Fanatical Trumpanzee, Emerald Robinson
Keeping the Big Lie going
The strategy of the Trumpanzee cult is now to convince enough Americans that there really
was massive electoral fraud in 2020, to give Donald Trump a good chance of a comeback in 2024 as the candidate who will restore democracy and defeat the evil Democrats, as democracy in the USA descends to the kindergarten level of debate. It is a strategy that relies for its success on the gullibility of a large enough number of American voters so he doesn't lose the popular vote again like the last two times, and gains enough state EC votes so the Electoral College doesn't need to return a bogus result to get a Repugnican candidate into the White House, despite being rejected by a majority of the electorate, like it did in 2000 when Gore beat Bush and again in 2016, when Trump lost to Clinton, despite the Russian interference.
Part of this strategy involves a bogus 'audit' of Arizona's Maricopa County 2012 presidential election returns by a company calling itself Cyber Ninjas [sic], whose CEO is a fully signed-up "Stop the Steal" activist, which has been bought and paid for by rich Trumpanzees whose tactics have already included directing its operative to conduct a forensic search for bamboo fibres as 'evidence that the ballot forms were flown in from South Korea!'. Even before his company was awarded the contract (or maybe that was because of it) Cyber Ninja's CEO, Doug Logan, had come out in support of the "Stop the Steal" movement.
Meanwhile, this recount is being repeatedly hyped in the news and social media by a small number of leading "Stop the Steal" activists like Emerald Robinson.
Emerald Robinson was shown to be top of the ten most persistent posters of lies and disinformation about the audit, by the non-profit Advance Democracy, Inc which analysed over 215,000 tweets mentioning the Arizona audit between April 1 and June 19. Also high on the list were other leading Trumpanzee cultists, Emerald Robinson was shown to be the top of the ten most persistent posters of lies and disinformation about the audit, by the non-profit Advance Democracy, Inc which analysed over 215,000 tweets mentioning the Arizona audit between April 1 and June 19.
Also high on the list were other leading Trumpanzee cultists, Candace Owens, former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, the Arizona Republican Party, far-right online personalities Matt Couch and Alex Sheppard, former reality TV contestant Anna Khait, and prominent Trumpanzee Juanita Broaddrick.
In all, just eight accounts were responsible for the vast majority of the disinformation being promulgates in a way which is clearly co-ordinated and one doesn't need to look much further than the Arizona Repugnican Twitter account (@
AZGOP) to see who that might be by.
The farcical nature of the audit can be judged from
this account of her observation of the audit process by Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official and national expert on post-election audits, writing in the
Washington Post:
When Arizona’s secretary of state asked me if I would serve as an observer of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, I expected to see some unusual things. Post-election audits and recounts are almost always conducted under the authority of local election officials, who have years of knowledge and experience. The idea of a government handing over control of ballots to an outside group, as the state Senate did when hiring a Florida contractor with no elections experience, was bizarre. This firm, Cyber Ninjas, insisted that it would recount and examine all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county in the 2020 general election.
So I figured it would be unconventional. But it was so much worse than that. In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged.
[...]
I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed things up.
Speed doesn’t necessarily pose a problem if the audit has a process for catching and correcting mistakes. But it didn’t. Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers recounted only if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.
I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it had been marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to groundless speculation that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea.
The 'auditors' were looking for anything 'suspicious'. This could include a folded ballot paper, because, so it was reasoned, people who vote in person wouldn't fold their paper before posting it in a ballot box! Other grounds for suspicion was evidence of having handled food before handling the balot, such as cheese dust (from Cheetos!) because people who vote in person don't eat snacks while waiting to vote!
And so the farce continued. Cyber Ninjas even changing the process and the training of its contractors in mid-audit!
As Jennifer Morrell concluded:
What I saw in Arizona shook me. If the process wraps up and Cyber Ninjas puts together some kind of report, that report will almost certainly claim that there were issues with Maricopa County’s ballots. After all, Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has publicly voiced his wild conjecture about the 2020 election. But the real problem is the so-called audit itself.
Audits are supposed to make our elections more secure and transparent — to strengthen the public’s trust in our democratic process. Maricopa County is known for having some of the best election practices in the country: Officials had already undertaken a hand-count audit and a forensic audit of their 2020 ballots and found no evidence of fraud. Now a group with no expertise, improvising procedures as it goes, is sowing doubt about the result of a well-run election.
This is not an audit, and I don’t see how this can have a good outcome.
It’s a threat to the overall confidence of democracy, all in pursuit of continuing a narrative that we know to be a lie.
Matt Masterson
Former Department of Homeland Security official
This is a well-financed campaign designed to fool the American electorate into believing what started life as Trump's desperate attempt to deny that he had been decisively rejected for a second term at the polls and that Biden won fair and square in a secure election. Having failed to convince any court, including SCOTUS with its Trumpanzee stooges, that there had been a massive electoral fraud, based on nothing more than Trump's say-so, Trumpanzee cultists in the GOP are now trying to manufacture the evidence that was singular lacking when the courts asked for it.
The only fraud going on here is that being inflicted on the American electorate by an undemocratic, would-be dictator and the extreme right who can't accept that the American people had the great good sense to boot Trump out of office at the first opportunity and to revert America to a properly run, democratic state with a legitimate president and good governance, in place of the White House-based crime syndicate many of whom are now facing jail, despite the blanket pardons for their crimes handed out by the syndicate boss, President-reject, Donald J Trump.
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