He still cries ‘fraud’ even after the audit he demanded found none.
WSJ Editorial BoardFormer President Trump claims Arizona’s ballot audit found “massive fraud,” yet the new recount says he actually lost the state by 360 more votes than originally reported. He is now demanding an audit of the 2020 election in . . . Texas, which he won by nearly six points. When are Republicans going to quit playing this game?Arizona’s official results say President Biden won by 10,457 votes. Mr. Trump never accepted the loss, so the GOP state Senate launched an “audit” by hiring Cyber Ninjas, a company without experience reviewing elections. After repeated delays and various pratfalls, here’s the result: A hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots says that Mr. Biden won the state by 10,817 votes.
There’s no reason to prefer this tally over the certified one, given the audit’s erratic process and lack of transparency. For details, see a June report co-written by Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s former GOP Secretary of State, warning that Cyber Ninjas “will not produce findings that should be trusted.” The good news is they don’t need to be trusted, since the result is the same, except with worse numbers for Mr. Trump.
True to his nature, Mr. Trump is claiming vindication based on the audit’s analysis of voter files. As the biggest example, he says Arizona’s results include “23,344 mail-in ballots, despite the person no longer living at that address. Phantom voters!” No. Did he read the report? This figure comes from comparing voter records to a commercial database on change-of-address filings, but look at the caveats.
Cyber Ninjas says errors are normal when using commercial data. Most of these voters barely moved: 15,035 stayed in Maricopa County, and another 1,718 went somewhere else in Arizona. Only 40% were Democrats and 33% Republicans. The audit also admits there are “ways that a voter could receive their ballot which in some cases would not violate the law.”
College students move often, but they could easily pick up ballots that were inadvertently sent home or to old roommates. What about people serving in the military, taking extended vacations, or working remotely? Address changes were probably noisier than usual last year, given how the pandemic scrambled life. The report offers no evidence that any of these people voted illegally.
The audit takes aim at other alleged discrepancies, but without providing conclusive explanations, much less proof of wrongdoing. The state’s official results, the report claims, show 3,432 more ballots than can be accounted for using the voter files. Yet in the middle of his presentation Friday, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, Doug Logan, said Maricopa County recently gave a benign explanation: Arizona has a separate protected voter list, which is used to shield the locations of judges, battered women, and so forth.
Another set of 9,041 voters, 34% Democrats to 30% Republicans, show up in the data as having returned multiple ballots. This “could be explained in any of the possible ways,” Cyber Ninjas speculates, ranging from clerical error to fraud. Or not. “The majority of these,” says a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Elections Department, “are voters that had questionable signatures that were cured or blank signatures that were eventually signed.” In other words: “This shows our Early Voting team was doing their job.”
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The audit documents exceed 100 pages, and it will take time for local authorities to comb through all the claims. Elections are human endeavors, so it’d hardly be surprising if an outside review found some goofs or ways to improve. But that isn’t Mr. Trump’s aim, as one official acknowledged Friday. “I have already started to hear from people saying that, well, the audit failed,” said Ken Bennett, the GOP state Senate’s liaison to Cyber Ninjas, “because it didn’t prove that the election was overturned or that there was a different result.”
On Friday Mr. Trump was set to Defcon 1, saying the audit found “incomprehensible Fraud at an Election Changing level,” and demanding that Arizona “immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results.” Is anyone surprised? This is what Mr. Trump does, regardless of the facts. Remember in 2016, when he said the results of the Iowa Caucus should be “nullified” based on “the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz ”?The GOP should quit chasing him down rabbit holes. Mr. Trump lost last year by 74 electoral votes, so even flipping Arizona would have left him two states short. He can’t admit to his fans that he lost, since it would undermine his rally attendance, fundraising and teasers about 2024. Perhaps Mr. Trump can’t even admit to himself that he lost, and in his final days he’ll be raging on the heath about “ballot dumps.”But Democrats this coming week are going to try to pass $2.1 trillion in new taxes and $5 trillion in spending, the greatest expansion of government entitlements since LBJ, or maybe FDR. Where’s a Republican leader who wants to pick up the party’s mantle and talk about that?Edited by user
4 years ago |
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