In the Spirit of Jefferson Davis (part twenty-one)

 

Part twenty-one.

 

 

 

November 15^th marked the twenty-third day since the official end of the ignominious Arizona Audit, and also end of the first in-depth audit of the Audit. The results of the second audit weren’t pretty.

 

Earlier this year, retired Auditors Benny White, Larry Moore and Tim Halvorsen founded The Audit Guys to take on take on Public Interest Investigations wherein their professional experience could clarify, or resolve, controversies like that which had occupied Arizona for the last nine months. this. White had worked for decades as Data Analyst for the Republican Party, Larry Moore was the co-founder of the Boston-based Clear Ballot Group, and Tim Halvorsen used to be Clear Ballot's Chief Technology Officer. The group was a reaction to the Trump-inspired election hysteria, and their first Audit, of the manner that the 2020 Election was conducted in Pima County uncovered no irregularities (that must have annoyed White, he’d lost in that race, but facts are facts, unless you’re a Trump-Cultist). When they took on the Arizona Audit controversy, they had exactly the kind of expertise and experience that this job required, and Cyber Ninjas sorely lacked.

 

From their report, “We have tried dozens of ways to include and exclude various boxes and batches to arrive at those precise figures and have been unable to replicate their announced results" Cyber Ninjas felt a paper trail proving that “They were not able to accurately hand count either the number of ballots cast ... or the votes on those ballots.” They had “spent about $9 million over 7 months, so far, and have proven absolutely nothing … the procedures they followed and the records they kept and relied on to announce results were so erroneous that nothing they reported could be relied on by the public."

 

In Cyber Ninjas’ report to the State Senate, it alleged there were more duplicate ballots than original ballots, so Ninjas chose to only to count original ballots. But the Audit Guys established that "The Ninjas had erroneously identified some ballots as duplicates which were originals and vice versa. This caused both their September 24 announcement and all subsequent comments about ballot counts and vote totals to be incorrect as well."

 

The Ninjas hand count found 994 fewer ballots than the county's official results, stating that Trump got 261 fewer votes that in the original Election tally, while Biden got 99 more votes. "At first that sounds like the Ninja hand count was close to the official results. However, it is completely illogical that Biden would have gained 99 votes when 994 ballots were removed from the count." The original win had Biden carrying 49.8% of the votes in the election, "Statistically, if you remove 994 ballots, you would expect Biden to lose something on the order of 495 votes, not gain 99 votes."

 

This suggested another reason why Ninjas opted to count the originals, no one else was supposed to have access to them, so no one could check the Ninjas' work.

 

But that changed when the Senate released the 80,000 images of tally sheets to the public.

 

“The Senate auditors also never anticipated that their entire effort could be dismantled by referring to available public records and without spending a penny.”

 

Cyber Ninjas' CEO Logan called the claims "outlandish," but did not respond to requests for him to point out specifically what in the Audit Guys report was untrue.

 

The Audit Guys bluntly accused State Senate President Fann and other legislators of engaging in a conspiracy to overturn the election and return Trump to office. "They were able to convince various Arizona Senators to conduct a legislative investigation which would bypass the statutory election contest restrictions and allow unfettered access to all election materials and equipment."

 

Fann responded in an email, “What I will say from my end relates to the 'accusation' of Senator Farnsworth, Senator Petersen and myself being involved with a 'conspiracy.' That is absolutely incorrect and, quite honestly, crosses the line of slander." She repeated her often made statement that the Audit was not an attempt to overturn the 2020 election but a review to ensure the integrity of future elections. Not many people believed her the first time, fewer still now. Despite the criticisms of Cyber Ninjas procedures coming in from all sides now, Fann still insisted the Audit "the most detailed, demanding and uncompromising election audit that has ever been conducted."

 

The former Chairman of the State Republican Party. Randy Pullen was now acting as the Senate Audit Liaison. He’d been in a war of words with the Audit Guys for some time now, saying this report, and earlier analyses then done on the same subject, were based on the faulty assumption that the hand count had been finalized and the Ninjas were continuing to work on reconciling the hand count even after the final report in September. Pullen challenged the Audit Guys, “Do they have evidence that would prove it? Remember evidence has to be presentable in court."

