RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-georgia-judge-approves-audit-of-145000-absentee-ballots-in-fulton-county?itm_s

A judge in Georgia unsealed roughly 145,000 absentee ballots from the November election for review in a Friday ruling.

The ballots must remain with Fulton County election officials throughout the audit, and the results of the review cannot impact the outcome of the November election, Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero said. The plaintiffs in the case accepted the terms, saying that the review is still needed after controversial behavior by Fulton County election officials last year, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Friday’s decision came in a lawsuit filed by nine plaintiffs, including Garland Favorito, a Fulton county resident and self-styled election watchdog,” the Journal-Constitution reported. “It’s one of more than 30 Georgia lawsuits stemming from the November presidential election and the January runoff for U.S. Senate. Some of the lawsuits are still winding their way through the courts.”

Former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who now leads the voter registration group Greater Georgia Action after losing a runoff election in January, cheered the judge’s ruling in a statement:

Voter confidence in our election system is the bedrock of our republic. Unfortunately, inconsistencies in Fulton County’s November 2020 absentee ballots cast serious doubt on voters’ faith in our elections. An independent investigation even characterized Fulton County’s absentee ballot handling as ‘generally bad management.’ While there is a dire need to investigate a number of other well-documented issues, we must also inspect Fulton County’s absentee ballots to reassure Georgians that their voices are heard and their votes are counted. The integrity of future elections is critical, and Judge Amero’s decision is a helpful step in restoring transparency, accountability, and voter confidence. We look forward to the findings and their role in promoting transparency and rebuilding faith in our elections.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/22/why-are-democrats-so-afraid-of-election-audits/

Democrats are positively terrified of election audits that aren’t completely controlled by the political establishment. If there’s a chance an audit might reveal meaningful information, you can bet Democrats (and certain weak Republicans) will stridently oppose it. The only audits Democrats and their allies support are the ones designed to rubber-stamp previous conclusions.

The increasingly desperate attacks on the ongoing audit in Maricopa County, Arizona—particularly those intended to undermine the credibility of the auditors—show just how much the Democratic Party establishment fears the whole process. Their entire argument is based on sarcasm, scorn, and scare quotes.

The auditors are inspecting the paper that ballots were printed on? They must believe in a far-fetched conspiracy theory!

The auditors are checking to make sure the ballots don’t have watermarks that are not supposed to be there? They must be members of fringe online message boards!

The audit is being funded primarily by private donations? It must be an elaborate “grift” rather than a serious fact-finding effort (not to mention they need the funds to fend off the litany of lawsuits they’re facing).

By smearing the auditors as corrupt and/or inept, and the audit itself as a partisan stunt, leftists are hoping they can discredit the process and convince Americans to stop asking pesky questions about whether any laws were broken or procedural loopholes exploited during the 2020 elections. That’s the way people respond to questions when they don’t want anyone to know the answers.

It’s not just the Arizona audit, either. Democrats and their media allies are already fully engaged in a crusade to preemptively impugn the legitimacy of any audits that might be conducted in other states, describing conservative support for audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere as “a bid to bolster former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”

If they really believe the 2020 elections were “the most secure in American history,” then they should welcome audits as a way of substantiating that claim. Indeed, they should even be celebrating audits run by Republicans, since their conclusions will carry so much more weight with GOP voters. That said, the Arizona auditors have practically been begging Democrats to participate, but the Democrats have only been interested in attacking the process from afar.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/breaking-maricopa-countys-attorney-office-writes-senate-leader-karen-fann-requests-documents-regarding

It appears the Maricopa County Attorney will weaponize her office and use it for a possible investigation of cyber forensics of America’s Audit cyber team.

Maricopa County officials have fought tooth-and-nail to prevent the Arizona Senate Audit from taking place.  They have stalled the process at every turn.

On Friday they threatened the audit team with legal action.
What are they so scared of?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/an_election_audit_in_new_hampshire_may_be_the_pebble_that_diverts_the_stream.html

I’ve shied away from reporting on events in Maricopa because it would require more hours than I have in a day to track intelligently the back-and-forth in that recount. My touchstone there is the fact that the Democrats’ and NeverTrumpers’ ferocious efforts to stop the count strike me as the actions of people with something to hide. Otherwise, they’d be there helping to prove that they’re right. Events in a small town in New Hampshire, though, are more interesting because a low-key audit may reveal serious election anomalies harming Republicans.

