> Also consider what you are saying about the ballots, that if a bad person gets access to them post facto, that that is bad.
seems that 1 bad actor can taint the ballots for future discovery.
also, unlimited discovery just leads to a Gish Gallop. looking for traces of bamboo, kinetic artifacts, routers, etc.
How many conservative friends do you have? I don't think people understand the positive effect that the Arizona ballot has had on their faith in the election.
It was "we're looking for bamboo fibers because there is a claim that these ballots were printed in China, where bamboo is used to make paper, and we didn't find any, so that seems unlikely."
Those CrAzY things actually have a calming effect on the conspiracies, not a fueling one. There are some people who are susceptible to conspiracies who will never let this go (in the same way that their left leaning counterparts never let Russian collusion stories, or governor kidnapping plots go), but for your average, not-that-into-politics conservative voter, the audits are good.
If they had discovered something obvious, it's likely that they would have leaked it (and gotten their report in on time). But I suspect that they'll find something to point out in their draft report due next week -- not a smoking gun, but something sufficient to show that the fraud was just too clever to have left one.
So I'll be curious to know what your conservative friends think when the draft report is released next week. I imagine there will be an HN article about it, so I'll keep an eye out there.
That number is likely even higher, now, after the crap that the GOP is pulling in Arizona. One of my close friends (a conservative, who doesn't even like Trump) is now convinced that the Democrats somehow stole the election. It's insane.
1) You are not allowed to look at the ballots, and if you do you are traitor. Just trust us and stop asking questions.
2) Look at these things as many times as you want.
Doing a third audit, with zero oversight/accountability, is not a serious attempt to detect fraud. It's a means to "discover" wrongdoing that can't be proven/disproven and further confuse people about what really happened.
The point isn't to reach the truth, but to cement in people's minds the idea that a massive crime has occurred, based on the psychological bias of "there's no smoke without fire", despite all the smoke being generated by a smoke machine.
This strategy of misinformation has long been known, and was portrayed quite brilliantly in the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate":
> Are they saying: "Are there any Communists in the Defense Department?" No, of course not, they're saying: "How many Communists are there in the Defense Department?"
Your friends may be different, but all the public evidence I’ve seen is that Republicans and Trump supporters (not exactly the same universe) have gotten less confident in the 2020 election over time (including the course of the AZ “audit”), not more.