As we head into a week of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi understated over the weekend as “a time of intensity”, we cover that on today’s BradCast along with a bit of postmortem mop-up following last week’s spectacular fail by the dopey Cyber Ninjas in their Maricopa County, Arizona “audit” of the 2020 election. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]
This week, Congress — and the Democratic Party which is now, apparently, being forced to run it all by themselves — is facing several precarious moment on a number of fronts. For a start Congress must pass a continuing resolution to keep the government operating after September 30th, when the current fiscal year ends. Even more importantly, to avoid a “financial calamity”, they must pass a resolution to suspend or raise the statutory debt limit — the amount of money the nation can borrow to pay for spending that has already been approved by Congress — before the country defaults on its loans for the first time in history at some point in October.
Republicans in the U.S. Senate are blocking Democrats from doing either of those things at the moment, in what Pelosi describes as brinkmanship that is “irresponsible beyond words”. That, after Democrats voted with Republicans time and again (three times during the Trump Administration alone) to suspend the debt ceiling in order to pay for much of the $8 trillion in debt that was run up with Republican approval over the past 4 years when Donald Trump was in the White House and they controlled Congress.
We explain the incredibly dangerous (and hypocritical) game that Mitch McConnell and the GOP are currently playing with the world economy, even as Democrats face their own internecine battles over how to pass final approval for the Biden Build Back Better agenda, including a bi-partisan $1.5 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill (which Dems can pass by themselves, if they can agree on it) to expand health care, child care, education and much more, including long-overdue action to address on climate emergency.
Next, BradCast listeners last week may know that we were the first in the nation to break the news that the phony, so-called “audit” of the 2020 Presidential and Senatorial election results in Maricopa (Phoenix), AZ by the partisan, conspiracy theorist Cyber Ninjas outfit ended up proving that the Dominion Voting Systems computer tabulators used to tally results in the state’s largest county did so accurately. That, according to the Ninjas’ own hand-count [PDF] of some 2.1 million ballots. In fact, in a spectacular and hilarious failure, the Ninjas count found the margins of victory for the Democrats in both Joe Biden’s Presidential contest and Mark Kelly’s Senatorial race, were actually larger than those certified by the County and state officials last year.
But, while the Ninjas tried (unsuccessfully) to bury that embarrassing finding, they also tried to flood the zone with smoke and mirrors about tens of thousands of ballots that they suggested were either illegal or fraudulent in their three-volume report on the audit, and a three-hour presentation last Friday to the GOP-controlled AZ state Senate. There too, they failed spectacularly with one outlet after another, including the Republican-majority Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, fact-checking, debunking and explaining the so-called “critical” claims made by the Ninjas.
It seems the Ninjas never bothered to check with any actual election administration professionals, else most of their concerns would likely have been explained to them.
We’re joined today for a postmortem debrief by an insider to much of the past five months of “audit” clown show theater in Maricopa,. You know him as that “bamboo guy”. We have known him for many years as the longtime progressive election transparency advocate JOHN BRAKEY of AUDIT-USA. Brakey joined us previously at the beginning of the “audit” for an insider view, and as it continued on for months past its initially planned three weeks, after comments of his taken out of context by a local reporter went viral, reporting that Brakey was looking for bamboo in the ballots, suggesting they were fraudulent and stuffed into the ballot box by China (as many in the MAGA set falsely claimed). In fact, as the later posted full context of his remarks reveals, Brakey was explaining what the Ninjas believed, not him, and that he was participating in the effort in hopes of “ungaslighting” the public about false and otherwise evidence-free claims being made by Trump supporters about the election results.
Brakey worked — for free, while also refusing to sign the Ninjas’ non-disclosure agreement — with AZ’s former Sec. of State, Ken Bennett, a Republican, who was tapped by the GOP state Senate to serve as their liaison to the “audit”.
“The whole thing was a grift. Okay?,” Brakey tells me today after the audits conclusion. “They didn’t want people to know how screwed up they were. They’re the best talkers but the worst producers. They pretend to know what they were talking about.” But, as Brakey explains again today, they didn’t have a clue what they were doing.
Among the many questions of mine that Brakey speaks to today:
- Were his efforts to “ungaslight” the public by working on the audit successful or was it a mistake on his part to lend his credibility?
