Tangle - The Arizona election audit.

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

On Friday, Cyber Ninjas, the group that conducted the audit of Arizona's largest county, released its official results of their hand recount. The review actually yielded more votes for Joe Biden and fewer votes for Donald Trump. In sum, Biden picked up 99 votes and Trump received 261 fewer votes. However, the group also alleged that they unearthed evidence that tens of thousands of votes were potentially fraudulent. Today, we review those claims and examine what this all means.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Dangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be covering the Arizona election audit. The results of that audit came out last week. They brought upon them many an opinion from commentators

all across the spectrum. We're going to jump into a few of those today. And then my take, of course, as some of you know, I'm pretty close to this issue, having reported a ton on claims of election fraud in November of 2020. In fact, I think that's how a lot of you guys found me. So we'll get there. Before we jump in, as always, some quick hits from the weekend. Number one, this week marks a moment of truth for the U.S. Congress as President Joe Biden tries to pass two major spending bills, keep the government open and avoid defaulting on our debt all at the same time. There are a lot of things going on in Congress this week. We're going to have a lot to talk about. Number two, the Biden administration took new steps to preserve DACA after a federal judge in Texas ruled against the program, saying it was illegal. Number three,

the center-left social democrats in Germany narrowly won the election yesterday, barely beating outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats. Number four, an Amtrak train derailed in Montana on Saturday, killing three people and leaving seven others in the hospital. Number five, cryptocurrency exchanges are rushing to cut ties with Chinese users after Beijing's latest crackdown on digital currency. All right, and that brings us to today's main story, which is Maricopa County. On Friday, Cyber Ninjas, the group that conducted the audit of Arizona's largest county, released its official results of their hand recount. Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, the Republican who led the charge for the, quote, full forensic audit, presented the results to the state chamber, conceding that the review actually yielded more votes for Joe Biden and fewer votes for Donald Trump. In sum, President Biden picked up 99 votes and Trump received 261

fewer votes. Truth is truth, numbers are numbers, Fan said at the Senate hearing on the review. Ever since Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, the critical swing state has been awash with allegations of widespread election fraud that handed the race to Biden. Key to those allegations have been Maricopa County with 2.1 million ballots, which the former president and many of his allies have said was integral to a plot to, quote, steal the election from him. Shortly after the election, the Republican-controlled Maricopa Board of Supervisors affirmed the machine count, which showed a Joe Biden victory was accurate. Courts

dismissed the lawsuit calling those results into question, and then county supervisors authorized a second audit of election machines in January that also showed no irregularities. In sum, before the Cyber Ninjas were even hired, two separate independent firms performed forensic audits on voting equipment, and two hand recounts of a statistically significant number of ballots were conducted immediately after the Arizona election, all affirming Biden had won the county with nearly identical vote totals. Each review has shown Biden won Arizona by a little more than 10,000 votes and carried Maricopa County by about 45,000 votes, making the county critical to his victory. This audit, however, began controversially after Republican state senators sued and brought in their own outside

group, which was funded by a Trump supporter who had no experience conducting election audits. The audit began on April 23rd and was scheduled to be completed by May 14th, but repeated missteps, public criticisms, counter-lawsuits, and issues with the venue where the recount was taking place resulted in four months of delays that pushed the report's release all the way to last week. Outside groups raised nearly $6 million to fund the audit. While finding the overall vote tallies largely matched up, the report also highlighted a series of alleged problems. One of the most serious they claimed was 10,342 potential voters who voted twice in different counties, which Cyber Ninjas called a, quote, critical finding

of the report. Maricopa County election officials called this finding laughable, and a series of rebuttals on Twitter explained that the Cyber Ninjas team listed over 10,000 people from different counties with the same names and birth years, but not the same birth dates. Experienced election officials say that in a state with millions of voters, it's a statistical likelihood that thousands will share the same name and birth year. The Cyber Ninjas group also alleged that more than 23,000 people voted by mail in a county after they moved, but tallied that total by matching voters with commercial data, not the data maintained by county elections offices.

