RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

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

United States voter fraud is a nationwide crime perpetrated locally, mostly by Democrats. Republicans either do not do it or when they do, they get caught. It is no coincidence that only Democrats fight voter ID laws, ballot audits in Maricopa County, and investigations in New Hampshire.

This month Matt Braynard, Trump’s data guy, issued a comprehensive report on Georgia voter fraud.  Read it?  If you did, you are the 11th person after friends and family. 

People, look, we cannot fight industrial, sovereign, large-scale election fraud with reports, press releases, and webinars. That stuff creates a false sense of progress to the committed while nothing changes for the masses.  The narrative remains “…but there was no provable voter fraud.” We need hip technology delivered on a phone showing electoral fraud in current data rolls — that drives citizen outrage. 

When one millennial looks across the sushi table at his bud and shows her 5,435 dead people registered in her county, via an iPhone, we are pretty much there.  Or scroll to the 643 people registered on a vacant lot.  Look, here’s a Google Maps’ pix of the open field!

Only outraged citizens can stop voter fraud before it happens, not chase it afterward.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-declines-to-hear-arizona-election-fraud-challenge_3801903.html

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a challenge filed by an Arizona resident who had sought to prove claims of election fraud during the Nov. 3 election in her state.

The nine justices, without comment, dismissed (pdf) a request by Pinal County resident Staci Burk to find evidence of election fraud. Burk had sought access to ballots to prove that some were invalid or fraudulent.

Earlier this year, the Arizona Supreme Court issued a ruling that agreed with a trial court judge in Pinal County that Burk lacked the right to contest the election. The reason given was that she wasn’t a registered voter at the time she filed her lawsuit, as required in state election contests. Both courts also agreed that she made her legal challenge too late, after the five-day period for filing such an action had passed.

Burk said in her lawsuit that she was a qualified Arizona voter, but officials said they discovered she wasn’t registered to vote. She later said she mistakenly thought “qualified electors” were people who were merely eligible to vote, and that her voter registration was canceled because election workers were unable to verify her address.

“There is nothing before the Court to indicate that Appellant timely contacted the appropriate authorities to correct any problems with her voter registration,” Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel wrote. “An election challenge … is not the proper vehicle to reinstate voter registration.”

Brutinel also said that Burk had admitted “that she was well aware before the election that she would not be able to vote in the general election … There is nothing before the court to indicate that [Burk] timely contacted the appropriate authorities to correct any problems with her voter registration.”

In her petition to the Supreme Court, Burk wanted a hearing over the question about whether she was an “elector.”

Meanwhile, an audit ordered by the Arizona state Senate of nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County, Arizona, ballots could last for weeks, according to former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, the Senate audit liaison.

Bennett said over the weekend that there is “no deadline” and added that the Senate has been granted permission to the state fairgrounds “for as long as we need it.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court threw out a slew of election-related lawsuits, including former President Donald Trump’s last remaining challenge.

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

While an uncertain public awaits  results from the Arizona election audit, the immediate major media outcry, prematurely denouncing it, should be viewed as the audit’s hitting a major media nerve.  The media’s reaction vividly demonstrates their fear of a searching re-examination of the election purity they have so arrogantly and unwaveringly proclaimed.

After all, if this election were as well run as touted (with the customary admission to the mere occasional and inevitable, but insignificant, error), then the Biden-centric media should be cheerleading the effort.  Shouldn’t the audit, to use a favored media word, be anticipated to “debunk” the claims of widespread irregularities?

The media have drawn great succor from numerous court cases turning down challenges to the 2020 election results.  However, these claims raised issues not properly cognizable by our judicial system.  Ordering a recount is one thing; relitigating a multimillion-vote election is quite another.  It looks tremendously suspicious that, after Republican poll-watchers were banished, massive blocs of Detroit votes were introduced in the early morning, with 95% Biden selection.  But what exactly is a smart person in black robes supposed to do with this tableau?  Overturn the election without taking evidence?  Convene a three-month trial with numerous witnesses and experts, while Biden and Trump cool their heels?  A wise court should toss the case, as each reviewing jurist did.  But this rejection should not be seen as validating the election process, as the major media did.

The election process itself, not the judicial system, is supposed to be administered so as to provide the public with confidence in the announced tallies.  For this reason, the only widely recognized judicial remedy, as in Bush v. Gore, is an order to recount, which brings the process back to its proper venue: the election centers.  So the unsuccessful Republican and Trump lawsuits to invalidate the various election results do not validate the propriety of election procedures; they merely demarcate the limited jurisdictional boundaries of our judicial system.

But that is not how major media, at once partisan and ignorant, have spun this string of unsurprising Republican defeats:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/sent-team-100-lawyers-stop-know-resul

President Trump released a new statement on Tuesday on the ongoing Arizona forensic audit of the 2020 Maricopa County election.

President Trump slammed Democrats over the continued efforts to shut down the forensic audit.

Trump says Democrats KNOW what the result of the audit will be – which explains their actions to stop it!

The Radical Left Democrat Party has gone absolutely INSANE in fighting the Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, right now taking place in the Great State of Arizona. They sent a team of over 100 lawyers to try and stop it because they know what the result of the Arizona Senate sponsored audit will be—and it won’t be good for the Dems. The audit is independently run, with no advantage to either side, but the Democrats don’t want to hear anything about it because they know that they lost Arizona, and other scam election States, in a LANDSLIDE. They also know that the Arizona State Legislature approved virtually none of their many election requests, which is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL. The people of Arizona are very angry, as are the people of our Country. If we can’t have free and fair elections, we don’t have a Country. The audit must continue. America deserves the TRUTH!