REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 THE FOCUS OF A MENTALLY DISTURBED, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT

 

                             …Boxes of ballots for the Cyber Ninja's Arizona audit

 

Trump and his allies falsely claim the Arizona ballot count will prove that the election was stolen.

 

I have been saying for weeks that our former President Trump was mentally ill.  I think he is showing if now, once again, proving me correct.

More than five months after the 2020 presidential election, and after numerous failed attempts to overturn the election results, this former U.S. president has a new avenue to try to call the outcome into question.  He wants to use the hand re-count of 2.1 million ballots cast in Arizona’s largest county.

Several Trump advisers have said the former president has become fixated on the unorthodox process underway in Phoenix.  This is where the GOP-led state Senate took the ballots and the voting equipment from Maricopa County.  They then turned them over to, believe it or not, an operation called: Cyber Ninjas.  This is a private contractor whose chief executive has made baseless claims that the election was totally fraudulent, but the executive has now promised a fair review of the November Arizona election results.

Trump of course, is huddled in his private club in Florida as he asks his aides multiple times each day for up-dates about Cyber Ninjas results.  Just as Trump was so interested in whether humans could ingest Clorox bleach, he is especially interested in the organization’s use of UV lights to scrutinize Maricopa’s ballots.  This is a method that has bewildered election experts, who say using UV lighting could actually damage the vote ballots themselves.

One person who recently visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, said they listened to Trump discuss the Arizona recount for about 45 minutes.  The person was speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe their private conversations.  They also said, “Trump talked about it constantly.”

Trump and his allies claim the Arizona count will prove that the election was stolen.  Because of the Arizona vote counting, there is a mounting anxiety among many election officials that similar partisan vote counts could now become the norm.

“I’m very concerned this has ramifications for every state in the country,” Kim Wyman, a Republican who serves as Secretary of State in Washington state, said in an interview. “This is politicizing an administrative process with no real structure or laws or rules in place to guide how it goes.”  She added: “Every time in the future the party in control loses, they will use some post-election administrative process to call it into question, and result is that people will no longer have confidence that we have fair elections.”

It's bad enough that a portion of the country is still believing that the 2020 election was full of fraud, even with all the states saying it was one of the most accurate elections ever.

But with Trump sticking with his “stolen election lie”, based on the Cyber Ninjas executive claims of election fraud, regardless of what the results of the now forth re-count of Arizona’s ballots.  Any results are going to be questioned.

This is especially true when it was found that the Cyber Ninjas were using black and blue ball-point pens in the recount.  This is forbidden in regular ballot recounts, because the ballots could be altered and no one would be aware of the change.  Only red or green pins are allowed with a regular ballot re-count.

In Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, a top Republican election official who has clashed with Trump, he tweeted that the Arizona audit is “another step in undermining confidence in elections. This process is neither transparent nor, likely, legal.”

Georgia Voting Systems Manager Gabriel Sterling expressed his frustration with conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.  He stated that the endeavor in Phoenix has been criticized for abandoning state guidelines intended to make recounts fair, and for allowing the rules to be set by a questionable private contractor like the Cyber Ninjas who previously promoted claims that the election was stolen.

Cyber Ninjas has fought efforts in court to disclose the procedures it is using and they have placed tight restrictions on media outlets and independent election experts who wish to observe the recount.  In response to a judge’s order, the company for the first time released manuals governing its work counting ballots and the examining equipment.

Longtime election officials who have gotten a glimpse through a live stream have expressed shock at how little the contractors are disclosing about basic processes.  For instance, how workers are determining voters’ intent as they review ballots.

And the funding and organization for the effort are included with a network of individuals who have promoted Trump’s false claims that the election was rigged.

Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R), who spearheaded the efforts to conduct the private audit.  She has said that it is not about challenging President Biden’s win in Arizona.  It is instead aimed at identifying possible weaknesses in state election laws that could be improved.  Yeah, right.

“When you’ve got half of the people who do not trust the electoral system anymore, rightly or wrongly, and they have questions, who is responsible for answering these questions?” Fann Said on KTAR News in Arizona. “This has been the sole reason, to get answers, so that if we have any problems, we can fix them.”

But Trump and many of his supporters have repeatedly invoked Arizona as a kind of first domino that could fall.  Claiming that the recount will identify problems that would justify reexamination of the count in other states.

“I think it’s going to be incredible. I think it’s going to be eye-opening,” Trump said on conservative host Dan Bongino’s podcast. “Because I have no question we won Arizona. We had rallies, we had such enthusiasm like nobody’s ever seen anything like it. And then all of a sudden, we lose. People couldn’t believe it.”

Three Trump advisers said the former president frequently cites the additional possibility of exposing fraud in Pennsylvania and especially in Georgia, constantly insisting to advisers and visitors that he won the election.