Many of the voters may have moved since Election Day or simply moved out of a parent's home, and the 23,000 voter count is well within the range of the estimated 1% of voters who change residencies in a given year. Additionally, Arizona voters can vote for president in Arizona if they move in the 29-day period preceding the election, which is the same time period the Cyber Ninjas analyzed, as their own report noted. Phan has said she has passed along the review's findings to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who said the Election Integrity Unit would look at the evidence presented by Cyber Ninjas to see if there were any further charges or investigations to pursue. Below, we're going to take a look at the arguments from the left and the right, and then my take.

Okay, first, what the left is saying. The left has argued that the audit is a sham from the beginning and believes the results should end claims that the election was stolen for good. In Slate, Jeremy Stahl said Trumpers spent millions on the audits only to find more votes for Biden. The timing of the release hints at the significance of the audit's findings, Stahl wrote. For months, Donald Trump has been billing the investigation as the thing that will provide definitive proof of his victory in Arizona. as the thing that will provide definitive proof of his victory in Arizona. If the audit was going to show that the election was stolen from Trump by Democratic goons in cactus-covered Antifa ski masks, why release it on a late Friday afternoon at a time usually reserved for dumps of information people want to go uncovered?

A leaked report on Thursday evening offered the answer. The bollywood and controversial conducted hand count of nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots still showed Biden defeating Trump. Though the margin changed by 360 votes, it was actually Biden whose margin of victory grew from 45,109 to 45,469. It turns out that not even a partisan funded and conducted recount using procedures out of a Pee Wee Herman film could change the outcome, Stahl said. He would think that Trump himself would be decrying the audit as the latest fraudulent conspiracy against him by his greatest nemesis, vote counters. Instead, he issued a series of manic and false statements complaining that the fake news is lying about the Arizona audit report and claiming that the audit had uncovered 10,000s of, quote, phantom voters. Again, even a cursory look at the work of Cyber Ninja's audit team,

led by CEO Doug Logan, who has been alleging voter fraud since November, disproves Trump's grand statement and the innuendo of the Cyber Ninja's report. In the New York Times, Reed Epstein and Nick Corrisinati said the Stop the Steal movement is, quote, ignoring the Arizona humiliation. Any fleeting thought that the failure of the Arizona exercise to unearth some new trove of Trump votes or a smoking gun of election fraud might derail the so-called Stop the Steal movement dissipated abruptly, they wrote. As draft copies of the report began to circulate late Thursday, Trump allies ignored the new tally, instead zeroing in on the report's specious claims

about malfeasance, inconsistencies, and errors by election officials. Significant parts of the right treated the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication, offering a fresh canard to justify an accelerated push for new voting limits and measures to give Republican state lawmakers greater control over elections, they added. greater control over elections, they added. It also provided additional fuel for the older lie that is now central to Mr. Trump's political identity, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Even Republicans who do not subscribe to false claims of election fraud are using investigations to justify more restrictive voting laws. In NBC News, Grant Woods, the former attorney general of Arizona, said the people spreading the lie should be investigated for fraud. Grifters have spent months embarrassing themselves and my home state by conducting the most expensive snipe hunt in history searching for invented fraud, Woods

wrote. The biased ballot review was the very picture of a circus. Search for delusions as partisans twirled ballots on tabletop merry-go-rounds in a never-ending pursuit of anything to spin into a conspiracy. The reviewers have sunk their own case by making a mockery of the process, with observers documenting dozens of security and counting flaws. The best way to close up this circus is to investigate whether laws have been broken and crack down on fundraising appeals that don't pass muster, he said. It's become clear that multiple entities have enriched themselves by spreading the lie that

the election was stolen. They have asked Americans to open their wallets to fund the sham review in Arizona based on this lie and convince vulnerable individuals that if they send enough money, invented fraud will be uncovered and the election will be decertified. This is false, and if these entities, from propaganda networks to former President Donald Trump to local political parties, knew that this was a lie or had no reasonable grounds to believe it was true, they may have committed fraud, an admittedly murky area of the law. All right, and that is what the left has been saying about this story. Here's what the right is saying. The right is split on the report.

