In the 2020 election, self-described libertarian, Stephen Richer was the Republican candidate for the position of Maricopa County Recorder. The office that oversees the elections in the county. He won. His Democratic opponent, Adrien Fontes, lost. Which raises the question, if the election was fixed by the Democrats, why didn’t Fontes ensure his own re-election?
Richer asks that provocative question in a piece published by the National Review: “The Madness of the Maricopa County Election Audit”. As he says, he has no skin in the game. He doesn’t have to defend his actions. He played no part in the election. He has no personal or political reason to lie. So when he writes,
“Armed with these facts and professional assessments, I made the only reasonable conclusion I could make: Maricopa County accurately tabulated the November 3 ballots.”
every reasonable American can take that to the bank.
And what were these “facts and professional assessments”? Richer elucidates,
“In the immediate aftermath of the November 3, 2020, election, Maricopa County oversaw a hand-count audit of over 47,000 votes, a statistically significant sampling as determined by multiple professional statisticians.”
Beyond the math of the numbers, further measures ensured the validity of the process. The methodology removed any chance of partisanship and the result was definitive,
“The recognized political parties — Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian — administered the hand count in groups of three volunteers appointed by party leadership. Those hand-counted results matched the machine-tabulated results with 100 percent accuracy. Perfect accuracy. This was the third hand-count performed by the political parties in 2020 that confirmed the accuracy of Maricopa County’s tabulation equipment.”
The machines performed as they should. There is no doubt the computer count matched the physical count.
So what about the software? Was there evidence of fraud there? Richer addresses that,
“The same is true of the pre-election and post-election tests done of the tabulation equipment — 100 percent accuracy. The machines are state and federally certified, and the county has used machines owned by the same parent company (Dominion) since 1998 without problems or discrepancies.”
Dear God, could anything more have been done to ensure the purity of the count? The answer is ‘yes’. And the election officials of Maricopa County did it,
“Nonetheless, in February, the county enlisted two professional, certified elections-equipment companies to analyze the oft-voiced concerns regarding the Dominion tabulation software and hardware.”
The county asked the two election-validation companies to do everything necessary to:
- Analyze hacking vulnerabilities of both the tabulation hardware and software
- Verify that no malware had been installed to the tabulators
- Determine if the tabulators had connected to the Internet at any point before, during, or after the election
- Assess if any vote switching occurred as a result of the tabulators
Both companies used methodologies honed over the course of hundreds of previous examinations. Neither company found problems with the tabulators.
There’s more. Richer adds,
“We also had the benefit of the eight court cases challenging Maricopa County’s election administration. None of those eight cases found any widespread inaccuracy, fraud, or wrongdoing. Only two were dismissed for lack of standing.”
The Republicans hide behind a smoke-screen of ‘election integrity’. But Richer dismisses any idea that the Arizona Senate’s decision to re-audit the re-audit was anything but a partisan hatchet job. As he points out,
“For an unknown reason [I think the reason is well known], Maricopa County is the only county of Arizona’s 15 counties being audited, and only the top two contests on the ballot — the presidential, in which Joe Biden (D) defeated incumbent Donald Trump (R), and the Senate race, in which Mark Kelly (D) defeated incumbent Martha McSally (R) — are being audited. Down-ballot, Republicans held the state legislature and won five of the six countywide seats.”
By now it is well-known that Arizona Senate President, Republican Karen Fann’s choice of the completely unknown ‘Cyber Ninjas’ to audit the election has led to a farce of blue pens, purple lights, and bamboo fibers. The Senate rejected a bid by the well-regarded and experienced election company, Clear Ballot, to conduct the audit in favor of an outfit that had never done anything of the kind — and was unknown even to Republican election officials in its home state, Florida.
A company which, in further evidence of the partisanship of the enterprise, is headed by conspiracy theorist Doug Logan. A man who believes the dead Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez, has corrupted the American election. Before the audit, he retweeted: “I’m tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. It happened, it’s real, and people better get wise fast.”
What evidence exists that this audit is being run with evenhanded professionalism? None. The process is in the hands of ill-motivated morons, out of their depth, tackling a task they have no expertise for.
Richer chose to start his piece with a self-description, and an analogy involving the IRS. I will end my piece with it.
I’m a libertarian-minded Republican. I hate taxes. Especially the income tax. But I pay all required taxes.
I suspect you also pay your taxes. And like most Americans, you probably don’t cheat or lie.
For that reason, even though an IRS audit might annoy you and cause you some stress, you’d eventually realize that you have nothing to fear as long as the audit is done fairly and properly.
But you’d likely feel differently if the IRS outsourced the audit to someone who:
- Had no applicable professional credentials
- Had never previously run a tax audit
- Believed that Hugo Chavez had nefariously controlled your tax-auditing software
- Had publicly stated prior to examining your taxes that you’d certainly committed tax fraud
That is what is happening to elections in Maricopa County, Ariz. — the home of almost two-thirds of Arizona’s voting population.
Amen.