I don’t know that the final “official” Cyber Ninja fraudit report has been released yet — it’s due any minute now — but a draft report that got leaked is all over the news has caused much amusement. As you must have heard, the fraudit “recount” that took so very long found that Joe Biden won the state by a few more votes than the original results said he did.
Of course, this will not stop the Big Lie. The MAGA-universe has already gone into overdrive manufacturing reasons for why the Cyber Ninjas report didn’t say what it said. In brief, even though the actual numbers reported say Biden won, the report issues enough questions about irregularities that certainly seem to leave room for shenanigans that stole the election from Trump.
We might ask what they were doing all that time if they couldn’t find the answers to those questions. Fortunately Philip Bump at WaPo has gone through these questions left unanswered and explains why they don’t add up to anything. Not that facts will cause the MAGA-heads to shut up.
If anything, the audit’s conclusion only confirms the very worst suspicions that have arisen about the true significance of Trump’s continuing insistence that the election was stolen from him, the response of many Republicans to that mythologizing, and the broader continuing threat all this poses.
That’s because it’s already clear that some Republicans will not use the audit news to affirm that confidence in our election system has been restored. Instead, they’ll use it to continue undermining that confidence, for the express purpose of justifying further anti-democratic tactics. …
… That’s because the audit also magically did purport to “find” serious problems with the vote counting. As The Post notes, it “undercut” its own conclusion about the validity of the outcome by suggesting that some ballots might have been “improperly accepted and counted.”
It probably took them so long to release the thing because they had to manufacture reasons why their own conclusions are wrong. Do read Philip Bump. The excuses add up to pretty tepid stuff, really.