Some are saying it confirms Biden's win again and are pleading with the Trump crew to let this 2020 big election lie go. And others are saying that the audit raises serious questions about vulnerabilities in the Arizona election. In the Federalist, Margo Cleveland said the corporate media was, quote, ignoring significant findings from the report. As broadly reported, the audit established there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvas of the county. Left unmentioned, however, were the numerous findings of problems with the election and, most significantly, evidence indicating tens of thousands of ballots were illegally cast or counted. The audit revealed that 15,035 mail-in votes in Maricopa County were from voters who had moved prior to the registration

deadline, another 6,591 mail-in votes came from voters who had moved out of Arizona prior to the registration deadline, and 1,718 mail-in votes came in from voters who moved within Arizona but out of Maricopa County prior to the registration deadline. One of three scenarios seems possible here. First, the mail-in ballot was delivered to the old address and then provided to the named voter who had only temporarily relocated Cleveland Road. Such votes would be legal and entirely proper. Second, the mail-in ballot was delivered to the old address and then provided to the named voter who had permanently moved but failed to timely update his registration record, yet signed an affidavit attesting to false address of residence. Such votes would be illegal. Or third, the mail-in ballot was delivered to the old address and then

someone other than the named voter cast the vote. Such votes would be both illegal and fraudulent. Neither Maricopa County nor the state of Arizona knows how many of those 23,000 plus votes fall within each of these three scenarios. And that's a problem. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said Trump lost Arizona again. Former President Trump claims Arizona's ballot audit found massive fraud, yet the new recount says he actually lost the state by 360 more votes than originally reported, the board wrote. He is now demanding an audit of the 2020 election in Texas, which he won by nearly six points. When are Republicans going to quit playing this game, the board asked. Arizona's official results say that President Biden won by 10,457 votes. Mr. Trump never accepted the loss, so the GOP state senate

launched an audit by hiring Cyber Ninjas, a company without experience reviewing elections. After repeated delays and various pitfalls, here's the result. A hand recount of Maricopa County's 2.1 million ballots says that Mr. Biden won the state by 10,817 votes. There's no reason to prefer this tally over the certified one given the audit's erratic process and the lack of transparency. For details, see a June report co-written by Trey Grayson, Kentucky's former GOP Secretary of State, warning that cyber ninjas will not produce findings that should be trusted. The good news is they don't need to be trusted, since the result is the same, except with worse numbers for Mr. Trump. The audit documents exceed 100 pages, yet it will take time for local authorities to comb through all the claims.

Elections are human endeavors, so it'd hardly be surprising if an outside review found some goofs or ways to improve. But that isn't Mr. Trump's aim. family's buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. In town hall, Ted Noel said words matter about the audit. Both the Arizona auditors and John Solomon committed a cardinal error that has allowed the left to celebrate victory and ignore the fine print, Noel wrote. Both note that Biden got more, quote, votes than Trump. That conclusion is incorrect because it ignores the rest of the story. A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible registered voter and must be cast in the time,

place, and manner prescribed by law. Anything else is not a vote. In Arizona, it is cast on paper ballots and read by machines. All the accurate count showed was that the machines counted the pieces of paper accurately. That's all machines do. They do not count ballots. The canvas did not answer the primary question. How many of the pieces of paper were lawful ballots and how many should have been excluded because they were not lawful votes? All the accurate count proves is that there was no outside effort to tweak the numbers by changing them by some direct internet chicanery. But it does not prove that Biden won or not. And that is the problem. All right, so those are some takes from the right and left, and this brings me to my take. Look, this is an issue where I'm fully trusting that readers will make it to my take and listen

to it because, to be frank, some of the stuff that the right is pushing above is just misleading or plainly false. It's difficult for me to decide which of these comments to publish. Some are widely held views, which makes me want to share them and tangle, but they also come with the caveat that they seem to be provably false in a lot of instances. As many of you know, I am close to this issue. I said at the top of the show, I know that many of the people listening to this and reading my newsletter actually found me because of a very viral Twitter thread that I had where I was tracking claims of election fraud during the election. I did this not because I was just trying to debunk all of them, but because the first 10 or 15 claims were things that were so obviously untrue to me, I decided to document them and keep them in a thread. There were some claims early on in the days after the election that I said, honestly, I didn't know whether they were evidence of election fraud or not in that time and investigations would tell. Since then, though, none of them

