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Post by the Scribe on May 10, 2021 22:16:23 GMT
CONSPIRACY THEORY: The 2020 Arizona election was rigged against Trump
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Post by the Scribe on May 10, 2021 22:21:50 GMT
Arizona Election Auditors Check Ballots for Bamboo Fibers After Conspiracy Theorists Claim 40,000 Votes Were ‘Flown In’ From Asiawww.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/arizona-election-auditors-check-ballots-for-bamboo-fibers-after-conspiracy-theorists-claim-40000-votes-were-e2-80-98flown-in-e2-80-99-from-asia/ar-BB1goNsK
Jerry Lambe 5 days ago
Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, who was hired by the Arizona State Senate, examine and recount ballots from the 2020 general election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on May 1, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Maricopa County ballot recount comes after two election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.
The already bizarre circumstances surrounding Arizona’s controversial GOP-led audit of the 2020 presidential election became even stranger Wednesday. Auditors are reportedly checking ballots for bamboo fibers in an effort to confirm an absurd conspiracy theory that fraudulent votes created in Asia were somehow counted in Arizona in November.
In an interview with journalist Dennis Welch of local CBS affiliate KTVK, Tucson resident and volunteer observer John Brakey explained the bamboo theory in greater detail.
“Well, there’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in to Arizona and stuffed into the box, okay, and it came from the south east part of the world — Asia — and what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper,” Brakey said.
He then gestured to a piece of equipment that wasn’t captured in the video interview but which was apparently being used to take extremely high definition photographs of individual ballots for inspection.
“That camera right there, that they [use] to take a picture of the ballot, they can really look at depth and find out is it a hand marked paper ballot because it’s a 5k camera. You can see the folds in the ballot, because 92-percent of all the ballots here should’ve been folded because they came in through an envelope,” he said, adding that he was “on a mission for facts.”
Welch then asked Brakey, who explicitly stated that he did not believe the bamboo-fraud theory, why auditors would be interested in finding bamboo.
“Because they use bamboo in their paper processing,” Brakey responded, specifying that by “they” he meant “people in South East Asia.”
“I don’t believe any of that,” Brakey added. “I’m just saying that is part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about and this is a way to do it.”
The search for bamboo fibers is just the latest cause for concern in a list that has been growing since the GOP-led state senate announced the audit last month.
First, the senate contracted Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based consulting firm that has never worked on an election and is led by conspiracy theorist Doug Logan.
apnews.com/article/elections-election-2020-business-government-and-politics-arizona-a56ee7c8214ecc876424ee3428e3ab72
Following the election, Logan authored a document promoting a series of debunked conspiracy theories about alleged voter fraud running rampant in the 2020 election. The missive was provided to U.S. Senators prior to that chamber certifying the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6. That document, titled “Election Fraud Facts & Details,” was also promoted by “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell on her website under the heading “Evidence of Fraud – 2020 Election.”
www.sidneypowell.com/election-evidence-2020
The Arizona Mirror also chronicled Logan’s support for Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement and his penchant for conspiracies. For example, in December, Logan tweeted that the “parallels between the statistical analysis of Venezuela and this year’s election are astonishing.” He also accused Joe Biden of committing election fraud.
The audit also got off to a shaky start. Journalists who observed the audit informed staffers that ballot counters were using blue pens when only red or perhaps green pens were permitted in counting rooms. The prohibition on blue and black ink is critical because those colors can be read by vote-counting machines and potentially be used to alter ballots.
Citing “trade secrets,” Cyber Ninjas also tried to withhold its auditing methods and procedures from the public until a judge ordered the firm to release such documents.
lawandcrime.com/2020-election/pro-trump-firm-hired-by-arizona-gop-to-audit-2020-election-results-told-judge-it-cant-release-procedures-to-public/
[Photo by Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images]
The post Arizona Election Auditors Check Ballots for Bamboo Fibers After Conspiracy Theorists Claim 40,000 Votes Were ‘Flown In’ From Asia first appeared on Law & Crime.
lawandcrime.com/2020-election/arizona-election-auditors-check-ballots-for-bamboo-fibers-after-conspiracy-theorists-claim-40000-votes-were-flown-in-from-asia/
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Post by the Scribe on May 10, 2021 22:26:59 GMT
QAnon Has an Alarming New Plan to Steal Arizona for Trumpwww.vice.com/en/article/93yy75/qanon-has-an-alarming-new-plan-to-steal-arizona-for-trump
It involves replacing all the state’s elected officials.