 

White answered, yes, they did. "We use their own data to show their errors."

 

November 23^rd, Arizona State Senator Boyer, who became a nemesis of Senate President Fann and Trump the previous July when he cast the deciding vote that protected the Maricopa Supervisors from being arrested for contempt, announced he would retire from the Legislature at the end of his term in 2023.

 

He was finishing off his second term and said the Capitol “feels more toxic than it had ever been.” He noted the Senators had taking to name-calling on Social Media and his own party, the Republicans, seemed to have turned on him. He arrived to work one day to learn his desk was moved to the Democrat side of the aisle without an explanation. He also received death threats, needed security detail and hardened his family residence with security doors, “The worst part is when I’m at the Capitol and know my wife and young son are at home.”

 

He was likely avoiding a bruising Primary battle that he no longer had enthusiasm for. Fann had already endorsed and hosted a fundraiser for former State Representative Kern to take Boyer’s seat. Kern was a Trump-Cultist who joined in the 1/6 Insurrection. And caused a second scandal when he was employed by the Audit.

 

December 8^th, an influential Conservative Lawyer Firm and Activist Group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, announced they’d completed their own analysis of the 2020 POTUS Election in their State. Wisconsin was like Arizona, a Conservative-leaning Battleground State that Biden won narrowly. Despite repeated Audits by the State, WILL felt compelled to do one of their own, explaining, “In a Marquette University Law Poll conducted in August 2021, nearly a year after the election, more than 70% of Republicans and 26% of Independents reported a lack of confidence that ‘the votes for president were accurately cast and counted in last year’s election … When large numbers of voters question the authenticity of an election, their concerns, whether valid or not, need to be addressed.”

 

WILL’s conclusion echoed those at the end of the Arizona Audit, they had found "no evidence of fraudulent ballots or widespread voter fraud," but, Like Arizona, then went on to say it was fraud anyway.

 

WILL Spokesperson Collin Roth, “The required legal processes for casting a ballot exist for good reasons, including the prevention of fraud and the assurance that the election is even-handed … We found little direct evidence of fraud, and for the most part, an analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud. But that is far from the end of the matter. Failure to follow proper procedures makes fraud more difficult to detect and therefore more difficult to entirely rule out.”

WILL suspected there were many “unlawful” votes, “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory,” then followed that with, “It is unclear whether, had these ballots been disqualified, the results of the election would have changed …

 

“It is not possible to know who these legally questionable votes were cast for and moreover, votes would have to be withdrawn pursuant to Wisconsin’s ‘drawdown’ method. Given the location of the votes it may be more likely than not that, depending on which ballots were thought to be unlawfully cast, that Trump would have wound up the winner. But because the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to disqualify any challenged votes based on the doctrine of laches, we cannot know this for certain.”

 

That last paragraph is important, because it contradicts the claim that the unknown number of unlawful ballots cast by an unknown number of people were even unlawful to start with; the Courts had already addressed the issue of such ballots and refused to throw them out. WILL seemed to define unlawful based rules they drafted in their own heads, not the rules written down that everyone else was following. WILL specifically objected to ballots in drop-boxes, claiming they were a security threat, but not proving how many, or any, ballots among that number were invalid.

 

“As recently confirmed by the Legislative Audit Bureau [LAB], the widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, encouraged by the Wisconsin Elections Commission [WEC], runs afoul of state law requirements for the collection of absentee ballots … This widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, not provided for under Wisconsin law, was correlated with an increase of about 20,000 votes for Joe Biden, while having no significant effect on the vote for Trump. WILL does not claim that the voters who used drop boxes were ineligible voters or should have had their votes rejected. But the ad hoc adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes without established rules, parameters, or security presents an election vulnerability and a challenge to state law.”

