The Pro-Trump Arizona Recount Farce Is Backfiring

The Pro-Trump Arizona Recount Farce Is Backfiring

The partisan “audit” of 2020 presidential votes appears to show a wider margin for Biden. Still, Republicans intent on spreading election-fraud fantasies are undaunted.

By Jonathan Bernstein

September 24, 2021, 8:30 PM GMT+9

Don’t try this at home.

Don’t try this at home. Photographer: Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images

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It appears that the results of the partisan Arizona recount of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County is actually going to show a larger lead for President Joe Biden than the real count showed. The non-experts who conducted this farce are expected to roll out their results Friday, but some have already leaked out.

This doesn’t confirm anything. It can’t. To do that, it would have had to be a professional examination of the election, and by all reports this effort didn’t come close. So whether Cyber Ninjas, the inexperienced private firm that conducted this exercise, claims it found good results for Biden or good results for former President Donald Trump adds no weight to the original election returns. Which, after all, were never challenged with anything like the kind of evidence that would have caused any real doubts.

Not that the apparent Arizona fiasco is slowing down Trump and his allies, who have become enamored of what they call “forensic audits.” Indeed, Trump just demanded one in Texas, a state he won comfortably, and so the Republican government in that state is preparing for one. Why not? After all, the top elected officials are all facing announced or potential primary elections in 2022, and none of them want to get on Trump’s wrong side.

We’re seeing these recounts proposed or happening all over — Michigan, Wisconsin, and a particularly nasty one appears to be in the works in Pennsylvania, where Republican legislators are “seeking the names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses and methods of voting for millions of people who cast ballots in the May primary and the November general election.”

None of this is how elections are run. None of it is going to tell us anything about the fictional election fraud Trump is teaching Republicans to talk about nonstop without even a hint of evidence. It’s far from clear that Cyber Ninjas and other private contractors would have the capability of finding actual fraud, even if it existed.

As with most things Trump, it’s hard to tell whether there’s method to any of this. Perhaps Trump really believes the conspiracy theories he spouts and thinks this is the way to prove them. Perhaps he, or other anti-democracy Republicans, are deliberately attempting to undermine trust in election results by encouraging the belief that all election administration is as partisan as these efforts are. Perhaps it’s a function of private companies seeking to cash in. Perhaps it's what plays well, for whatever reason, in Republican-aligned media — a fad they’ll ride until they find something else.

Perhaps it's some combination of all of this.

It’s garbage, and poison to the republic.

1. Niambi M. Carter at the Monkey Cage on the U.S. history of deporting Haitians.

2. Alan I. Abramowitz on white working-class voters.

3. Matthew Shugart on Canada’s electoral system.

4. Dan Drezner on how Biden can improve his foreign policy.

5. Barbara Rodriguez on new research about the political socialization of boys and girls.

6. And Lili Loofbourow on what happened at the troubled women’s advocacy group Time’s Up.