I know you may have thought that the US presidential election was over, but it isn’t! Much like a Romero zombie, it just keeps shuffling forward hoping to make enough new zombies along the way to take over the world. Republicans are calling it the “Arizona audit”; they’re saying that the purpose of it is just to confirm that everything was cool, but the first step of the audit was giving the voting machines to a Trump fascist who held onto them for quite some time, so they are no longer safe to use for future elections.
The current process that’s happening with the audit would be that Trumpers are examining all the ballots for Arizona. If there is anything weird about the ballot (folding, smudges, crumpling, presence of bamboo, or if it just seems suspicious), the Trumpers place the ballot in a special examination area. Then, the special examiners look at the flagged ballots. Ballots that were for Biden are determined to be fake ballots from China (this is really what they believe), and ballots for Trump are determined to be real, American ballots.
Slate has a pretty good description of what’s going on at the audit site.
This whole process is so obviously skewed toward confirming the Republican belief that Satanic pedophiles of the Democratic party (in cooperation with China) somehow stole the election from Trump that it will be extremely shocking if the audit confirms that the election was valid. The more likely outcome is that conservatives will mark down Arizona as having gone to Trump in the election and then move on with the same strategy for the next swing state with the long-term goal of getting support for seizing control of the entire government. The other swing states that went to Biden are New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
One thing interesting about this is how it illustrates the conservative thought process in a more general sense. There’s nothing about Cheeto powder on a ballot that suggests anything is wrong with it in an electoral sense, and both Republicans and Democrats enjoy a good Cheeto. The conservative sees an area where they lack power (the ballots in this case) and manufactures bullshit to be concerned about; that’s the first step. “Oh, no! The ballot is soiled!”
Next, the conservative formalizes the bullshit as an important feature; in this case, it would be making a rule that we should be putting “soiled” ballots in the pile marked “suspicious”. Again, there’s nothing suspicious about dirt on a ballot, but putting it in the “suspicious” pile sure makes it look suspicious. From there, the conservative simply says that some percentage of the suspicious ballots were rejected. Nobody is surprised that suspicious ballots were rejected — they were suspicious! Interestingly, most of the rejected ballots opposed the conservative’s worldview — which, the conservative says, is exactly what you’d expect.
If you were to examine the ballots specifically to determine how many are soiled and whether Democrats or Republicans are more likely to have soiled ballots, you’d probably find no connection. You might even find that Republicans are more likely to have soiled their ballots — that’s what we find with things like pedophilia and Satanism. But somehow, this process, which is run by Republicans, will reject more Biden ballots than Trump ballots based on the issue of soil, which isn’t at all related to how ballots work.
Remember, Republicans never actually cared about Cheeto stains, just like they don’t really care about democracy, justice, or babies. They want you to care about Cheeto stains so they can leverage your feelings to further their power, and they do it by defining “soiled” as “suspicious”. This is the same way they redefine all sorts of words to try to get people to go along with their agenda: capitalism, socialism, freedom, self-defense, power, baby.
100% of conservative political positions are based on manufactured bullshit like this, which is why there is absolutely no reason to try to negotiate with them. Anyone who tries to negotiate with them is either exceedingly naïve or working the negotiations for their own selfish benefit. Which of those apply to the Democratic party?