This is one of those moments when if it were possible to stop the wheel of history, or maybe we should call it the merry-go-round, and get off and reassess things, now would be a good time. Anthony Kern is a former Arizona State Rep. He traveled to Washington, D.C. to participate in Donald Trump’s riot of January 6. Now, he has been spotted by the local press counting ballots in the election audit which is being conducted by a QAnon conspiracy theorist, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, who demands that his methods remain secret. In plain English, we have seditionists and QAnons trying to prove that the election was stolen from Trump — and he’s obsessed with this topic. He talks about it all the time. There is no way this is going to end well.
UPDATE I deleted retweet that showed ballot at audit table where ex GOP State Rep. Anthony Kern was counting ballots. Media agreed not to show ballots when shooting images/video at Coliseum. But point remains: Today, Kern counting ballots. Jan. 6, he was at Capitol insurrection. pic.twitter.com/ZGy0Ds3JjV
— Brahm Resnik (@brahmresnik) April 30, 2021
What the Senate election audit lacks in transparency, it makes up for in QAnon conspiracy theories.Â
From the Arizona Senate to the cybersecurity company overseeing the audit of nearly 2.1 million ballots from the November election, everyone involved has said one way or another that they want and hope to be transparent about the process, but to date, there is little evidence to support those claims. Â
While media outlets across the state had to fight and threaten legal action to receive limited access to the Madhouse on McDowell – dubbed so decades ago for raucous Phoenix Suns games – unanswered, important questions still hang in the air. Â
And while all the cloak and dagger is going on, funds are being requested by Patrick Byrne, who visited the White House in the last days of Strikeforce Rudy, when invoking martial law was being discussed.
Bennett also urged people to visit a website if they wanted to give money to the audit. The site – also a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization – is hoping to raise $2.8 million. The nonprofit, The America Project, is run by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who has close ties to Trump, Lindell and others in that inner circle. Â
Meanwhile, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled on April 28 that policies and procedures for the audit conducted by Cyber Ninjas and its subcontractors is considered a public record, but the ruling is likely pending appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court. Â
To date, a coalition of media publications had to fight with the Senate, Bennett and Cyber Ninjas over allowing members of the press to be in the room as the audit is being conducted. It took until the fourth day of counting ballots before media got inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum to report. From day one of the auditing process, media outlets could only gain access to the venue if they volunteered to participate as an observer without being able to report, but attorneys for media organizations struck a deal to allow one pool reporter at a time in.Â
Before that, only one reporter, Jen Fifield from The Arizona Republic, was granted access (a Capitol Times reporter was denied after signing up) and became a key part of the story when she noticed blue pens were about to be used and urged Logan to remedy it. Â
Now, there’s a rotation of media outlets who can observe from the bleachers inside the coliseum during several shifts in a day.Â
Meanwhile, as QAnon crackpots and seditionists count ballots at the Madhouse on McDowell, the Mango Monarch of Mar-a-Lago is “fixated” on the audit. One aide says that he “talks about it constantly.” Maricopa County is seen as a domino, and if that can fall, then the entire 2020 election can be undone.
While the likelihood of that is slim to none, what is happening is that faith in free and fair elections, the very cornerstone of democracy, is being eroded. And that does not bode well for the next election.
They’re going to lie. We all know that. This is completely invalid and is only going to be used for propaganda. Hope that guy gets arrested and locked up for being at the insurrection.
This is at least the fourth time that set of ballots has been counted. The first three all agreed one the results – Biden won that county.
So now they have a company with no experience in handling ballots, started and chosen for purely political reasons, doing an “audit” where no one really knows what they’re actually doing with/to the ballots. (No UV marks were on the paper, the paper company swears to that. So any they find will be invented for the results.)
The goal of fascists isn’t to pile up factual truth to support their violent autocracy, it’s to create their own ‘truth’ through a continuous stream of propaganda that excuses any extreme they choose to use to grab & hang on to power. A confused, distracted, fearful, & essentially undereducated citizenry is ripe, especially when capitalism allows fox & facebook to spew lies as ‘news’. Goebbels would have flourished in the Republican party. Face it. Speaking of Dr. Suess, we have yet to prove, as the Sneeches did, that we can overcome intolerance, prejudice, ignorance, & tribalism, to accept that all Sneeches are the same whether they have stars on their bellies or not. Planet earth. A closed ecological system populated by a dominant species hellbent for mass suicide. Time for ancient aliens…gotta go.
Oh yeah, today in 1945 Hitler shot himself in the head, thereby ending the thousand year Reich. So we have that going for us.
This “audit” is being done by by the republiQanons so that they can try to manufacture some evidence of election fraud. There is literally nothing there to find, as the last three audits will show. Therefore, any “irregularities” will have to have been manufactured by the highly biased (to say the least!) and unqualified folks doing the current “audit”!
I’m sure that after this crowd of partisan hacks gets done with the ballots, there will be a plethora of ‘irregularities’. I can’t imagine what they are doing to those ballots, but you can bet it’s not good. Or legal.
Now that, that weasel, ex GOP State Rep. Anthony Kern, has been identified and has been, “counting ballots”, AND was at the Capitol bash, the photo proof and witnesses have just nullified ANY RESULT report from the count system …
The private counting, done with anybody, willing to spend hours of nothing useful efforts, the whole biased GOP stunt should be charged with being a public nuisance and made to pay the State for all costs, including rentals and insurance/security connected with the building.
Also, those ballots are a federal-tally count for Biden and a rejection for Trump, after 4 recounts and their results, THIS COUNT, should be charged at the highest levels for ANY tampering with the original ballots …
The USA is all f*cked up.
The largest voter fraud organization in American history.
Eventually it will all come out…
The Arizona senate is only providing about 18% of the funds ($150,000). They are estimating the cost may be close to $3 million dollars by the time the audit is done, and most of it is coming from donors whose names are not required to be disclosed.
So, if they meet their fundraising goals (which seems possible at this point), 82% of the financing will be provided by highly partisan fundraising organizations promoted by Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and others in their circle.
The results of the Arizona count will not change the results of the presidential election. It won’t provide enough electoral votes to make a difference, and there have already been two independent audits and a spot hand count that showed the counts to be very accurate.
Lawmakers say they approved it to instill faith in the elections system, but if 83% of the funding is provided by partisan donors, and the person heading the audit team was re-posting Stop the Steal messages on social media (and attending Stop the Steal meetings at Lin Wood’s property in November 2020), it is a highly stacked deck. Can we expect an accurate result?
Most of the process is not visible to the public. Once the counters at the round tables are done, everything is processed through computers and there is no public information about where the data is going, what they are doing with it, how many copies are being stored, whether it has been transmitted offsite, or whether it will be deleted for security purposes when the audit is done.
Both sides of each ballot are being digitized, which raises significant privacy concerns for voters of both parties. The information can be used to influence future elections, to disenfranchise or intimidate certain voters, or can be sold under the table.