Windham, New Hampshire, a town of 14,853 people, has long been a stalwart Republican stronghold in an otherwise Democrat state. As was the case throughout New Hampshire, it relied on AccuVote machines to collect and tally its 2020 votes.

When the election in Windham ended, Kristi St. Laurent, the Democrat candidate, had lost by only 24 votes. With that close a margin, she naturally demanded a hand recount.

The hand recount revealed something very peculiar: St. Laurent hadn’t lost by 24 votes; she’d lost by 420 votes. In a small election, that meant that her margin of defeat wasn’t 0.005% but was, instead, 9.6%, which is a significant loss.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investigations/2021/05/14/arizona-senate-considers-expanding-audit-maricopa-county-ballots-all-races/5100735001/

The Arizona Senate is considering expanding its audit of Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 election to include all contests, not just for president and U.S. Senate.

Audit organizers now say they want to test county voting machines by examining results from all of the races.

“We are looking with other companies to do a machine tabulation of all the races on the ballot to compare with the Dominion tabulation back in November,” said Ken Bennett, who is serving as the Senate’s audit liaison.

“We will be looking at the images of all 2.1 million ballots.”

The examination would not involve a physical recount like the one underway at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Rather, it would be a separate audit using digital images of each ballot, Bennett said.

The effort would, however, require a reexamination of the nearly 500,000 ballots that auditors have gone through since the audit began April 23. 

Bennett said the Senate is considering hiring a California company to conduct the digital tabulation, but he declined to name it. He said the imaging would be done “in the time of the rest of the counting.”

Auditors said in April the recount of ballots would be completed by May 14, when its lease on the coliseum expired. But with less than 24% of the ballots counted as the audit takes a week’s break for high school graduations, auditors have indicated the recount of the races for president and senator could last into July. 

Republican state senators launched the audit after questioning the validity of the general election results in Maricopa County, where President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by 45,109 votes. 

Senate President Karen Fann says the results will not be used to attempt to overturn the election results but instead will be used to ensure election integrity in future races

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/hold-new-hampshire-election-audit

An audit team sent to conduct a forensic examination of the 2020 election results in Windham, N.H. started the process off well enough on Tuesday. But by Wednesday, they hit a major snag: The live stream cameras that had been broadcasting the audit room around the clock went offline for close to 90 minutes, potentially obscuring any problematic intervention. 

The team decided Thursday morning to reinspect the ballot machines on camera in an attempt to maintain observers’ faith in their process. They needed to determine whether the machines had been tampered with over night when the cameras mysteriously went down.

With the country focused on the election audit in Maricopa County, Ariz. and early headlines about election night troubles centered on cities in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan, it comes as a small surprise that the idyllic New England town of Windham — where Republicans ultimately won each of the races now being inspected — also now finds itself under scrutiny for possible election night machine malfunctions and numbers that just don’t add up.

While the audit is focused solely on tiny Windham (estimated population: 14,853),  the results could have statewide repercussions, as the AccuVote machines used in the town are the only vote-counting machines approved for use in New Hampshire.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/the-supine-loser-party/

Was John Stuart Mill right that conservatives are members of “the stupid party”? I used to scoff at that charge. Lately, alas, I have begun to harbor doubts. Maybe “stupid” is a bit of an overstatement. But how about “supine”? Can it be said the conservatives are “the supine party”? The evidence, I submit, is formidable.

You have probably noticed that the computers furnished to journalists these days come with the phrase “the Big Lie” programmed into them. It is impossible to write about the 2020 election, Donald Trump, the political environment, or your Aunt Mabel’s recipe for fudge brownies without encountering it. 

A couple of days ago, CNN speculated about “Why Republicans won’t walk away from the ‘Big Lie’.” Ditto Politico, which assured its readers that “The ‘big lie’ lives on.” MSNBC weighed in with a story that the GOP was the “Party of the Big Lie.” Then there is the Washington Post which told its readers that Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” was about more than the “baseless and overwhelmingly debunked effort to call the results of the 2020 election into question.”

These examples easily could be multiplied a hundred-, a thousand-fold. There seems to be an unwritten rule (or, who knows, maybe it is written down in the stylebook by now) that you cannot write a column without declaring that any suggestion that the 2020 election was fraught with “irregularities”—which is a polysyllabic word for “fraud”—be described as “baseless,” “debunked” (“overwhelmingly debunked”), etc. 

