean the debacle was legitimate.

By David A. Graham


(The Atlantic) The so-called audit of votes in Maricopa County, Arizona, will confirm that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election there, and all it took was five months, millions of taxpayer dollars to replace voting machines tainted by the audit, and a full-frontal assault on faith in elections, the foundation of American democracy. The review didn’t merely confirm that Biden won Maricopa County—it reportedly found 99 more votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Donald Trump than the original count.

The report is expected to be released by the state Senate today (though many earlier deadlines have passed unmet), but multiple news organizations obtained a draft version of the report, and Randy Pullen, a spokesperson for the audit, confirmed to the local radio station KJZZ that the final report would be similar.

“Was there massive fraud or anything? It doesn’t look like it,” he said.

The new, higher vote tally for Biden is darkly comic, in that the Republican state senators who commissioned the review, the head of the company that conducted the process, and the private donors who provided most of the funding for it all clearly hoped that it would cast doubt on the election results. But those who might like the new number shouldn’t take it seriously, any more than they would have had the review reached the incendiary conclusion that Trump had been cheated out of votes. The process employed in the review was sloppy, inconsistent, and lacked transparency, and there’s no reason to trust it, as I wrote in May. This has not changed.

....(snip)....

The goal was to substantiate a new consensus Republican belief that Democrats cannot win elections legitimately, and that any victory they notch must be somehow tainted. It is not a coincidence that the places where audits have focused are those, like Maricopa County, or Harris County, Texas, or Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, with high levels of minority voters, who can be disparaged—mostly implicitly, but occasionally more directly—as illegitimate participants in the polity. Trump has been the foremost proponent of the theory, but he’s been joined by eager sycophants, demagogues, and conspiracists. .........(more)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/the-arizona-recounts-happy-ending-does-not-justify-its-existence/620196/

[Bucky]

1. They're coming after Harris County in order to intimidate minority voters

They want to do more than undermine faith in democracy. They want to do more than waste tax payer money. They want to send a signal that they'll investigate us for having too many brown people around ready to do their patriotic duty.

[Wounded Bear]

2. Actually, it proves that the whole process was bogus from the get-go...