Biden was the first Democrat to capture Arizona since Bill Clinton, driven largely by his win in rapidly diversifying Phoenix in Maricopa County.  Angered by his loss in a state that has been a Republican stronghold, and particularly a decision by Fox News to declare Biden the victor of a close race in the state on election night.  Trump has promoted false claims of fraud in Arizona since November 2020.

Such allegations have been totally rejected by previous audits of the Maricopa vote and both state and federal judges in Arizona.  Gov. Doug Ducey (R) inflamed Trump’s temper by certifying Biden’s win and declaring that the state’s elections provided a national model for fairness and integrity.

Still, Arizona Republicans in Congress and the state legislature have continued to promote Trump’s claims of possible problems in Maricopa.  Egged on by state Republican Party Chair, Kelli Ward, the state Senate ordered the new audit earlier this year, financing it with $150,000 in taxpayer money.  Ward has been aggressively promoting the audit, posting a video to Twitter of herself interviewing Ken Bennett, a Republican former secretary of state who volunteered as a spokesman for the effort.  A note at the bottom of the screen included a website to donate to the state Republican Party’s “integrity fund.”

It is not known if any of these donations would end up in Trump’s accounts.

But some Republicans fear that focusing so much attention on re-litigating Trump’s loss will turn off moderate voters at a time when the party is already losing ground in Arizona and elsewhere.  It could also fuel false information, including the kind that led to violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“Election integrity is a losing issue. It doesn’t help us get our voters out,” said Dan Eberhart, a prominent Arizona Republican donor who had supported Trump. “This is a mistake issue and a red herring the Democrats want us to chase. I don’t see a win there for us, but Trump keeps repeating the issue, and it resonates for some in the party.”

Ducey, who recently stated again that he thought the November election had been fair.  He has been largely silent about the audit.  But last week, Trump demanded that the governor deploy National Guard troops to secure the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.  This is where the recount was being held and which was not under any noticeable threat. 

Trump blasted him as “one of the worst Governors in America, and the second worst Republican Governor in America.”

National party leaders have tried to tread softlly, well aware that a majority of GOP voters believe Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, has not gotten involved in the Arizona effort.  But she recently told donors that Arizona is among the states the RNC is targeting in 2022 as part of its “election integrity” efforts. 

Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is examining the results of an internal poll about the 2020 election to determine whether grievances about the vote should be incorporated into messaging ahead of the 2022 midterm election, including in Arizona where Sen. Mark Kelly (D) faces reelection.

Maricopa County officials and election experts have watched the process unfold with dismay.

“When this all started, I thought perhaps if they really do this right, we perhaps could get beyond this and really alleviate some of the concerns,” Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in an interview. “But the more we’ve gotten into this, the more I realize this is creating more chaos, more doubt and not solving anything.”

The Cyber Ninjas have sought to keep documents describing the procedures it is following in the recount under seal, unsuccessfully arguing to a judge that they are “trade secrets.”

Media access to the count has been extremely not allowed.  Many times totally barred completely, even as the pro-Trump, One America News network (OAN) was given the right to live-stream the event. After objections by news organizations, the state Senate agreed this week to begin allowing one local reporter at a time to attend the recount, positioned in bleachers high above the floor where counting is taking place.

The effort to examine ballots with UV lights has spurred particular enthusiasm among Trump supporters, and particular worries among election officials.

The exact purpose of the lights remains murky. A document released by Cyber Ninjas described the use of the light, but did not say what it is intended to detect. It indicated the weight and thickness of ballots would also be studied. OAN reported that the lights were being used “to search for ballot watermarks and weed out phony ballots.” That prompted Maricopa County to release a fact sheet noting that the county’s ballots do not bear any watermarks.

Asked about the process at a news conference, the spokesperson said workers are using UV light to look “at the paper” and are “part of several teams that are part of the paper evaluation.”

He added that he did not know whether workers were hunting for the nonexistent watermarks, adding, “We’re looking for a lot of things.”

In an interview, he added: “The best understanding I have is that they’re looking for watermarks or anything that might appear under the UV light they wouldn’t see without it. . . . If there’s nothing there, they won’t find it.”

Arizona reporters monitoring the audit from inside the Coliseum reported that they did not see the UV lights in use.

The reporters repeatedly said the goal of the recount is to complete a review that all Arizona voters can trust.

But critics have noted that Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has connections to Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, two Trump-allied lawyers who filed unsuccessful lawsuits after the election challenging the results nationwide.

Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of Overstock.com, attended a loud, hours-long meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in December where he, Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn advised the president on tactics to overturn the election, as The Post previously reported.

“This audit is historic and the first of its kind in the United States,” @ArizonaAudit tweeted, adding that if people wished to “join the tens of thousands of Americans who are helping fund this audit,” they should visit the site.

It is all just another way for a mentally disturbed individual to get as many people as possible to donate to his cause.

Copyright G. Ater 2021