This tic is not confined to acknowledged leftists. It has also infected the prose and pronunciamentos of the entire anti-Trump fraternity. Thus we see soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) deriding Donald Trump and his repetition of “the Big Lie” in columns, speeches, and tweets. “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” she wrote. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their [sic] back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” 

The great thing about the phrase “The Big Lie,” of course, is its origins in the philosophy of Adolf Hitler. That gives the phrase, free and for nothing, an extra dollop of nastiness making it easier, for example, to describe supporters of Donald Trump as potential (or maybe actual) “domestic extremists,” “terrorists,” etc., because, after all, they support die große Lüge, recommended beforehand by Nazis, ergo what do you expect?

In my view, however, it is not CNN or MSNBC or even Liz Cheney who has demonstrated a true understanding of the nature of the Big Lie that is affecting our society. It is writers like Julie Kelly. Just a couple of days ago in American Greatness, Kelly hit the proverbial nail on the head (Jeeves would have said rem acu tetigit). “The ‘Big Lie,’” she wrote, “isn’t that the 2020 election was stolen; the ‘Big Lie’ is that it was fair and lawful.”

Bingo, as anyone who can pronounce mail-in ballots, unconstitutional changes to voting laws immediately before the election, or ballot harvesting knows full well. Stalin got it in one. Voting is fine, he said. We all want voting. What matters is who counts the votes. Thus, just as things are getting interesting in the Arizona vote audit, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is making noises about shutting it down. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/if_theres_nothing_to_hide_why_are_democrats_freaking_out_about_the_arizona_audit.html

If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and “concerned” NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.  An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona’s Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights.  Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount “ludicrous” because “the election is over.”  And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only “dangerous,” but also the “end of democracy.” 

Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented transparency and live video feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process, reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers.  If there is a reason for inserting spies into an already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the auditing process itself, I don’t know of it.  And if there is a reason to expose workers’ identities to the public other than to make them targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt to provide it.

Compare the highly professional audit taking place in Arizona to the orchestrated chaos of the presidential election.  It took five days last November for vote-counters to find enough mail-in ballots for Joe Biden for the Democrat press corps to declare him the winner, and in the voting precincts where Trump leads disappeared over those days, transparency was nowhere to be seen.  Vote-counters covered windows with cardboard to block outside observation of any kind; counting paused and restarted in secret; and ad hoc procedures were established on the fly and without consistency from one precinct to the next when determining whether to include ballots lacking legally required voter identification metrics, including even the rudimentary safety protocol of a loosely matching voter signature.  If “free and fair” elections require basic security, verification of ballot authenticity, and consistently applied standards at least across the precincts and counties of any one state, then there was obviously nothing free or fair about the 2020 election.  

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/06/democrats-cant-quash-the-big-lie/

Six months later, the “Big Lie” won’t die.

The Left and NeverTrump have tried everything in their collective power to punish critics of the 2020 presidential election: Social media accounts, including those belonging to Donald Trump, have been deplatformed. Republican lawmakers have been cut off by longtime donors, threatened with legal recourse, and worse.

Nonviolent Trump-supporting Americans who traveled to the nation’s capital on January 6 to protest dubious election results in swing states now face criminal charges. Nearly 75 million Americans are considered potential “domestic violent extremists” by their own government and nearly half their countrymen agree.

Lives and careers are being destroyed—and the Biden regime is only getting started.

The news media portray election doubters as conspiracy theorists or QAnon cultists. CNN’s Jake Tapper this week threatened to ban from his show any Republican who peddles the “Big Lie” about election fraud. Speaking on the same network responsible for perpetuating any number of lies related to Donald Trump, from tales of Russian election collusion to disrespectful MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic teenagers, Tapper had a major meltdown. 

“The lie about the election on its own is anti-democracy, and it is sowing seeds of ignorance in the populace, and obviously has the potential to incite violence,” Tapper ranted. “But beyond that is, if you’re willing to lie about that, what are you not willing to lie about?”

Tapper insisted that history would harshly judge politicians who “lied” about the election. “History sees you being a coward. They are afraid of Republican voters who have been lied to by a very sophisticated propaganda machine led by President Trump but augmented by plenty of others.”

Projection much?

Beleaguered Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a martyr to the very same people who just a decade ago wanted her father charged with war crimes, now clings to political relevance based on her nonstop condemnation of the January 6 protest and her election fraud denialism. Naturally, Cheney found an appropriate outlet for her latest tantrum—the opinion pages of the Washington Post—where she attempted to lecture a Republican Party with a voter base that wants nothing to do with her. 

“[F]ormer President Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen,” Cheney wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday. “Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6.”