GOP 'conspiracy crew' slammed for yet another partisan audit by Arizona columnist

On Monday, writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts scorched Arizona Republicans for starting yet another partisan investigation into the voting process in Maricopa County to try to prove former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" about the election being stolen.

The previous such audit, conducted at taxpayer expense, was derided even by Trump supporters as a "clown show" and ended with no evidence of fraud and the company behind it shutting down amid contempt of court fines. But that isn't the end of it.

"Yeah, I know. You thought the audit of the 2020 election was over, that it ended in September when the Senate’s own Trump supporting auditors could find no evidence of widespread fraud," wrote Roberts. "O ye, of far too much faith that, at some point, sanity will sink in. That the state Senate’s Trump contingent will accept the fact that their guy lost, freeing us poor taxpayers from having to continue shelling out money to chase a conspiracy that doesn’t – and didn’t – exist. They won’t and so we will open our wallets wide once again, that is."

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The new investigation involves a taxpayer-funded special master, former GOP state Rep. John Shadegg, who has contracted three IT specialists to investigate whether voting equipment in Maricopa County was connected to the internet and vulnerable to hacking. But the whole premise, wrote Roberts, is ridiculous.

"The county has long said the equipment wasn’t connected to the internet," wrote Roberts. "The Republican-run Maricopa County Board of Supervisors hired two sets of elections experts who concluded that the election equipment wasn’t connected to the internet. The Senate’s own audit provided the most convincing evidence of all that the election equipment wasn’t connected to the internet ... None of it was good enough for the Senate’s conspiracy crew."

"The reason the election equipment was supposedly hacked, as the conspiracy theory goes, was to change thousands of votes from Trump to Biden," noted Roberts. "But the Senate’s own Cyber Ninja auditors hand counted the paper ballots, all 2.1 million of them. That hand count matched the machine tally by Dominion Voting Systems. And both counts showed Biden got more votes than Trump. But if the machines had been hacked, wouldn’t that hand count be diff … oh, never mind."

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