Post by LFC on May 27, 2021 23:39:10 GMT
The Republican march towards fascism is quickening its pace.
Retired cops hired by a top Wisconsin Republican. A litmus test in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race. A fight in rural Michigan over a small town’s election equipment.
Fueled by a shambolic election recount in Arizona, the audit-bug is spreading, and, with it, the fantastical belief that President Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat could still be reversed.
The Arizona exercise — ostensibly labeled an “audit,” though its procedures are questionable at best — was ordered by the state’s Republican Senate. It has been plagued with conspiracy theories, incompetency and dissent from within the state GOP. But it has also given Trump’s supporters hope that validating his false claims of mass fraud just takes a little more digging. In battleground states across the country, MAGA diehards are making increasingly loud demands for another round of review of the 2020 results, though the contest was dubbed by election experts and Trump’s own administration as a historically secure election.
Trump has cheered on the reinvigorated recount effort and lied about what it’s shown so far, including in a statement Monday about an audit in New Hampshire.
“Why aren’t Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans doing anything about what went on in the 2020 Election? How can the Democrats be allowed to get away with this?” Trump said. “It will go down as the Crime of the Century! Other States like Arizona, Georgia (where a Judge just granted a motion to unseal and inspect ballots from the 2020 Election), Michigan, Pennsylvania, and more to follow.”
Fueled by a shambolic election recount in Arizona, the audit-bug is spreading, and, with it, the fantastical belief that President Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat could still be reversed.
The Arizona exercise — ostensibly labeled an “audit,” though its procedures are questionable at best — was ordered by the state’s Republican Senate. It has been plagued with conspiracy theories, incompetency and dissent from within the state GOP. But it has also given Trump’s supporters hope that validating his false claims of mass fraud just takes a little more digging. In battleground states across the country, MAGA diehards are making increasingly loud demands for another round of review of the 2020 results, though the contest was dubbed by election experts and Trump’s own administration as a historically secure election.
Trump has cheered on the reinvigorated recount effort and lied about what it’s shown so far, including in a statement Monday about an audit in New Hampshire.
“Why aren’t Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans doing anything about what went on in the 2020 Election? How can the Democrats be allowed to get away with this?” Trump said. “It will go down as the Crime of the Century! Other States like Arizona, Georgia (where a Judge just granted a motion to unseal and inspect ballots from the 2020 Election), Michigan, Pennsylvania, and more to follow.”
Another dispute has popped up in Cheboygan, Michigan, a largely rural county of about 25,000 people where Trump won by 30 percentage points over President Biden. A group of activists — parroting the claims about voting equipment that were rejected in the Antrim case — want to get their hands on the county’s election machines there for an audit.
“The election deniers, in many cases, have taken on a strategy where they’ve tried to go after individual counties, thinking that those counties might have fewer resources and be less inclined inclined to oppose some of these fake, so-called audits,” David Becker, a former Justice Department official who know heads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on a press call Thursday.
He said a “sickness is spreading” with the push for amateur audits in various states.
The Cheboygan audit-seekers face the opposition of state election officials.
“Interest in granting access to unqualified third parties to conduct a ‘forensic audit’ may stem from misplaced reliance on ongoing misinformation, which has been repeatedly, comprehensively, and definitively debunked,” Michigan State Election Director Jonathan Brater said in a letter to the county clerk, according to the Washington Post.
Yet the words of caution and concern among election experts have inspired creativity, not reticence, among some of the Republicans who are embracing the audit frenzy.
Wisconsin’s top legislative Republican, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, is planning on taking a route that’s unconventional, even by the terms of zany recount fantasies elsewhere in the country.
“The election deniers, in many cases, have taken on a strategy where they’ve tried to go after individual counties, thinking that those counties might have fewer resources and be less inclined inclined to oppose some of these fake, so-called audits,” David Becker, a former Justice Department official who know heads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on a press call Thursday.
He said a “sickness is spreading” with the push for amateur audits in various states.
The Cheboygan audit-seekers face the opposition of state election officials.
“Interest in granting access to unqualified third parties to conduct a ‘forensic audit’ may stem from misplaced reliance on ongoing misinformation, which has been repeatedly, comprehensively, and definitively debunked,” Michigan State Election Director Jonathan Brater said in a letter to the county clerk, according to the Washington Post.
Yet the words of caution and concern among election experts have inspired creativity, not reticence, among some of the Republicans who are embracing the audit frenzy.
Wisconsin’s top legislative Republican, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, is planning on taking a route that’s unconventional, even by the terms of zany recount fantasies elsewhere in the country.