- Does he believe the minds of any of the MAGA Mob were ultimately changed through this exercise?
- As a long time election transparency and integrity champion, was there anything that the Ninjas DID uncover that was actually troubling and needs to be addressed or corrected by election officials?
- Will the AZ “audit” make similar post-election reviews more or less likely elsewhere in the country?
- What is the AZ Senate hiding by failing to release thousands of public documents and communications between them and the Ninjas (including emails and texts from Brakey), as ordered by a state judge?
- And much more, including whether or not the Ninjas ever found that elusive “bamboo” in Maricopa County’s 2.1 million hand-marked paper ballots!…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Republicans are so desperate in Texas they drew a ‘terrible’ congressional map to maintain power: strategist
You are a disgusting example of human filth. Your blog (which looks like the work of a child) is full of lies and propaganda and your soul was long ago sucked from your rotten, bloated corpse.
One does not have to look too far to disprove your dismissal. Poor effort, Bozo.
AZ Audit Could Not Find the Identity of 86,391 Voters – They Don’t Appear to Exist and 73.8% Are Democrat or No Party Affiliation
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/not-making-headlines-az-audit-not-find-identity-86391-voters-dont-appear-exist-73-8-democrat-no-party-affiliation/
Hi GFY! You seem nice! (Though you used to be much nicer when you posted under your other name(s) here. Sorry to see that you’ve been so terribly brain-poisoned.)
Anyway, normally I’d delete your comment. Not for the funny insults, but because, again, you have violated the very few rules we have for commenting here by using multiple names to post. But I feel charitable and sorry for you tonight. (Seriously. You may wanna seek mental help at this point.)
Anyway, also sorry that you’ve been duped by the dumbest man on the Internet, Jim Hoft. Especially on the day that he was shown to have posted a fake Arizona “audit” report and hoaxed you with all sorts of fake stories about it. Most would be embarrassed about that and wouldn’t use Hoft as a source for anything. But, as he’s posted hundreds if not thousands of false stories, and you still fall for them, I guess that may be an attraction for you.
Nonetheless, because I feel sorry for you, here’s some help on the hoax you fell for from Jim as posted above. Even the Cyber Ninjas don’t consider those 86,391 voter records to be troubling (those aren’t votes, as Hoft hoaxed you, those are voters in the database.) Of about 30 different “findings” in the Ninjas’ own “audit” report (see page 5 of Volume III) they rank their findings based on concern about them from “Critical” to “High” to “Medium” to “Low” to “Informational”. Jim may have forgot to tell you, but this startling “BOMBSHELL!” from Jimmy was based on an “Informational” point from the Ninjas. Why? Because it was their failure, not the County’s.
Surely you checked Jim’s back before showing your pseudonymous face back here to call me names, right? What? No? Oh, well. I’m always happy to help anyway, bloated corpse or otherwise! 🙂
As AZ Republic reports on those 86,391 voters you have been hoaxed into being concerned about:
The only “critical” claim that Cyber Ninjas identified in its report was that 23,344 voters had their ballots mailed to old addresses.
The county cites numerous legal reasons why this would be the case, including if the voter is in the military, if the voters recently moved and hadn’t updated their driver’s license address, or had requested a one-time temporary address request.
Cyber Ninjas used a commercial database service called Melissa to try to find voters’ addresses and compare them with the voters’ addresses in the county’s database. They used this method to identify several discrepancies, including voters they claimed had moved out of state before they voted and people who had died before they voted.
But that database is not always accurate and does not always have all voter information. The contractors admitted as much when, later in their report, they noted that they couldn’t locate information for about 86,391 voters using the service.
Slate reports similarly:
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Indeed, that data, which Burden suggests is based largely on mail-forwarding requests that are by nature incomplete, was by Cyber Ninjas’ own estimates off by tens of thousands of votes. “86,391 individuals were found with no record in the database for either their name, or anyone with the same last name at the address,†the Cyber Ninjas draft report concedes. “It is expected that a number of these individuals are in fact real people with a limited public record and commercial presence; but it is unclear how large that number is.â€
And yet Cyber Ninjas used this admittedly incomplete dataset to claim there are tens of thousands of what Trump is now touting as “phantom voters.†Critically, if Cyber Ninjas truly wanted to know where these voters lived and if they voted legally, they could have double-checked with official sources, like the Arizona secretary of state’s office.
