Senate audit is about to be released. Does anybody really doubt what the conclusion will be?

In just a few days, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann’s auditors will release the preliminary findings of their investigation into Maricopa County’s election.

After long months of UV-lighted, 5G photographed study of the county’s 2.1 million ballots and tabulation machinery, the Cyber Ninjas are expected to present their draft report to Fann and her “Senate team” on Monday. 

No need to wait for the big reveal. I can predict two things with confidence:

1.     The Cyber Ninjas will announce they have found evidence of fraud.

Or, in the alternative, they will say they found inconsistencies and discrepancies that point to fraud and if only they had the county’s routers, they could tell us for sure.

2.     This audit will be an epic fail. In fact, it was doomed from the start if you believe Fann’s reasoning for conducting it.

If the ninjas don’t announce, insinuate or otherwise give gas to the notion that something nefarious happened here, I would fall over in a dead faint.

There is plenty of money to made from the audit

This audit was conducted by and funded by supporters of Donald Trump.

Oh sure, it’s an official state audit, begun with $150,000 in taxpayer funds. But the conspiracy crowd kicked another $5.7 million to actually finance the operation.

Meanwhile, nobody knows how much money has been made off of this audit by the various groups, grifters and politicians who are relentless in shaking down Republicans for donations to “preserve election integrity”.

The Arizona Republican Party has been using the audit as its chief fundraising tool for most of the year. Countless Republican politicians have cashed in. Rep. Mark Finchem, an Oro Valley Republican who is hoping to oversee elections as Arizona’s next secretary of state, is even selling T-shirts. He’d be happy to send you one for the meager sum of $35 to $45.

Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, now travels the country advising kindred Republicans in other states how to conduct their own audits – all while putting out almost-daily fundraising pleas.

“I am an Arizona State Senator, fighting for election integrity in Arizona and standing strong amid the storm!” she wrote, in one recent plea for cash. “Please help me continue to fight for America’s Audit!”

They have no reason to stop this gravy train

Meanwhile, the previously unknown Cyber Ninjas – which, from what I can tell, is a couple of guys who run their cybersecurity business out of UPS mailbox store in Sarasota, Fla. – are now a national phenom (in some circles, anyway).

Bottom line: There’s big money to be made as states across the country now clamor for their own “Arizona-style” audits of the 2020 election. Do you think an audit that gives Maricopa County a clean bill of health will keep that gravy train rolling?

Those ninjas know what is powering their nunchucks.

Which brings us to Senate President Fann.

On some level I can understand why a once-respected Republican leader decided to take a header down this rabbit hole.

After Trump narrowly lost Arizona, the party’s resident kooks proclaimed loudly and often that the election was stolen, spinning wild and then wilder conspiracy yarns about felt-tip pens, about ballots secretly flown in from Asia in the dead of night, about Venezuelan-inspired plots by the Chinese (or possibly, the Iranians?) to switch votes.

The audit quickly went down the rabbit hole

In the absence of sane Republicans speaking up, the crackpots convinced GOP voters that the fix was in on Nov. 3. More importantly, Republican senators Fann needs to remain in her leadership post were convinced the fix was in.

And so began Fann’s audit, to “restore voter confidence in our elections”.

But then she hired the ninjas, whose only elections experience appears to be a CEO who promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote was stolen.

Then came Trump supporters counting the ballots.

Then came the audit’s official Twitter account, run by Trump supporters. And the audit’s broadcast partner, One America News, whose “reporter” at one point was coordinating with Rudy Giuliani and later was raising funds to help pay for the audit.

Then came the hunt for bamboo and the search for “kinematic artifacts” using untested technology invented by a Trump supporter who claimed he could root out phony ballots.

Then came the Senate’s supposedly independent auditor, head ninja Doug Logan,  appearing in a documentary about how the election was stolen. 

Then came the most damning of all: The auditors’ various public claims and insinuations that databases were missing (they weren’t), that ballots were missing (they weren’t), that 74,000 early ballots never requested somehow magically appeared (nothing magical about it to those who understand how to interpret Maricopa County’s election data).

All Fann did here was fan the flames

So now we await the result of the now-infamous Maricopa County election audit – to be released publicly next week.

The result was really never in question. 

Those who believe the election was stolen will glom onto the inevitable ninja conclusion that something heinous happened here (and please, keep those contributions coming). 

Those who don’t will dismiss the findings, with a gigantic eye roll.

All Fann has done is fan the flames of doubt and division with an audit that has been astonishingly transparent in its bias, conducted by people glaringly devoid of qualifications.

Her goal of restoring voter confidence?

That ended the moment the first ninja leaped into town.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Arizona Republic can be found here ***