[continued from previous message]   
      
   Kelly Johnson, who traveled from Orange County, California, to attend the   
   audit and carries a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum in a holster as he walks   
   around between the Coliseum parking lot and the tent encampment to guard   
   against antifa, says that Joe Biden belongs in Guantánamo Bay.*   
      
   It’s been treated in the national press corps almost like distant history,   
   but it was only five months ago that a group of similarly minded Trump   
   supporters stormed the Capitol of the United States assaulting police   
   officers and hunting for public officials.   
      
   “What’s going on right here is dangerous,” said Kirk Vandermiller, a   
   counterprotester standing across from the audit supporters with his own   
   signs.   
      
   At about midday and in 99-degree heat, Vandermiller set up on the opposite   
   side of the street from the pro-audit tent with a two-sided replica road   
   construction sign, one side reading “ELECTION FRAUD IN PROGRESS” and the   
   other “SORE LOSER ZONE.”   
      
   After Vandermiller put out his signs, one of the women in the pro-audit   
   tent put out a new sign that looked freshly spray painted, which read   
   “Winner Zone.”   
      
   “They’re living in a fantasy,” Vandermiller said. “Adults live in reality,   
   children live in fantasy, and this is a movement of people with childlike   
   minds.”   
      
   As I began to head for the audit site, someone from the pro-audit side   
   shouted at Vandermiller: “What are you afraid of?”   
      
   This is a major talking point of the pro-audit side: If election officials   
   and Democrats had nothing to hide, they wouldn’t oppose the process.   
   What’s going on in the actual audit site, though, leaves plenty to worry   
   about.   
      
   First, the public has no idea who is paying for the audit. The Arizona   
   Senate put up $150,000 in funding, but the cost for the audit is reported   
   to run into the millions of dollars. The Cyber Ninjas are raising that   
   money from anonymous third parties.   
      
   What little we do know about the auditors themselves does not bode well   
   for an impartial count. The counters have been drawn mainly from the ranks   
   of the grassroots Republican Party, and the few who have been identified   
   publicly are self-described partisans. One of the workers who spoke with   
   CNN, Elouise Flagg, was straightforward about her perspective. “I think   
   Donald Trump won the election—firm believer,” Flagg told the network. “I   
   hope we come to a point where we’re happy with the results and truth is   
   told.”   
      
   Another auditor was a former Republican state legislator named Anthony   
   Kern who participated in “Stop the Steal” events, was photographed on the   
   steps of the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot, and had been fired from a law   
   enforcement job for lying to a supervisor and placed on an official   
   misconduct list. Kern’s name was also on the ballot as an official elector   
   for Donald Trump—under normal Arizona audit procedures, it is illegal to   
   count a vote when your name is on the ballot. Kern was ultimately removed   
   as a counter because of “optics,” Senate liaison Ken Bennett told   
   reporters in the press pool when I was at the coliseum.   
      
   And then there are those hasty counting procedures, which seem almost   
   designed to create errors. Despite Smith’s insistence that this recount   
   was not a recount, the audit supporters and the rest of the Republican   
   base seem ready to view it as exactly that. Bennett, the former Arizona   
   secretary of state who is now the leader of the audit, said this count—and   
   he called it a “count”—is being conducted to look for “more than   
   acceptable variance” from the official tally.   
      
   “More than acceptable variance” is 0.3 percent, or Joe Biden’s margin of   
   victory in the state, Bennett told me. In Maricopa County, that would be a   
   change of 6,268 ballots, or approximately one error toward President   
   Donald Trump every third batch count. Again, the count allows up to two   
   discrepancies per batch between the two official counters and a third   
   “off” counter.   
      
   “This has been designed in a way to create this doubt and to be able to   
   put out misinformation and not be honest with the public about what they   
   found,” Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told me. “A   
   really key piece of any audit is that you can replicate your results, and   
   they’re creating results that are not going to be replicable by anyone   
   else who wanted to do the same thing again.”   
      
   Adrian Fontes agrees. “I can guarantee you right now they will not find   
   the same numbers because they’re not performing the same acts,” he says.   
   “Worse yet, spinning these Lazy Susans around and only giving these folks   
   three seconds per ballot and then discounting one of the three folks, and   
   those numbers, means that they’re going to get wildly different numbers   
   that are going to be wholly unverifiable.”   
      
   “We didn’t do so bad,” said deputy audit liaison John Brakey in the press   
   booth, on one of the final days before the audit suspended its operations   
   so that Veterans Memorial Coliseum could host a week of high school   
   graduations. “We didn’t qualify for Bizarro Watch, so that’s a win!”   
      
   Brakey was discussing his and Ken Bennett’s appearance on The Daily Show   
   the night before. “All Chinese ballots are on bamboo? Is it because soy   
   sauce would be too obviously racist?” Daily Show correspondent Jordan   
   Klepper asked Brakey and Bennett on national television.   
      
   “I consider it a victory because we survived it,” Brakey said.   
      
   The bamboo question had been trailing Brakey ever since he first reported   
   to a local member of the Arizona press that the audit was indeed looking   
   through high-resolution digital cameras for traces of bamboo in the   
   ballots. “They shot the messenger,” Brakey muttered at one point. “The   
   rest of my life they’re going to talk about this.”   
      
   Down below, cameras were snapping photos of ballot after ballot, still   
   looking for bamboo. But it was never Brakey’s idea, he wanted the press to   
   know. It was another member of the audit team, Jovan Pulitzer, who came up   
   with the notion that you could prove or disprove Chinese influence in the   
   election by hunting for bamboo traces on potentially smuggled ballots.   
   Brakey spoke at length about Pulitzer, describing him as a charlatan. He   
   also shared with reporters an email dossier that describes Pulitzer as a   
   “con artist who is a master of hoaxes and fraud” and a “failed treasure   
   hunter.”   
      
   Back in December, Pulitzer said that he could use forensics to try to   
   detect bamboo in suspected Chinese ballots; in March, he declared that “my   
   technology and intellectual property is assisting one of the most   
   impressive and qualified audit teams ever assembled.” Bennett subsequently   
   confirmed Pulitzer would be involved in the audit.   
      
   The bamboo hunt, though, had become such a national embarrassment that   
   Pulitzer himself tried to disown it during a conversation with me. “I   
   don’t lend any credence to that story,” Pulitzer said of the claim that   
   China had flown in tens of thousands of ballots to Maricopa County via a   
   South Korean airplane to swing the election for Biden. Pulitzer told me   
   that he’s a scientist merely trying to help “to tell whether that story is   
   true or made up bullshit.” Like Brakey, he says, “Don’t shoot the   
   messenger.”   
      
   As for the South Korean jetliner story, “if that’s found to be fraud, then   
   I’m all for taking a piece of bamboo and whipping the shit out of that   
   person for making up that bullshit story, because that is just un-   
   freaking-forgivable,” Pulitzer said. “But right now, nobody knows. And,   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)