Audit gone wild
Aw imagine going to all the trouble of an audit only to find your opponent does even better.
A partisan, Republican-instigated so-called “audit” of the 2020 election result in Arizona has confirmed that Joe Biden did indeed beat Donald Trump in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous county, according to a draft report of the review.
A month-long hand count of the 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, found that Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported in the November election. Biden won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes on his way to getting more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history during the election.
I think “Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported” should read “Biden actually defeated Trump by 360 more votes than was reported.”
The investigation is the most extensive partisan effort to date to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election and has been widely celebrated by Trump and allies who falsely believe the election is stolen.
So now they’re stuck with it.
Regardless of what the report says, Republican efforts to conduct similar reviews are underway. Republicans in both the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania legislatures are moving forward with similar investigations into the 2020 race. And on Thursday, Trump called for a review of the 2020 race in Texas, a state he carried in 2020 by nearly six points. Experts worry that the reviews suggest a new normal, where the losers of elections simply refuse to accept the results.
That would be bad.
And they’ll use these results to justify these “reviews”. “What are you so worried about? Your guy ended up with even more votes in Arizona!”
Well, it has its precedent in nature. In a bee hive, the first queen bee to emerge always performs her paramount royal duty.of going round the honeycomb and stinging any rivals (ie pretenders) to death before they can emerge the way she did. Two queen bees in the one hive is just not on. But there possibly have been rare cases where two queens emerge at the same time, each claims the other has cheated and refuses to ‘accept the result’, and they fight to the death then and there.
In his own way, Trump is a would-be queen bee. But he lacks convincing stinging capacity. (Aside: here the mind starts to boggle.)
It gets worse. The surviving queen (hereafter referred to as Her Majesty) leaves the hive on her mating flight, followed by every eager male (drone) in the hive. Only one of this randy retinue has the speed and stamina to keep up with Her Majesty, and he gets the one and only chance to ‘make love’ to her; while airborne, at full throttle, with all stops out and all systems ‘go’. She, possibly with a high sense of outrage, never mates again in her whole life.
Meanwhile, having propagated his offspring with Her Majesty, our successful drone then finds (no doubt to his horror) that the union is permanent, and in more ways than one. He cannot withdraw and go his own way. As she accelerates away from him, she retains his donger and drags out his abdominal organs as well along with it. While he crashes to Earth, never to be heard of again, she flies on to found a new hive and take up her royal duties, in time to be tended by a swarm of devoted and ever loyal (sterile female) daughter-servants: the Stakhanovite ‘worker bees.’
And… As Her Majesty is settling in and enjoying her new royal life, the unsuccessful drones are running out of energy and crashing to the ground, here, there and everywhere.
But then a further problem arises in this narrative. If Trump is a queen bee analog, what does that make Stormy Daniels?
Wait, did they say whether those extra votes were printed on paper with bamboo threads?
Of course, one real purpose of these investigations is to legitimize the investigations. “Oh, look, there’s been so many investigations into the election! Clearly, there must be something hinky in there! No smoke without fire, says I.” This is then used to further outrage the base, making them show up in even greater percentages to the next election. (Something the GOP will desperately need, given the way COVID is now disproportionately killing off die-hard conservatives.)