have really panned out. And I just want to say, you know, it feels to me like every single week we have this new claim about what the next thing is going to be and, you know, who is going to prove finally once and for all that the election was stolen and show us the smoking gun. So, you know, I just want to say the results of this audit are devastating for Trump. But more importantly, they're also clarifying for people like me who have been chasing down every claim of election fraud and trying to look into the validity of those claims. It's clarifying because it proves that the decision has been made by these actors up front that the election was stolen, and they will contort themselves in any manner necessary to maintain that increasingly obvious

charade. The issue with reporting on these claims of election fraud is that the boring explanation often requires more time to lay out than the explosive and misleading allegation itself. This report is jam-packed with a half dozen examples of allegations like this, but to illustrate it, we can just look at the big one, which is the major, major claim of the report, that 23,344 mail-in ballots were from, quote, phantom voters who no longer lived at that address they voted from, which is how the former president put it.

So first, cyber ninjas arrived at the 23,000 number by comparing voter rolls to a commercial public database called Melissa, which tracks addresses not for issues related to voting, but for things like commercial marketing. You can go look at Melissa's website if you want. I linked it in today's newsletter. Naturally, anytime you compare two totally different data sets at two totally different points in time, you're going to run into discrepancies. This should be obvious beyond having to state, but clearly it's not. To their credit, Cyber Ninjas actually pointed this out in their own report. I mean, if people actually read the report, they'll see that Cyber Ninjas said 86,391

individuals were found with no record in the database for either their name or anyone with the same last name at the address. That was proof to them that a number of these individuals are in fact real people with a limited public record and commercial presence, and thus are not showing up in the Melissa database. It was unclear to Cyber Ninjas how big that number was, but it's proof that from the beginning the fundamental data they're using and citing for their innuendo is based on, you know, corrupted data. So let's just assume for fun that it isn't. What Cyber Ninjas could have done was taken their data and then compared it to data from the Arizona Secretary of State's office. Instead, though, they never even subpoenaed those records in the first place in order to do that. This is something even people on the right are criticizing them for. And

it's, you know, kind of funny to think about that they had an opportunity to allege or prove this fraud by matching their data up with what the Arizona Secretary of State had. But they didn't do that. They didn't try to do that, which I think, you know, is either a major oversight or a very telling look into what they thought would have happened if they did that. Of course, even if they did confirm some 23,000 votes cast, mail-in ballots were from places that voters didn't live, that wouldn't actually mean the voters were illegal. It wouldn't mean the votes were illegal. It's totally possible that legal voters were casting legal ballots and also forwarding their mail

addresses to different places. Forwarding mail addresses is how Cyber Ninjas was tracking the number of voters who were moving around the time of the election. So college students and people living in vacation homes during election season, for instance, could have filed addresses forwarding to themselves, forwarding their mail to themselves in order to cast completely legal ballots because there were still permanent residents in Maricopa County. There was also that whole pandemic thing, I don't know if you remember, where people were working remotely in locations all over the country that weren't their permanent addresses.

Those people can still legally vote in the place where they live. In a county with 2.1 million voters, it's really not that hard to believe a few thousand of them would fall into this category. Even if you take those voters out of it, though, Arizona law says that any voter who moves within 29 days of an election can cast a ballot in a presidential election from their preceding address. More than 35 million address changes were submitted to USPS in 2020. That's just according to a separate USPS data set. So, you know, again, I'm violating my own rule here by comparing some separate data sets, but it seems totally plausible just with that context that a few thousand of those 35 million address changes, maybe even 10 or 15 or 20,000 of them, happened in one month in one of America's largest counties in the country.

Add to that context from the National Association of Realtors that Arizona had the seventh highest rate in any state of people moving in and out of it in 2020. And you sort of get this picture of like, oh, okay, thousands of people actually move around in any given month. So on top of everything, on top of everything, all these numbers I just laid out here, there's this one sort of like funny fact that nobody's really talking about, which is that those voters who are moving are not all Democrats. Right. Think about it. They have these 23000 voters. You know, if Arizona was as close as people say, you think like an even split. Half of them are Republicans. Half of them are Democrats.

So we don't even know if those voters, if all 23000 of those voters were illegal. Why are we assuming they're all Democrats? In fact, Cyber Ninja's data says about 40% of those voters were Democrats and 33% were Republicans. Again, I think their data and the data that they had was pretty corrupted. So even that's probably not an accurate number. But even if it were, then you're just, you know, you're saying that, okay, a third of the votes were actually Republicans and could have been fraudulent and 40 percent were Democrats. And who knows how that comes out in the wash in the Arizona race? Every explosive claim produced by this report, which can be expressed in a sentence, an allegation in a sentence that 20,000 people were phantom voters, requires paragraphs like this to explain.