 

But LAB’s report didn’t say that, it said that State Law neither prohibited nor permitted absentee drop boxes, and recommended that the WEC create an administrative guidelines for them, a process that began only a week before. Simply put, WILL was objecting to rule changes that were made in 2020 and not only wanted the rules changed back for the future, but hinted at retroactive wishes by calling them “unlawful” even though they were within the then-current rules. Political Science Professor at UW-Madison, Mike Canon, observed “Every court, filled with Trump appointees and Obama appointees, they all said you can’t change the rules in the middle of the game. In a way this is the wrong discussion to be having. The law is clear that once rules are established, you can’t after the fact challenge those laws.”

 

Roth insisted that because state law is silent on drop boxes, they are prohibited. “If the law does not say anything on drop boxes, then drop boxes are not provided for. The LAB does suggest that a rule might have been promulgated for drop boxes but we don’t agree. There has to be some authorization of drop boxes to warrant a rule. But even if we are wrong, a rule had to be promulgated before there can be drop boxes. There was no rule so there could be no drop boxes.”

 

Spokesman Wisconsin Elections Commission Riley Vetterkind objected to that, “The use of secure absentee drop boxes was lawful and the practice predates the November 2020 election.”

 

Also in the report was mention of a law suit WILL brought in with Waukesha County over this, showing both that WILL’s legal position on the subject was long standing and the position was not broadly accepted (and probably never will be).

 

Roth responded to questions regarding the law suit, “The fact that someone disagrees with us does not mean their position is strong.” That logic is sound enough, but it sound apply equally for WILL as it was for Waukesha.

 

So, there’s no evidence of Fraud, but it was Fraud anyway, and there was enough Fraud to swing the election, even though it’s impossible to say how much Fraud there was, and the fraudulent ballots were done properly in the context of then-current rules, just WILL didn’t like those rules, so they proved Fraud, even if it involved citizens who had the legitimate right to vote.

 

The report also addressed the Zuckerburg Five, or five Cities that received Election-related grants to defray the costs of running an election from the non-profit CTCL. These grants were actually provided to 200 municipalities, but the Trump-Cult seemed only to care about the State’s five biggest cities, for reasons WILL made clear, “Private grants for election administration from the Center for Technical and Civic Life (CTCL), a non-profit largely funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, resulted in an increase in turnout in five Wisconsin cities — all voting heavily for Democrat Joe Biden. A statistical analysis finds significant increases in turnout for Democrats, approximately 8,000 votes statewide, as a result of the distribution of CTCL grants. Specifically, Biden’s vote increased by about 41 votes per municipality in cities that received CTCL grants relative to those that did not over 2016. No statistically significant effect was found for Trump.”

 

This is likely true, but again, there’s no evidence of misconduct, the grants were not “bribes” as some had tried to call them, they were used for training of Election workers and Get-out-the-Vote drives, necessary functions that were burdensome to cash-strapped municipalities. Also, 2020 had a bigger turnout than 2016, so if the larger turn-out was because CTCI’s efforts, God bless ‘em. And if a larger turn-out hurt Trump, well, that’s just Democracy in action.

 

Roth defended the above conclusion, “We aren’t saying that CTCL funding caused people to vote for Biden. We are saying that it was distributed in a way that was not even-handed and was correlated with larger turnout for the preferred party beyond what was expected from the normal voting patterns in 2020.”

 

So, so the five largest cities got the more money than small towns? That’s merely logical, not sinister. The consequences of that logic were close to inevitable, as Trump’s support was generally more rural, and Biden’s more urban and suburban.

 

WILL also claimed local Elections Clerks improperly maintained voter rolls during the 2020 election, failing to remove voters who may have moved, died or been convicted of a felony. WILL used data from a 2019 list from Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) that tracks when people moved out of state or died. But the list was controversial and WILL was then-embroiled in another law suit on that very issue, because WEC had refused to purge the voter-lists based on the ERIC list because, they said, the ERIC was too prone to error. WILL had lost the case in a lower court and was appealing. This is another example of WILL claiming that votes legitimate within the then-current rules were somehow “unlawful.”.