DG
By David Gilbert
May 10, 2021, 5:32am
PHOENIX, AZ - NOVEMBER 05: SUPPORTERS OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP DURING A PROTEST AGAINST THE ELECTION RESULTS AT THE MARICOPA COUNTY ELECTIONS DEPARTMENT OFFICE ON NOVEMBER 5, 2020 IN PHOENIX, ARIZONA. (COURTNEY PEDROZA/GETTY IMAGES)
A group of Arizona citizens, including one Republican Congressional candidate, is asking the state’s Supreme Court to invalidate all election results since 2018 and remove all elected officials from their offices immediately.
And who should replace the ousted election officials? Well, the citizens who filed the lawsuit, of course.
The legal petition claims all officials elected in Arizona since 2018 are “inadvertent usurpers” because the elections they won were conducted by vote-counting equipment that was not properly certified.
The plaintiffs claim the evidence to back up this staggering claim will be provided in the lawsuit’s appendix, which unfortunately they had not submitted at the time of writing.
The plaintiffs claim that the court has the authority to void the terms of the named officials—which include Gov. Doug Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs—and install themselves as appropriate replacements.
“When in the past citizens have been appointed by the Governor to finish out a Senate term due to unusual circumstances, the Governor has typically chosen pedigreed, well-known politicians, but this is not necessary. Any Arizona resident meeting the minimum qualifications is entitled to and has the right be appointed to a seat in unusual situations,” the lawsuit claims.
The legal filing is the latest harebrained effort by pro-Trump and QAnon supporters in Arizona to get the results of November’s election overturned. There is currently an audit of 2.1 million votes being conducted in Maricopa County. The GOP-sanctioned recount is being conducted by a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, which has no experience conducting audits.
So far the group has used UV lights to look for watermarks that conspiracy theorists claim were placed on certain ballots by former President Donald Trump to prove election fraud. And last week they began examining the ballots for bamboo fibers, based on a false claim that 40,000 ballots were flown in from Asia to tip the election in President Joe Biden’s favor.
The new lawsuit was filed with the Arizona Supreme Court on Friday, and the plaintiffs in the case sought to have their names redacted. “Petitioners have chosen to redact their names and personal information and utilize initials due a reasonable concern for their safety,” the plaintiffs write in the lawsuit.
But the group does give some indication of who they are by calling themselves “We the People,” a widely used phrase in the QAnon community.
One of the people involved in the “We the People” group is Daniel Wood, a former Marine who was a Republican candidate for Congress in last November’s elections.
Wood, who was beaten by Democratic rival Rep. Raul Grijalva, is mentioned at the bottom of a press release about the lawsuit which was published by the right-wing website the Gateway Pundit.
Also listed on the press release is Josh Barnett, a businessman who says he is a Republican candidate for Congress in 2022.
“As average citizens of Arizona, from all walks of life, we have discovered that our past elections in 2018 thru 2020 are out of compliance per the U.S. Election Assistance Commission,” Wood and Barnett claim in the press release.
Wood and Barnett did not respond to a request for comment from VICE News.
The lawsuit was shared widely on pro-Trump and QAnon message boards and channels over the weekend.
“Hang onto your hats, it's getting wild in Arizona,” Dave Hayes, a prominent QAnon booster known as “Praying Medic”, told his 61,000 Telegram followers on Sunday. Ron Watkins, the administrator of the message board 8kun who’s been identified as a likely author of many “Q drops,” also shared the news with his 200,000 Telegram followers, saying the lawsuit “is something to watch carefully as it plays out.”
But not everyone in the Republican world is happy about the efforts to overturn the election results, including those who voted to sanction the audit last month.
“It makes us look like idiots,” State Sen. Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, told the New York Times.
“Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”
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