Donald Trump has been watching the utterly bonkers election “audit” in Arizona with great interest. In fact, a New York Times reporter recently noted that Trump has told people close to him that he believes the Arizona audit “could undo” the results of the 2020 presidential election.
It was against this insane backdrop that the former president issued a statement yesterday that read in part, “Arizona Republican State Senators are engendering such tremendous respect, even adoration, for the great job they are doing on the Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.”
There is no scenario in which any of that was true. On the contrary, a variety of prominent Arizona Republicans are increasingly mortified by this embarrassing fiasco. What’s more, as the Arizona Republic reported yesterday, the IT company that was in charge of running the day-to-day audit no longer wants anything to do with the partisan debacle.
The contract with Wake TSI ended May 14, the original completion date for the hand count, and the company chose not to renew its contract, according to Randy Pullen, an audit spokesperson and former state GOP chair. “They were done,” he said. “They didn’t want to come back.”
If Wake TSI’s name sounds familiar, it’s not your imagination. Rachel explained on the show last week that Cyber Ninjas, the woefully unqualified Florida outfit run by a fringe conspiracy theorist, needed a subcontractor to oversee the actual recounting of more than 2 million ballots in Maricopa County.
Wake TSI is now walking away. It’s hard to blame them; I wouldn’t want to come back, either.
Last week, the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors urged the GOP-led state Senate to put a stop to this madness, calling the outlandish process a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” adding, “Our state has become a laughingstock.”
They went on to write, “You have rented out the once good name of the Arizona State Senate to grifters and con-artists, who are fundraising hard-earned money from our fellow citizens even as your contractors parade around the Coliseum, hunting for bamboo and something they call ‘kinematic artifacts’ while shining purple lights for effect. None of these things are done in a serious audit. The result is that the Arizona Senate is held up to ridicule in every corner of the globe and our democracy is imperiled.” The letter was signed by members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, as well as the local Democratic sheriff, and Stephen Richer, the local Republican official who oversees Maricopa County’s elections department. It was the same Richer who responded to Donald Trump’s deranged comments about the state’s election results, describing the former president’s preposterous nonsense as “unhinged.” Richer added, “We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country.” Evidence of this ridiculous process “engendering such tremendous respect, even adoration” remains hard to come by.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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