 

A particularly revealing paragraph was, “A WILL poll of 2,000 absentee voters revealed a strong partisan split in absentee voting preference. Among those expressing a preference for one of the two major parties, only 27.4% of the sample identified as Republican, while 72.6% of the sample identified as Democrats. Our poll found a surprisingly high percentage of respondents who say they did not request absentee ballots. A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats claim they did not request an absentee ballot than of Democrats. Most of those who said they did not request absentee ballots appear to have voted. We could not conclude that this is evidence of fraud, but neither can we exclude it.”

 

So, the reason absentee voting by qualified Citizens is bad because it favors one Party, and fewer Citizens voting is good because it favors the other Party.

 

This all, of course, intersects with Republican moves within the State Legislature. That same week, a group of Republicans began circulating a co-sponsorship memo for a bill that would call for the resignation of five WEC Commissioners and its Administrator. 

 

The Executive Director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign Matt Rothschild was appalled by this, “It’s a ridiculous, endless, sickening sideshow that Republican organizations and leaders insist upon carrying out … They’re continuing to fuel this obsession and this falsehood that there was something wrong with the election. That is destructive of people’s faith in our democracy, number one. Number two they are paving the way to try to dismantle the Wisconsin Elections Commission and set up a different mechanism for administering and certifying our elections so that partisan officials would be in charge and could decide who wins the election, even if it goes against the majority votes at the election … that’s not how our democracy is supposed to function.”

 

December 14^th was the date the world leaned that Wyoming Republican Party Chairman William “Frank” Eathorne was a proud member of the terrorist group the Oath Keepers.

 

Some will, of course, object to me calling the Oath Keepers terrorists, but I feel secure in my assessment. One can’t call the Republican Party a Terrorist Organization every time a registered Republican knocked over a liquor store, or call the Democratic Party a Terrorist Organization because Lee Harvey Oswald was, at one time, a registered Democrat, but the Oath Keepers are: Not only to their members engage in political violence, but groups of their members engaged in the planning of that violence and their leadership are involved in the acts.

 

There is an official list of known Terrorist Groups, but it is somewhere within the bowels of the FBI and for obvious reasons, they don’t publish it. The State Department does publish their list, but their only concern is International Terrorism, so it doesn’t include the Oath Keepers or the KKK. The private organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League publish lists that most Journalists rely on, but theirs is a list of “Hate Groups” and a large number don’t engage in violence. The OATH Keepers are on both those lists.

 

We also get some insight into the secret FBI list based of their prosecutions. The KKK is obviously on the FBI list, and the FBI says as much with every arrest. As for the Oath Keepers, when much of their Leadership got indicted related to the 1/6 attempted Coup, the FBI listed them as a “Paramilitary Organization.” Paramilitary Organizations are technically illegal in the USA, though many operate quite openly because it’s so hard to tell the difference between them and more legitimate gun- and sports-clubs, but when they’re actively involved in the planning and execution of Terrorist Acts, there is no ambiguity.

 

The Oath Keepers were founded during the Obama Administration and their ideology leans heavily on Conspiracy Masturbation. They’ve repeatedly made headlines for showing up at BLM events, and though violence has erupted at some BLM demonstrations, BLM itself specifically rejects violence as a political tool, the Oath Keepers do not. It should also be stated that sometimes the violence at BLM rallies isn’t committed by BLM’s more dubious “claiming” allies, but their public adversaries, like the Oath Keepers.

 

More than 20 suspected members of the Oath Keepers were arrested in relation to 1/6, and their top-guy, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, is now under indictment for Seditious Conspiracy. The Oath Keepers claim tens of thousands of present and former law enforcement officials and military veterans as members, and about that, they’re probably not lying.

 

Eathorne and other Oarth Keepers were exposed by White Hat Hackers who penetrated the Oath Keepers computer records. He’s a Wyoming native and former Law Enforcement. He’s also a failed Politician, and he was present for the rallies in Washington D.C. on 1/6, but not accused of committing any criminal acts on that date.

 

The Director of the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino, Brian Levin, noted “It is disturbing that someone of such a high political position would be affiliated with the Oath Keepers, who have about 20 members facing charges out of the Capitol insurrection and who promote the idea of Second Amendment ‘insurrectionism’ — which means they can revolt when they subjectively believe that the government has become tyrannical.”

