Believing is seeing: The coming Arizona mess.

     “I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes” 

“Some very interesting things are happening in Arizona."

"This was a rigged election, everybody knows it, and we’re going to be watching it very closely.”

Trump, in Mar-A-Lago, speaking to guests

We can see it coming.

The firm hired to re-audit the Arizona election will find "irregularities." They will find "multiple unanswered and unexplained variations." They will find "suspicious ballots." They will find "unexplained marks." They will find "potential fraud sufficient to change the election result." 

Having suspicion is all that is necessary, and people can always be suspicious. Ballots will be questionable because people can always have questions.

That will feed the election-fraud meme:

 See? There is the proof. The election audit in Arizona showed questionable and suspicious activity!!!  I knew it!!!

The Arizona ballots had been counted three times by state officials. The third time was a hand-count of the ballots, which confirmed the earlier vote counts. All three counts were overseen by Republican election officials under extreme political pressure to find problems with enough ballots to change the outcome. Republican Governor Ducey's failure to do so earned him an official censure from his party.  Donald Trump personally pressured the Governor. 

There was a problem: The ballots were what the ballots were. Officeholders did their job. No good deed goes unpunished.

The majority-Republican Arizona state senate has the freedom to keep raising questions. They chose a firm led by a man publicly committed to the idea that widespread fraud took place. The Cyber Ninja firm says their methods of audit are "trade secrets" and cannot be revealed. They allowed workers handling ballots to carry with them blue pens which could mark and change ballots. They block the media from observing.

Of course they will find "irregular" and "suspicious" marks, especially on ballots that were mailed in--the ones that are predominately for Biden. They were handled by voters in their homes. They will find "suspicious grease marks" because some will have been marked on a kitchen table. Those grease spots, or fingerprint spots, will make the ballot "irregular." Or, alternatively, some ballots will be "suspiciously clean and free of signs of having been handled." Either way, suspicious. There will be extraneous marks where a pen touched the paper in a margin--or there will be a suspicious lack of marks. Under bright ultra-violet light an opaque ballot may show more or less transparency which an employee can note as "unexplained" or "irregular" and therefore "suspicious."  

We saw this with the "birther" gambit. Trump could never be satisfied. He questioned the Hawaii birth certificates. He said he found evidence Obama was born in Kenya. Or maybe Indonesia. Trump had this exchange with Today Show host Meredith Vieira. She cited his birth certificate in Hawaii.

Trump: "I’m not convinced that he has one.Three weeks ago when I started, I thought he was probably born in this country and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I did before.I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” 

Vieira: “You have people now, down there searching in Hawaii?”

Trump: “Absolutely, And they cannot believe what they’re finding.”

There is no evidence that he sent investigators to Hawaii, so nothing was reported found. He later said he believed Obama was born in Hawaii after all. It did not stop the birther meme. A majority of Republican voters still say they question Obama's birthplace. 

Will the cycle of election-fraud suspicion ever end?  Yes, probably, if there is electoral finality. If Republicans running in the mid-term elections, in order to remain acceptable to primary voters, assert the election-fraud story, and then endure surprising losses. Officeholders will realize that Trump's election-fraud assertions are leading them off a cliff. I don't expect this.

April, 2021: 55% of Republicans think election stolen

More likely, Republican officeholders will follow Trump's lead, keep talking openly about "likely fraud," or be silent in the face of the assertion, win in primaries, and then--as is common for the party not in the White House--do well in the mid-term elections. That would tend to validate the wisdom of echoing the Trump insistence the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. That would tend to justify efforts to "take our country back." This process is already underway, with Fox News hosts sympathetic to Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by Capitol police as she attempted to break through a door, and their descriptions of the January 6 insurrection as mostly a matter of concerned citizens assembling to right something they legitimately feared was wrong. 

In that case, Biden's overarching goal of returning America back to "normal" and "restoring America's soul," a delicate and marginal enterprise at best given his narrow 2020 mandate, will have utterly failed. There is a good chance of this.

On left and right, people think America's institutions are rigged and corrupt to the core. It is the premise behind Ralph Nader's and Bernie Sanders' critiques of the American economy and culture. This means that conspiracy language has bipartisan validation. It was outvoted on the left but took command in the GOP, where people open to this have a plurality of votes that lever up as a governing plurality, temporarily out of power by a tiny margin in a few states.

Donald Trump understood this group. He gave it voice and focus, and brought it to power. It is still there, perhaps as strong or stronger than ever. The results from the Arizona "audit" were obvious from the start.

Of course the Arizona vote was "suspicious" and the results "questionable."