Townhall - Columnists - Ted Noel
OPINION
In the Arizona Audit, Words Matter
Ted Noel | Posted: Sep 27, 2021 12:01 AM
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Leftist news outlets are trumpeting the idea that “the Arizona Audit proves that Biden won!” And Just The News says that “the final count of votes in the state's largest county of Maricopa showing President Joe Biden won Arizona was accurate.” Certainly the argument is over. So why is President Trump still claiming that the election was rigged? He didn’t become a billionaire by being stupid.
This is one of those times when we wish that people would have used more circumspect language. Both the Arizona auditors and John Solomon committed a cardinal error that has allowed the Left to celebrate victory and ignore the fine print. Both note that Biden got more “votes” than Trump. That conclusion is incorrect, because it ignores the rest of the story.
A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible, registered voter. It must be cast in the time, place, and manner prescribed by law. Anything else is not a vote. In Arizona, it is cast on paper ballots and read by machines. All the “accurate count” showed was that the machines counted the pieces of paper accurately. That’s all machines do. They do not count “ballots.”
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READ MORE: https://townhall.com/columnists/tednoel/2021/09/27/in-the-arizona-audit-words-matter-n2596508
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Maricopa County did everything it could to block the audit. If it was confident that it had done its job correctly, then one would expect that it would cooperate fully. Indeed, with the hand count matching the canvas, it seems that all should be well. But then we find that hundreds of thousands of election files were deleted from Maricopa County’s computer servers the day before the audit began. That smacks of guilty knowledge.
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At a bare minimum, the Arizona Presidential election was irretrievably tainted. The taint was large enough to make determination of the actual winner impossible. That’s why I wrote before January 6 that VP Pence should send several slates of electors back to their respective state legislatures for a final determination. Those states, by repeated violations of their own state laws, did not hold elections. The processes they followed did not allow a tally of lawful votes.
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Pieces of paper with marks on them are not ballots until it is determined that those marks were made by a lawful voter in the time and manner prescribed by the legislature. Only after that bar is crossed for every ballot is it possible to have an election. Biden did not win the Arizona election because there was no Arizona election. It is impossible to truthfully say that he got more “votes” than Donald Trump. Nobody actually knows.
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