by Charlie Kirk
Democrats are positively terrified of election audits that aren’t completely controlled by the political establishment. If there’s a chance an audit might reveal meaningful information, you can bet Democrats (and certain weak Republicans) will stridently oppose it. The only audits Democrats and their allies support are the ones designed to rubber-stamp previous conclusions.
The increasingly desperate attacks on the ongoing audit in Maricopa County, Arizona—particularly those intended to undermine the credibility of the auditors—show just how much the Democratic Party establishment fears the whole process. Their entire argument is based on sarcasm, scorn, and scare quotes.
The auditors are inspecting the paper that ballots were printed on? They must believe in a far-fetched conspiracy theory!
The auditors are checking to make sure the ballots don’t have watermarks that are not supposed to be there? They must be members of fringe online message boards!
The audit is being funded primarily by private donations? It must be an elaborate “grift” rather than a serious fact-finding effort (not to mention they need the funds to fend off the litany of lawsuits they’re facing).
By smearing the auditors as corrupt and/or inept, and the audit itself as a partisan stunt, leftists are hoping they can discredit the process and convince Americans to stop asking pesky questions about whether any laws were broken or procedural loopholes exploited during the 2020 elections. That’s the way people respond to questions when they don’t want anyone to know the answers.
It’s not just the Arizona audit, either. Democrats and their media allies are already fully engaged in a crusade to preemptively impugn the legitimacy of any audits that might be conducted in other states, describing conservative support for audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere as “a bid to bolster former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”
If they really believe the 2020 elections were “the most secure in American history,” then they should welcome audits as a way of substantiating that claim. Indeed, they should even be celebrating audits run by Republicans, since their conclusions will carry so much more weight with GOP voters. That said, the Arizona auditors have practically been begging Democrats to participate, but the Democrats have only been interested in attacking the process from afar.
Neither should the Democrats be afraid of incompetence or chicanery. The American people are savvy enough to see through a poorly crafted deception, especially since the mainstream media are already doing everything in their power to find flaws in the audit process they can expose. And again, the auditors repeatedly have invited their critics to engage in constructive cooperation, only to be met with hostility.
Even as they attack the audits, liberals also love to argue that they’re redundant and unnecessary, pointing out that election officials in Arizona and Georgia have already conducted their own post-election audits. They always neglect to mention, however, that these were partial audits, not comprehensive reviews like the one being conducted in Maricopa County. They also leave out the fact that they were designed to validate what took place, rather than identify potential vulnerabilities in the election process that might have been exploited.
We have laws for a reason, and if laws were broken during the 2020 election, then the American people have a right to know what happened and why. Maybe there was no fraud—but watching state and local election officials pat themselves on the back for a job well done does nothing to dispel widespread public concerns.
Democrats claim that election audits like the one in Arizona are an existential threat to democracy, but it’s difficult to see how that could be the case unless they reveal that our elections have been hijacked by political partisans.
Every time you see a liberal melting down about election audits, just ask yourself: What are they so afraid of?
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Charlie Kirk is the founder and president of Turning Point USA and host of the top-rated podcast and nationally syndicated Salem radio program, “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
Photo “First time voter” by Karri VanKirk CC 2.0.
