Fraud claims fail, again

Interesting article about the latest outcome of investigation into alleged voter fraud in Arizona:

In section 6.6.7 of the “audit” of votes cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., two years ago, one finds an estimate that 282 dead people submitted ballots.

The methodology is offered with a complicated abundance of jargon. Using an “identity and address validation tool” called “Personator,” the team hunting for fraud in Arizona’s largest county cross-checked deaths with votes as indicated in the file “VM55 Final Voted Nov2020 PBRQ” (MD5 hash: 43070bc7afdf40a37cd45092e9733654). And, lo: 282 suspected dead voters were found.

This wasn’t enough to shift the results in Maricopa, where Joe Biden won by 45,000 votes. It was, however, an important part of the narrative: Here was a place where suspect ballots were cast, amplifying questions about the level of confidence one could have in the election results. The report recommended that “the Attorney General further investigate this finding to confirm the validity of this finding.”

Arizona’s attorney general did investigate the finding — and found that the finding had no validity. Of those 282 dead voters, only one was dead. Many of those contacted by his office, Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) said in a letter, “were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.”

The probe was yet another massive waste of state employees’ time and taxpayers’ money. There’s some slight benefit to the state in establishing that the allegation made by the auditing firm, Cyber Ninjas, had no merit. But Brnovich’s probe will not diminish skepticism about election results. Those who believed that the firm had uncovered dead voters solely on the basis of the presented evidence — which, despite all of those complicated numbers, was just a rough match of two lists of identities — will simply shift their assumptions about rampant fraud to one of the Ninjas’ other claims. That’s why the “audit” existed in the first place: to surround the election tally with as much just-asking-questions fog as possible.

It’s very easy to simply wave this away, to shrug at another claim of fraud falling apart. Why even bother covering it?

The answer is simple. As often as possible, we should highlight the fact that despite all of this attention and focus, no more than a dozen or two cases of fraud have come to light. The past 21 months have seen a flurry of allegations of varying complexity, asserting that statistical or circumstantial evidence shows that rampant fraud occurred. And every single time, those assertions crumple under scrutiny. This is not only the perpetual endgame for the claims, it’s the predictable one — as we keep seeing.