“The Ninjas apparently did not make any type of attempt to do that,†said Benny White, a Republican veteran election analyst in Arizona, who has spent the past months double-checking Cyber Ninjas’ work. “They just published this report saying all this bad stuff happened. Well, maybe bad stuff happened, but maybe they didn’t do the investigation properly. I’m going to vote for the latter.â€
Hope some of that is useful as your quest for the “truth” continues! And I hope you haven’t been so duped and brain-poisoned that you actually gave Jimmy some of your hard-earned money. But if I was a bettin’ man, I bet you have. Sad!
It appears you�ve decided to cherry pick only data that backs up your bias there Brad. Interesting that the guy who made a documentary talking about a rigged election where a Republican won, now thinks elections are clean as hell when the Democrat wins. It�s kinda pathetic.
But honestly, no concerns about the fact election logs were deleted just as they knew auditors were about to look at them? Ballots accepted with NO signature? Ballots adjudicated at rates 10x higher than normal? No red flags? Let�s see your level of integrity Brad.
Hi Jared!
Nice to see you. And it’s fun that all you guys decided to go harangue that Brad guy at once! 🙂
Anyway…as to your comments…
Um. Perhaps I missed the part where I have ever claimed that “elections are clean as hell”? (Or, for that matter, claimed that the election you refer to was “rigged”.)
Did you actually bother to watch that documentary?
Sure. That sort of thing has been a concerrn for about 20 years. Much more disturbing is that they can be deleted without anyone noticing. In this case, however, Maricopa explains that they were cleared out for their machine audit following the election, and securely archived. The Ninjas didn’t bother to know that or find out if it was true, because they didn’t subpoena the logs, according to the County.
No, it’s not unusual to delete and archive logs when preparing for either a new election or a machine test audit. At least in my 20 years or so of reporting on these things.
There are a number of explanations from longtime election integrity experts on that, beginning with the point that those “NO signature” ballots actually did have a signature that was either too light to be picked up by the low-res scanners Dr. Shiva (who previously made claims of fraud about AZ that he subsequently forgot to mention during his presentation) or were done with ink in colors that is not picked up by scanners at all.
None of that is unusual. But I do hope you or someone else in the public will investigate it, if you are concerned. All of the other confirming information was on those ballots, as I understand it. But, by all means, investigate!
My integrity is well established. 🙂 You are welcome to pretend to question it. Adjudicated ballots is a GOOD thing. It means that the sensitivity has been set in such a way that ballots are examined by human beings, rather than discarded by the computer system. as has been happening (maddeningly) for years!
I’m sorry you’re not familiar with how this stuff works. But taking it out on me seems both silly and unproductive.
Has anyone given an explanation for: How can a rubber handheld ink impression appears behind an arrow that points to the signature area.
Oddly enough it’ looks like the arrow was placed on top mail-in envelope “after” a handheld rubber stamp was used then an arrow was printed on the the ballot, which is impossible.
Ge Sta asked @6:
My understanding, from people who know that system better than I, is that it is not a “rubber handheld ink impressionâ€. Rather, it was added by the software to look like one, but without either obscuring or permanently damaging the original item. Remember, you were looking at a digitally scanned version of the original ballot envelope in question.
#HYPOCRITE!!
#THEN: (6/22/2010) #BradBlog.com
yells about #HugoChavez owning the #IP used by #DominionVotingSystems & how vulnerable these #machines were to #hacking and the #RevolvingDoor of #politicians & #Corruption
(Me: YAY, #BradThePitbull!!)
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_620084
#NOW: (9/27/2021) “‘The Whole Thing Was a #Grift’: A Postmortem for #CyberNinjas’ Spectacularly #Failed AZ ‘Audit’: ‘BradCast’ https://bradblog.com/?p=14011
(Me: UGH!, #Brad, who #Bought You?
Tom Grove @8:
#ME #NOW: #DominionVotingSystems and all the other systems are still vulnerable to #hacking
(You: Whaaa?)
#ME #NOW: If you have any #evidence of same, please let me know! Or let the #CyberNinjas know. Or let #anyone know!
(You: Apparently #evidence free. #Desperate. #Brain-poisoned. #Clueless.)