Supporters of former President Donald Trump got a brutal political gut-punch Friday, when an “audit” by a firm with partisan funding and no experience in elections oversight found that, despite its best efforts to find fraud in Arizona’s 2020 election, Trump indeed lost the state.
In fact, according to a draft report by cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, President Joe Biden won the Grand Canyon State by an even larger margin than reported. The inquiry, which looked only at Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state, had Biden picking up 360 more votes among the more than 2 million cast.
That devastating blow – clearly a shock to Trump himself, who speedily removed a self-congratulatory statement from his website when the news of the Cyber Ninjas report surfaced – would seem to discourage Trumpsters in other states from mounting similar “audits” of their elections.
But in a sign of how determined Trump and his backers are to prove the consistently discredited claim that Biden stole the election from the Republican, several states are proceeding apace.
Cartoons on the Republican Party
Texas, a state Trump won by 5.6 percentage points last year, became the latest state to announce Thursday night that it would seek an audit of four populous Texas counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin. Biden won the first two counties by landslides, won Tarrant narrowly and lost Collin County, but while still making a double-digit percentage gain over what Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton got in 2016.
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both swing states Biden won and which have Democratic governors and GOP-run legislatures, are conducting post-election audits and investigations of the vote. Florida lawmakers are also considering an audit, although Trump won the state by a greater margin than he did in 2016.
The Pennsylvania audit has drawn added ire from voter advocates and privacy groups, since the state Senate committee has issued a subpoena for the driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of the Social Security numbers of all Pennsylvania registered voters. That information would then be given to a third party with no stated restrictions on use, according to a lawsuit the Pennsylvania state attorney general filed to quash the subpoena.
The Arizona effort – elections officials and lawyers bristle at calling it an “audit” – was Trump’s best hope, experts say, since Biden’s win was close and the firm chosen by the GOP-run state Senate had clear partisan financial backing to do the work.
But even that set of advantages didn’t produce what Trump wanted, proof that Biden didn’t, in fact, win Arizona. Had that been the conclusion, Trump would have been able to mobilize support for so-called audits in other states.
“This is a huge defeat for Donald Trump. This is a swing and a miss from what he thought was a sure thing, and they missed by a mile,” GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who was counsel to the George W. Bush presidential campaign during the heated 2000 recount, told reporters in a conference call Friday. “This was Donald Trump’s best chance to prove his case of the election being rigged and fraudulent and they failed.”
The conclusion was clearly an unhappy surprise for the defeated president, who posted a bold statement on his website Thursday night blasting the House of Representatives for its investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt on the Capitol. He finished by saying, “Everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly-respected auditors and Arizona state senate found out regarding the so-called Election.”
That statement was scrubbed from his site not long after a draft Cyber Ninjas report was published, concluding Trump had lost the state by more than was initially counted.
What worries elections lawyer Barry Burden is that the bottom-line bad news for Trump will give legitimacy to the widely denounced Cyber Ninjas report, including charges that the election was not conclusive because of things like the weight of the paper ballots or the fact that some voters had the same names and birth dates.
In fact, Burden, founding director of the Elections Research Center and a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s not uncommon for people with the same name to share not just birth years but actual birthdays. The Arizona report found thousands of people with the same first, middle and last names and birth years.
Further, Burden said in a call with reporters, Cyber Ninjas used sketchy tactics to do its name-matching exercise, using information from a private, for-profit company instead of public databases.
“My hope is that people in other states will look at this and say this isn’t worth our time and effort,” Trey Grayson, the Republican former Kentucky secretary of state, said in the call. “It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask questions of elections administrators,” Grayson added, but the audits and inquiries need to be credible.
Democrats agreed. “Today’s report doesn’t make this ‘fraudit’ legitimate. Not only has it been riddled with irregularities and cost Arizona taxpayers millions, it has also already done the damage of creating more distrust in our elections,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement.
The head of the Maricopa County Republican Party, Jack Sellers, said the report – which he had opposed producing – “means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters.
“That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise,” Sellers said in a statement. “I hope those holding onto their anger for the past 10 months will see the truth and put their energy into supporting the democratic process instead of trying to tear it down.”
With several states continuing with similar audits, that hope appears dim.
