Monday was supposed to be the “big day” for election fraud conspiracy numbskulls, when Cyber Ninjas formally entered their Maricopa County election report into the record books. But something went wrong, and no, the excuse wasn’t that these bozos overseeing the “audit” know that this report will be utter garbage (which it will be), but because CEO Doug Logan and couple other members of this clown show came down “sick” with—guess what—the Covid-19, and it made them “very sick.” Of course it is hard to take this at all seriously, since we doubt very much that they took the virus seriously themselves; heck, even Trump received some “boos” the other day from crowd in Alabama when he belatedly suggested that vaccines actually work.
This is all very “convenient,” of course, and one suspects that the “report” wasn’t actually “finished,” and needed some “touching up” before it was ready for its grand debut. One suspects that Karen Fann, president of the Arizona state Senate and the fanatical Trumpist who was behind the recount, had a “preview” of what was in the report, and suggested that just a “portion” of it be submitted because most of the rest threatened to make her the laughingstock of the world if it was released “as is.”
Meanwhile, Democrats in the U.S.
House of Representatives are seeking an investigation into Cyber Ninjas, who
have reportedly not complied with the Oversight Committee looking into their
activities, as well as that of pro-Trump
“dark money” sources that have largely paid for the audit. Cyber Ninjas'
“objected” to the request for documents, which of course leaves them open to
accusations of fraud for not being “transparent," particular when a court order was needed to force the company to release its audit procedures, which some observers claimed they didn't follow anyways.
Of course you could ask how we got to this place of stupid. It started out with Donald Trump and his refusal to believe than anyone could actually receive more votes than he did. His vote count benefited from the same pandemic voting changes that Joe Biden did, yet he still can’t understand that a lot more people think he was wrong for the country than think he is “right.” So we’ve had to go through this absurd circus about alleged voter fraud, that far-right Republicans, upset that their so-called “man” didn’t win, decided in at least one state that one, two, or even three recounts was not enough; they needed to find an “audit” company that was sure to crawl through any sewer pipe to find “something.”
No, it wasn’t Clear Ballot Group, an experienced vote counting firm based in Boston, which had submitted a bid to do the audit; according to an Associated Press story, they were never contacted in response. Instead, Fann decided to contact a company that had not actually submitted a bid and had no experience whatever in counting—let alone auditing—votes. Fann apparently “discovered” the group because its CEO, Logan, was the author of the principle piece of “kraken” in Sidney Powell’s crackpot election fraud lawsuit:
The core software utilized by Dominion, the 2nd largest US voting machine vendor, originates from intellectual property of Smartmatic, a company founded in communist Venezuala (sic) with links to Hugo Chavez.
This comes first because it is the easiest to be the cause of mischief in the uninformed mind. Dominion is not affiliated with Smartmatic at all, and was founded in Canada, and has no “suspicious” ownership links. While Smartmatic, which was founded in 1997 by several Venezuelan software engineers, and is a “multi-national” company whose current headquarters is in the UK, and has “links” to Chavez because it was used in Venezuelan elections (as well as many others around the world), and thus it is “suspect” by the right-wing in this country for partisan political reasons. The only fact that people should be “concerned” about is that Smartmatic voting machines were only used in Los Angeles County in the 2020 election.
ES&S, Dominion, and Hart Intercivic represents 92 percent of voting machine market and have a long history of significant security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a nation state that would be difficult to detect.
This is another conspiracy theory easily debunked. “Evidence” is provided by boasts made during a hacker convention, and the false claims made in a “forensic” report in Antrim County, Michigan by a “Dr. Shiva,” who I’ll get to later.
An affidavit and scholarly statistical paper attest to Smartmatic rigging Venezualian elections. Smartmatic has also been accused of rigging elections in the Philippines and India.
These claims were largely made by local media outlets that did not like the election results; no actual proof of “rigging” any election were provided. It should be remembered that the machines can’t "rig" elections all by themselves—it is the people who operate them who can be accused of that.
There followed other claims of foreign ownership, particularly China. This was debunked when it was pointed out that the far-right media got their “UBS” companies mixed up. Then there was the attack on Dominion’s VP of Engineering, Eric Coomer, as a flaming liberal who supposedly claimed that he had made sure that Trump wasn’t going to win. The “sources” of this charge were anti-immigrant xenophobe Michelle Malkin and someone who calls himself a “Hippie Jesus Freak.”
Chinese goals in 1963 to take over America without firing a shot, entered in Congressional Records included, ’15. Capture one or both of the political parties,’ ’20. Infiltrate the press,’ ’21. Gain Control of Key Positions in radio, TV, and Motion Pictures’ and many other relavant (sic) topics to current happenings.
While China has certainly been guilty of cybercrimes, although perhaps not on the scale of Russia (yet), we are charting into truly bizarro territory by Logan. From here he just throws anything that he hopes might stick to the wall, like faulty “analysis” of county election officials’ press conferences and claims made by poll watchers and counters with eyesight issues. Logan also linked to a widely-debunked “statistical analysis” indicating “massive fraud” in Michigan by that someone named Shiva Ayyadurai, and immigrant from India and far-right lunatic, who has hypocritically bemoaned media coverage of the white supremacists and neo-Nazi types he invites to his speaking engagements.
Running in the 2020 Republican Senate primary in Massachusetts and losing, Ayyadurai claimed that a million ballots had been destroyed and the state committed election fraud against him. He has also made extremely bizarre claims about the Covid-19, including the assertion that it is not a virus at all, but a condition of an “overactive immune system” which could be treated by Vitamin C. Rebuttals against Ayyadurai’s claim that he is the “inventor” of email has led to frequent defamation claims against individuals and small media outlets that don’t have the resources to defend themselves in court.
Logan—who has made claims that the CIA is somehow involved in “rigging” the election—was also identified as the voice of the mysterious “Anon” in the far-right conspiracy film “The Deep Rig,” which featured Patrick Byrne, who is the principle “dark money” source funding the audit, as well as former Arizona Secretary of State and Arizona Senate “liaison” Ken Bennett. Logan is heard near the end of this compendium of QAnon conspiracies intoning “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” Some people would say the real threat to democracy are Republican efforts to suppress the constitutional right of all citizens to vote.
The effort to find “fraud” in the audit was the only thing “transparent” about it. Cyber Ninjas hired counters from far-right activist outfits, many of whom were discovered to have posted election fraud conspiracies on social media. So far, every claim that Cyber Ninjas discovered “irregularities” has been shot down because of their incompetence and lack of knowledge of vote counting procedures. “Auditors” were looking for fraudulent ballots by “kinematic artifact detection,” bamboo in the ballots (the Chinese supposedly use bamboo for paper), using ultra-violet light to detect watermarks (according to one conspiracy theory, Trump “secretly” watermarked fake ballots).
Bizarre piled on top of bizarre. The auditors stopped making scanned copies of the ballots after a “software update” deleted all the ones they had already done. Faulty security and storage of the ballots has been charged. The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper asked Senate liaison Bennett and an audit “volunteer” if they were checking for the “Hungarian vector.” Bennett wisely kept his mouth shut, but the volunteer excitedly exclaimed “I didn’t know about that one. What’s the Hungarian vector?”
Klepper informed him that “It’s just a bullshit thing I made up because it sounds cool.” One thing for certain is that this whole thing was “bullshit” from the jump.
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