They’ve Been Picking My Pocket for Six Years

I live in Arizona, and for six years we have been targeted by a coordinated national campaign to scare voters with propaganda about election fraud. It has never produced a shred of evidence, because there was never any evidence to find. The Department of Justice is now demanding the voter files of five million Arizonans. I am one of them, and I am done.

The audit found no fraud. Cyber Ninjas, the Florida company the Arizona Senate hired to recount Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots, spent months examining 2.1 million votes. Their results: Biden gained 99 votes, Trump lost 261. It wasn’t close before — and it was even less close after.

We had to pay $3.2 million to replace the voting machines Cyber Ninjas compromised, plus hundreds of thousands more in legal fees, facility costs, administrative burden, and who knows what else. And all that energy from political operatives nationwide, all that time and attention pulled away from the elected representatives I am paying to actually govern — that is a cost too, and who knows how much. The full accounting is documented in The Veto Queen Story Is Missing Its First Three Chapters. The short version: there was zero fraud.

This situation never ends. More than sixty lawsuits challenged 2020 results in state and federal courts. Every one was dismissed or rejected for lack of evidence. The Arizona Attorney General’s office spent 10,000 hours investigating every claim election deniers brought and found nothing. Ten thousand hours. Because every bad-faith claim still has to be answered. An internal summary stated that in each instance, claimants had not provided any evidence to support their allegations. The Republican attorney general who commissioned that investigation suppressed the report. His office released it after he left.

There was no election fraud in Maricopa County. The people running these investigations knew that going in. You do not hire a company with no election experience whose CEO is a Stop the Steal activist if you are trying to find the truth. You hire him if you are trying to produce propaganda for your side.

All these audits and lawsuits and investigations are political theater designed to keep the fraud narrative alive long enough to be useful:

Useful for fundraising
Useful for base mobilization
Useful for justifying the next round of legislation making it harder for specific categories of voters to cast a ballot

This is how concentrated political power protects itself — and it works just as well with a D after the name as an R.

Propaganda raises fears that justify voter suppression. Voter suppression is how politicians choose their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives. It’s always good for the party in power, and it’s why we the people created independent redistricting.

Arizona gets targeted for a reason. We are one of the few states that is not badly gerrymandered — we have an independent redistricting commission, and the legislature has been trying to dismantle it ever since voters created it. Elections have become more competitive with every cycle, because the people are represented more fairly now.

That’s the problem. When maps are fair and elections are actually competitive, it’s easier to convince voters the system is rigged than to actually earn their votes.”A voting system that worked has been recast as a problem because it stopped producing the “right” results. Arizona is a carefully chosen political target.

Now the Department of Justice is suing Arizona to get our voter files. Who knows how many hours and dollars this will cost us. The political operation in power thinks they will be able to identify and purge selected voters from the rolls. Former DOJ attorneys filed court briefs saying the stated legal justification was a cover story — the real purpose was building a national voter database to identify and purge voters. Federal judges in multiple states have agreed enough to block it. The DOJ has filed in nearly two dozen other states anyway. The FBI has subpoenaed records from the same Arizona Senate audit that confirmed Biden won. Homeland Security Investigations — an agency that is supposed to handle human trafficking and transnational crime — is now probing Arizona’s 2020 election results.

Six years. Every investigation. Same result. And I’m paying for it.

This is not investigation. Investigation produces findings or it stops. This keeps going regardless of what it finds, because it’s not independent — it’s targeted. My tax dollars paid for audits and court cases that confirmed what three prior hand counts had already confirmed. My tax dollars are now paying the Arizona Secretary of State and Attorney General to defend my voter file from a federal government that courts have already told to stand down.

This is extraction politics: using governmental authority to transfer costs from a political operation onto the public. We are the public. Arizona has been paying for six years, and the operation has never once produced the evidence it claims to be looking for — because it was never looking. They’re looking for messaging. And they’re charging me for it.

I live here. I’m paying for this. There was no fraud. They know there was no fraud. They are still coming at my state.

I am sick of this.

Courthouse News Service (2021) — Arizona GOP election recount tallies wider Biden victory, finds no major irregularities
CNBC (2021) — Trump-friendly Cyber Ninjas audit of Arizona votes still shows Biden won
CNN (2021) — Arizona election audit: Draft report confirms Biden defeated Trump in Maricopa County in 2020
Wikipedia (2021) — 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit
NPR (2021) — Controversial election review in Arizona confirms Biden win
Reuters (2021) — Republican-led Arizona audit reaffirms Biden win
StateScoop (2021) — Ballot review could force Maricopa County to spend millions on new equipment

They’ve Been Picking My Pocket for Six Years

Arizona audit results, no fraud, Biden +99 / Trump −261, Cyber Ninjas inexperience, partisan ties

Replacement of voting machines, cost to Maricopa County

AG investigation, 10,000 hours, no evidence, suppressed internal memo

General confirmation that the Maricopa result was accurate

FBI subpoena of Arizona Senate audit records

Leave a Comment Cancel reply