Monday, May 10, 2021

If There's Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit?

 By J.B. Shurk | American Thinker

Image: John via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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.  

The remarkable thing is that most Americans have actually come to this correct conclusion.  After six months of some of the worst gaslighting in America's history, during which corporate news propagandists and tech behemoths have colluded with federal and state authorities to paint the presidential election as aboveboard and all those who question its legitimacy as kooks, "extremists," "violent insurrectionists," and "terrorists," the nearly universal narrative drumbeat from the press and the psychological warfare deployed against regular Americans have failed miserably in their desired effect.

  Whether spray-painted on highway overpasses, discussed in uncensored online forums, or spoken aloud, more and more Americans have concluded that the election was stolen from President Trump.

State legislatures were useless in ensuring election integrity.  Election lawsuits in Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia, New Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin failed to provide any timely mechanism for remedying violations of states' own election laws, let alone for redressing the likelihood of outright fraud.

 The Supreme Court shirked its own constitutional duty to safeguard American enfranchisement by declining to hear on appeal the merits of lawsuits alleging electoral misconduct, consenting to review controversies only after Biden's inauguration and then largely booting them as moot, and outright refusing to exercise its original jurisdiction over Texas's suit against other states for their failure to ensure equal application of their own voting laws as required by the Constitution. 

At every step of the way, America's institutions utterly failed to safeguard the security of the 2020 election beforehand, to protect Americans' votes once the predictable catastrophe of mail-in balloting unfolded on November 3, or to provide any semblance of the rule of law afterward that could have remedied the election's obvious and multifaceted failures and halted America's downward decline toward a banana republic farce whose elections look less reliable than those in Venezuela.

Yet the common sense of the American people has largely prevailed over the "Big Lie," an astonishing accomplishment during a time when Americans have never been more controlled by government authorities micromanaging everything, from what they wear across their faces to which pronouns they use to refer to others.

I have always been of the opinion that whether the full scale of the 2020 election's fraud and manipulation ever comes to light, the historical record will never be able to account for three facts that betray most Americans' common sense:

(1) no president for a century and a half has won more votes during re-election than he did for his first election yet lost re-election, and President Trump gained over ten million new votes over his 2016 victory;

(2) Joe Biden, a man evincing obvious signs of mental decline and dementia who generated historically low levels of excitement among his own Democrat voters, somehow won over fifteen million more votes than Barack Obama, the political rock star who energized Democrats like no other politician in recent memory, managed in 2012; and

(3) President Trump won almost every traditional bellwether county in the country from coast to coast by double-digits.  

After a year when Facebook and Twitter did everything they could to minimize Trump's reach to his voters and his voters' reach to each other, and after years of outright Pravda corporate news that pushed the Deep State's "Russia collusion" and Ukraine "quid pro quo" lies to take down a sitting president, President Trump's vote totals in 2020 were still so remarkable that they would have normally indicated a resounding mandate from the American people.  

It is revealing that, unlike other past election losses, there was no great Republican "autopsy" done in order to pinpoint what went wrong, as there was after Mitt Romney's 2012 failure

Other than an occasional assertion that Republicans "must do better with suburban women," there is no serious analysis about how Republicans should improve upon President Trump's 2016 totals.  The reason why is obvious: he did better with voters, in general, than any other sitting president in history, and with minority voters in particular than any Republican in sixty years

When George Bush recently remarked that Republicans would lose future elections if they appealed only to a "white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant" base, his out-of-touch assessment of the 2020 election was apparent to anyone paying attention.

 However WASP-y George Bush's Republican Party may have been, it is Donald Trump who expanded the party's reach to Americans of every background, and Trump's direct engagement with black voters has been so successful that even Obama was forced to minimize the accomplishment as merely due to Trump's "macho style."

Trump built that.  Most Americans seem to have figured that out.

The problem with using the organs of the State to advance outright lies is that the State becomes less and less credible as more lies are revealed for what they are.

 The audit in Maricopa County, Arizona involves the votes of one county out of roughly 3,100 in the United States, but after six months when Americans' collective common sense has been at odds with the collective narrative of the powers that be, one county's truth could expose a whole nation's lies.  

No wonder Democrats find it so "dangerous."

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