“The goalposts keep moving,” Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, told me. “There will never be satisfaction, because the answer is not going to change. Joe Biden won Arizona free and fair and he is our legitimate president. There’s a portion of our electorate that will not believe that, because they continue to be told that the election was stolen.”
The Maricopa exercise is a badly flawed process built atop a fatally flawed premise. The premise is that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, but despite frantic efforts, Trump and his allies have failed to produce evidence of widespread fraud. (In one of the few proven cases of individual fraud, a Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty this week to voting absentee for Trump in the name of his late mother.)
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/arizonas-election-audit-is-a-trainwreck/618834/
Flashback: November 5, 2020
Heard on All Things Considered
How The Trump Campaign And Supporters Are Trying To Affect State Ballot:
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
As we await results in this nail-biter of an election, as poll workers in key states keep counting ballots, they are doing so amid a crush of lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign. Joining us now to explain how the count is going and the strain on election officials as the count keeps going is Tammy Patrick. She’s a senior adviser to the independent, non-partisan Democracy Fund. She was previously an elections officer in Maricopa County, Ariz.
Let me address, so that we can move on, the position of the man whose campaign is filing these lawsuits. The president has been tweeting things like stop the fraud. Twitter flagged that tweet as possibly misleading and several others of the president’s. Is there any reason to believe fraud is being committed in the states still counting?
TAMMY PATRICK:
Absolutely not. Part of what’s so critical for the listeners to understand is that the dedicated election officials and volunteer temporary workers that are in the processing of the ballots, that are in tabulating the ballots have been doing so without regard to what gets tweeted and with what is going on outside of their buildings. They’re just trying to make sure that every ballot that was cast – because there are no new ballots being cast – that every ballot that was cast on Election Day by the close of the polls is, in fact, being counted, as is that voter’s right.
Facebook banned Trump for saying, since November 2020, that the election was “stolen.” But Hillary Clinton, since November 2016, has said THE SAME THING. Why hasn’t Facebook banned for Clinton for peddling “The Big Lie” about her 2016 defeat?!? pic.twitter.com/rokrSovlEA
— Larry Elder (@larryelder) May 6, 2021
h/t Anon Braveheart