The Arizona "audit" is over and Trump was spinning to the bitter end

In a statement issued through his leadership PAC, Save America, the former president called the audit report, which is slated for release Friday afternoon, a political bombshell that “has uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD.”

“Huge findings in Arizona! However, the Fake News Media is already trying to ‘call it’ again for Biden before actually looking at the facts—just like they did in November!” Trump said, invoking once again his baseless claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

“This is a major criminal event and should be investigated by the Attorney General immediately,” he added. “The Senate’s final report will be released today at 4:00PM ET. I have heard it is far different than that being reported by the Fake News Media.”

[...]

“This is not even the whole state of Arizona, but only Maricopa County. It would only get worse!” Trump said. “There is fraud and cheating in Arizona and it must be criminally investigated! More is coming out in the hearing today.”

  The Hill

So let's have a look at that ridiculous "audit", shall we?

The Arizona Senate on Friday heard testimony from the firm it hired to conduct a so-called audit of more than 2 million votes cast in Maricopa County during the 2020 elections, the latest in a cavalcade of election disinformation spread at the behest of former President Trump.

The audit has cost Arizona taxpayers and private donors millions of dollars, and even some of the Republicans who voted to authorize it in the first place began to raise concerns over its handling by Cyber Ninjas, the firm at the heart of the audit.

“They wasted nearly $6 million to tell us what we already knew, meanwhile exacerbating an already unhealthy political environment,” state Sen. Paul Boyer (R), an audit opponent, told The Hill in a text message.

  The Hill

As always, the winners are the scammers.

The main event of the so-called audit was a hand recount of the roughly 2,089,000 ballots voters in Maricopa County cast in 2020.

Those ballots broke for President Biden by a 45,000-vote margin, about four times his winning margin statewide, making him the first Democrat to carry Arizona since former President Clinton.

In the words of the auditors themselves: “[T]here were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvass results for the County.

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In fact, the Cyber Ninjas-led team found Biden’s margin of victory in Maricopa County was 360 votes wider than the official canvass had been.

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The hand recount, a multistep process that included manual data entry from volunteers who were not professionally trained by election administrators, found 2,088,569 votes in the presidential contest and 2,088,396 votes in the Senate race — a difference of 175 ballots.

It’s not a statistically massive difference, but it is a difference. In its first data point, Cyber Ninjas showed its count was marred by human error.

Of course, they couldn't let the affair stand at a total loss...

The Cyber Ninjas report includes several recommended areas that the firm suggests warrant further scrutiny, broken down by level of severity — critical, high, medium, low and unknown (or, in its term, “informational”).

The top priority — one that Trump seized on even before the final report came out — is mail-in ballots cast from a voter’s prior address. The Cyber Ninjas report suggests 23,344 ballots were cast by voters who no longer live at the address at which they are registered.

“Phantom voters!” Trump said in a context-free statement released Friday.

But election analysts and experts said that figure is meaningless without more context. Cyber Ninjas matched voters with commercial data, rather than official data maintained by county elections office. Those who cast ballots but now live in different areas may have moved since the election, or moved out of a parent’s house around Election Day.

Just over 1 percent of voters who cast a ballot in the 2020 elections may have moved since — a figure well within the normal range of the share of people who change residences in a given year.

Garrett Archer, a former top aide in the Arizona secretary of state’s office who now reports for Phoenix’s ABC affiliate, told The Hill that the official data maintained by the county would have answered questions raised by the commercial data — but that Cyber Ninjas did not take that step.

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In its report, Cyber Ninjas dedicates a 158-word paragraph to a description of how ink bleeding through paper might affect a ballot — but really, only the last eight words of that paragraph matter: “No images that were reviewed met these conditions.”

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Cyber Ninjas dedicates a section of its report to the paper on which ballots were printed. Its conclusion: Election administrators used different paper weights. Not a word about bamboo.

“The large number of papers utilized during this election and the lack of official reporting about what paper stocks were utilized made it difficult to identify any potential counterfeit ballots. Standardization on these details would more greatly facilitate future audits,” the report says.

[...]

“The purpose of this audit was to overturn the result of Arizona’s presidential election, prove fraud and expose flaws in our election system. The audit went 0-3,” said Mike Noble, a Phoenix-based pollster and political strategist. “Its one potential true impact is the lasting damage to our trust in our electoral process.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Oh, for fuck's sake...