And ultimately, that's the greatest trick of this grift. It's why the people who spent months insisting they needed your money to produce an audit that would prove fraud are now saying they need more of your money to get the claims in this audit investigated by the state attorney general. They believe that you will take what they say at face value without taking the time necessary to understand how they're misleading you. You can read it in the Wall Street Journal opinion page or Slate or even watch Fox News, who covered this honestly and extensively this weekend. You can find any number of sources with any number of ideological slants to explain it in depth to you.

The only people left peddling the absurd idea that there is proof we have a stolen election are either running for office, profiting from the claim, or spectators and voters who are deeply committed to the idea that their guy lost unfairly. It's clear to me that they will keep going and keep raising that money and keep preying on voters' fears and frustrations until a whole new election rolls around in 2024. All I can say is that I hope you see through it by now. All right, that's it for my take.

Obviously, a little bit personal, and I care about this one. So, you know, I know I don't always fall down firmly on one side of an issue, but on this, I really, truly do. That brings us to our story that matters today, which actually is another story really close to my heart for different and sadder reasons. The Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, has issued a public warning that a growing number of pain medications on the black market are laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl or methamphetamine, which is helping drive overdose deaths to record levels. I've written about this in the newsletter before, but I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which has one of the highest rates of opioid overdoses in the country. A number of my friends from high school, my neighborhood friends I grew up with, have died

of drug overdoses. And last year in 2020, there were more than 93,000 drug overdoses in the U.S. That's a 30% jump from 2019. A public safety alert like this has not been issued since 2015 when the agency saw an alarming amount of heroin laced with fentanyl, a drug that can cause overdoses in much smaller quantities than heroin. The DEA has seized 9.6 million counterfeit pills already this budget year, and the Washington Post has more on that story. bills already this budget year, and the Washington Post has more on that story. All right, our numbers for today. 541 is the number of votes overcounted for Republican incumbent Senator Martha McSally, according to the Cyber Ninjas audit. 60 was the number of voters undercounted for Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, according to the Cyber Ninjas audit.

the number of voters undercounted for Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, according to the Cyber Ninjas audit. 40% is the potential percentage of Democratic voters who moved, according to the audit. 33% is the potential percentage of Republican voters who moved, according to the audit. 3,432 is the number of ballots kept secret on Arizona's voter rolls because they belong to judges or women who survived domestic violence or other protected groups. All right, this has been a difficult newsletter, so hopefully our have a nice day story today will cheer you up a little bit. It's about the SureChill fridge, which is a solar powered device that can last for two weeks without electricity. And it's opening the door for rural communities to access one of the most important needs on the planet, cool place for food and medicine storage. The fridges have been deployed to over 50 countries where they are now being used to house COVID-19 vaccines

and other medicines that must remain cold. These fridges are very, very important. Their emergence is a really significant achievement that is being made for global health care, Thomas Sorensen of the Cold Chain Unit in UNICEF Supply Division said. The other critical thing is that it's being rolled out at scale, with the scalability and has generated capacity for new vaccines coming in, especially bulky ones like lung and diarrhea vaccines. Good Good Good, the Good News Story website, has some more on this particular piece. You can go check it out in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, that wraps it up on this cold, chilly fall morning here in Brooklyn, New York. As always, if you want more, please go check out readtangle.com. Also,

we announced on Friday, and I want to reiterate again today, you can now support this podcast. I know the newsletter and all these other places, everybody's asking you for money. I get it. I get it. I get it. But truly, in order to produce this podcast, it does cost money. We are losing money on producing the podcast now until our audience grows and we bring on some advertisers and stuff. So we really need your help to keep the ball rolling. If you go to the episode description, you can click a link where it says pledge to support and you can just give us five bucks, nine bucks a month, whatever you can manage, if you can manage.

If you can't, of course, the podcast will remain available. But we are just trying to get a little base of subscriptions to keep us going until we can really grow this thing. Thank you as always for your support and we'll see you tomorrow. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police

procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.