arizona election audit

The Arizona Election Audit Is Somehow Getting Even More Distant From Reality

Arizona ballot recount
The audit that won’t end gets zanier. Photo: Courtney Pedroza/The Washington Post via Getty Im

In my recent effort to explain the Arizona election audit, I expressed hope that it would soon peter out amid vague talk of noncooperation from Maricopa County as an excuse for its being “incomplete.” But now it looks as if it’s going in the opposite direction. Instead of ignoring the latest absurd subpoenas from the Republican state senators who are the ringmasters of this circus, the county supervisors (a majority of whom are Republican) rejected them angrily and contemptuously, as Eric Lutz explained:

“It is now August 2021,” Jack Sellers, [Republican] chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, wrote in a searing letter to Senate Republicans. “The election of November 2020 is over. If you haven’t figured out that the election in Maricopa County was free, fair, and accurate yet, I’m not sure you ever will.” 


He continued: “The Board has real work to do and little time to entertain this adventure in never-never land. Please finish whatever it is that you are doing and release whatever it is you are going to release.”

This did not go over well with the relevant state senators:

Aside from the supervisors, officials at Dominion Voting Systems (or the “fraud machine company,” as Rogers calls it, in a nod to the really loopy conspiracy theories about it for which Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are being sued) were subpoenaed by the Trumpy legislators and also refused to comply. They too are being threatened with a trip to the slammer by Rogers. And now a higher authority in the state senate is making the threats tangible by siccing Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, on the supervisors:

Brnovich, as it happens, is running for the U.S. Senate and has been criticized by the Big Liar himself, Donald Trump, for complicity in the certification of Biden’s Arizona win and for failing to side with the auditors. It wouldn’t surprise me if Brnovich is looking high and low for an excuse to be on the MAGA side of at least one legal question, and he just might have found it.

The further the whole brouhaha gets from the underlying reality of a fair election repeatedly and redundantly and endlessly confirmed, the more it reinforces Trump’s clear long-term strategy of submerging inconvenient facts in a fog of wild accusations and conspiracy theories in the hope that, next time around, facts stop mattering and the most audacious scofflaw liar will win.

Arizona Election Audit Gets Even More Distant From Reality