 

Another failed Wyoming Politician, Ken Pendergraft. Pendergraft had argued that created “gun free zones” around schools and hospitals, were unconstitutional.

 

Yet another failed Wyoming Politician, Dr. Taylor Haynes, was on the list. On Facebook he describes himself as “a statesman, a rancher, and a constitutional scholar with a vision for Wyoming that is founded on Constitutional-based government.” But in 2018, the state attorney general declared Haynes ineligible in the Governor’s race because residence. Haynes’ property straddles the border between the States. Haynes sued, but then dropped the case.

 

A total of nine Wyoming Oath Keepers were identified as veterans and five affiliated with law enforcement.

In February 2021, Eathorne supported an effort by the party to formally censure Senator Cheney, which narrowly succeeded. He went further earlier this month, pushing through a successful vote to no longer recognize Cheney as a member of the Republican Party.

 

As a guest on former Trump Strategist Bannon’s podcast earlier the same year, he talked about Wyoming seceding from the USA.

 

December 22^nd, Public-Records lawsuits filed by nonprofit American Oversight and the newspaper The Arizona Republic were being heard in Arizona courts. Thus far, every ruling ordered Cyber Ninjas to turn over records, but the Ninjas kept fighting. Among the Ninjas arguments were that it couldn’t afford cost of producing the records and preparing a detailed log of their redactions. The newspaper’s Attorney, David Bodney, was now warning Ninjas that the newspaper would most likely request reimbursement of legal fees if they continued to be recalcitrant.

 

December 31^st, Trump hosted a New Years’ Eve party at his resort, also residence, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida.

 

Super-rich William Randolf Hearst devoted decades to the construction of La Cuesta Encantada, a castle to display his wealth, only to have it cruelly satirized in the movie “Citizen Kane” before it was even finished. The same thing happened to super-rich David A. Siegel regarding his even bigger castle Versailles, that became notorious as the subject of the documentary “Queen of Versailles,” and as I write this, decades after construction began, it’s still not finished. I suspect that Mara-a-Lago, or some cruel parody of it, will by the subject of many films and documentaries in the years to come.

 

Super-rich Trump didn’t build Mara-a-Lago, that was Marjorie Merriweather Post, and she willed it to the National Parks Service in 1973, hoping it would become a Presidential Residence; but most of the following Presidents weren’t interested. The maintenance costs became burdensome, so the Federal Government sold it to Trump 1997. Trump’s interest in running for POTUS became public immediately after he purchased Mara-a-Lago, though no mostly forgotten, he ran for POTUS in 2000, dropping out before the Primary, sorta half-ran in 2004 and 2012, and finally went all-in for 2016. When he turned it into a Resort, he pissed off most of is super-rich neighbors, and that eventually evolved into one of his 2016 fraud scandals concerned him self-dealing from his charity to pay-off a Mara-a-Lago civil settlement.

 

Trump’s New Year’s bashes were gala events, maybe the Resort’s best night of each year, but he ditched the party in 2020, flying away to Washington D.C. at the last possible minute to plot the overthrow of our Republic.

 

He attended his party this year, and his guests his included Federal Representative Matt Gaetz, currently under investigation for child sex-trafficking and Attorney Rudy Giuliani, already severely sanctioned by the Bar because of his work for Trump. Though the threat of CV19 had receded over the previous year, cases had just started spiking again and Florida was a particular hot-spot, but the crowded the event was largely mask-less, though the servers’ faces were covered. Earlier the same week, the Chief Medical Advisor to the President of United States, Dr. Fauci, recommended against large gatherings like this.

 

The crowd that paid as much a $1,000 a ticket to attend and count down the midnight dropping of the Ball in Times Square in New York City, 1,200 miles away, a place that was glad to be rid of him, though we might call him back if his criminally indicted here. Then crowd cheered, laughed, and kissed each other.

 

And when the sun rose at 7:18 am on January 1^st, 2022, Biden was still President.