Arizona GOP's election audit labeled 'a gigantic embarrassment' undercut by 'the looniest bunch the party could find'

According to Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman, the audit of the 2020 presidential ballots in Arizona's Maricopa County could have handed Republicans a tool to contest election results in other states if it hadn't been conducted by a group of misfits who ended up embarrassing the GOP nationally.

As it was, the liberal columnist suggested, the botched attempt to overturn the election results in favor of Donald Trump might end up being a gift to Democrats.

Getting right to it, Waldman called the disastrous and expensive exercise in futility, "... a kind of Renaissance fair for deranged conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump dead-enders" conducted by "the looniest bunch the party could find."

Noting the Arizona audit shenanigans even included searching for traces of bamboo in the paper ballots that would indicate interference from China, the columnist sarcastically suggested Americans should expect nothing less than "....the final report, which may at last reveal that it was aliens from the planet Xerpdorp, working with George Soros and D.B. Cooper, who stole the state's election."

"The Maricopa County audit, which Trump has insisted all along would show that he really won the state, has been such a farce that even many Arizona Republicans have tried to distance themselves from it. GOP state senators are feuding with one another over whose fault it is; the governor says, 'I don't think we should spend any more time thinking about 2020'; and the whole thing has proved to be a gigantic embarrassment," he wrote before noting that those trying to overturn the 2020 election don't represent the best and the brightest the Republican Party has to offer -- and he laid the difficulties on Donald Trump's front steps.

"One of the most remarkable things about 2020 is that Trump himself never summoned the wherewithal to put together a real effort to steal the election," he explained. "Though he had been saying for months that fraud was rampant and any outcome other than him winning was illegitimate by definition, on Election Day he seemed to be caught off guard. All his legal and PR maneuvering in the subsequent days was ad hoc and incompetent, one of the consequences of which was that many Republicans in his own government and at the state level were reluctant to help him."

For that, Waldman wrote, Democrats should consider themselves lucky.

"When Democrats watch a farce like the Arizona audit play itself out, they ought to say a word of thanks. If these people knew what they were doing, it could be even worse," he warned.

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