So Now ‘Q’ Is A Consultant On the AZ Senate’s Sham ‘Fraudit’ of Maricopa County Ballots

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Kelly Weill reports at The Daily Beast, a  so-called audit of the 2020 election in Arizona was always going to be crazy. This is something else.

An ongoing “fraudit” of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County, Arizona, is taking its cues straight from a man intimately tied to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

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The counting has just begun, but already the audit has become almost inextricable from the far-right internet. There, audit-watchers share tips and concerns about security offered by Ron Watkins, a man suspected of helping birth the QAnon craze.

[W]atkins is a former administrator of 8kun, the forum that hosted the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely accuses Trump’s foes of Satanic pedophilia and cannibalism. A new HBO documentary argues that Watkins is one of the authors behind the conspiracy theory. Watkins, who did not return a request for comment, denies that he is the anonymous “Q.”

That hasn’t stopped him from imbuing an outlandish process with an extra dose of paranoia.

Even before the audit kicked off, Watkins suggested that it might be attacked by rioters. “Will Maricopa county deploy police to protect the auditors from rioters?” he posted on his Telegram channel in mid-April. “Will the police end up standing down? You cannot have information security without physical security.”

On Saturday, The Florida Man echoed Q’s comments in a press statement. Trump Calls on Arizona Governor Ducey to Provide Security for ‘Patriots’ Conducting Election Audit. Q is the tail that wags the dog.

He wasn’t the only QAnon-adjacent person stoking those fears. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn claimed, without evidence, that anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter activists would attack the audit. “I’m telling you now, I’ll say it today, because we have intel that they may be bringing people down from Portland and Seattle to disrupt,” Flynn said during a speech this month. “I mean to disrupt finding the truth, discovering the truth?“

Watkins has continued to imply the left was traveling to protest the “fraudit“—a process virtually no one outside of the far right has taken seriously. “If you have proof, chat logs, or information regarding BLM or antifa booking rooms in Arizona to protest the audits, please email me,” he wrote several days later.

So far, any threat has yet to materialize. Outside the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the audit is being held, much of the ire appears reserved for Maricopa County’s Republican-majority board of supervisors, who previously certified the vote that gave Joe Biden the state’s electoral votes. “Board of supervisors are enemies of the nation,” read one flag, photographed by the Arizona Republic.

But after months of “Stop the Steal” memes about phantom voter fraud, the security theater has been steadily escalating—with some semi-official help.

The event is currently receiving security from the Arizona Rangers, a civilian law enforcement auxiliary that has raised more than $130,000 on GoFundMe since it began patrolling outside the audit. On Monday evening, the two most recent donations (each for $100) read, “Because I want the truth out once and for all, plus I want the right President back in Office, and that is Trump” and “THEY CANT STOP WHATS COMING! WWG1WGA!” (“WWG1WGA” is a QAnon slogan.)

[O]n Facebook, the Arizona Rangers shared an article about Trump’s comments, from the fringe site Gateway Pundit. The article concluded with the claim that, “The Coliseum is well guarded and there are contingencies if someone tried to bully their way in. But the Democrats are desperate and will do anything—even steal an election to gain power.” (The Rangers, a group of more than 400 officers, do not receive state funding and do not have the full powers of a police force. They did not return a request for comment.)

Watkins’ connections to the audit have previously drawn scrutiny. The recount is being steered by a Florida-based firm called Cyber Ninjas, whose CEO Doug Logan has promoted conspiracy theories about the election and tweeted multiple times at Watkins. Watkins’ Telegram posts about the audit are also shared frequently in groups dedicated to tracking the pointless process.

But in Arizona, these channels are more than just group chats. A spin-off of the largest channel claimed to host a live Q&A with a state Senate-appointed official in charge of monitoring the audit. (That official could not be reached for comment on Monday.)

Also on Monday, Logan, the Cyber Ninjas CEO, argued in court that his auditing methods should remain a secret and that a court hearing on the recount should be closed to the media and the public. That commitment to secrecy comes even as conservative outlets are promoting what they claim are the audit’s yet-to-be-announced findings.

One image, which appeared on far-right network OAN and some similarly conspiratorial blogs, shows a tally of supposed Arizona ballots flagged as suspicious for reasons like “absentee ballots cast from addresses other than where voters legally reside.” The result, the unsourced graphic claims, is more than 250,000 “possible illegal votes.”

The provenance of the graphic is unclear. A spokesperson for Logan and the audit effort did not return a request for comment on the graphic, or whether the audit had even processed 250,000 ballots to begin with. Hosts of OAN, which promoted the graphic, have been involved in launching a fundraiser for the audit. Despite the recount’s ongoing status, one of those hosts recently appeared in an OAN broadcast in which she declared that the process “will unravel the Democrat schemes from 2020.”

Another standard riff on the unsourced graphic came in a blog post that announced “It’s happening Patriots! The truth is coming out… TRUMP WON!” (Trump did not win.)

That post was shared by Bobby Piton, the manager of an Illinois-based financial planning firm. Piton has previously promoted theories about voter fraud in Arizona ( a USA Today analysis rated those claims as false).

Reached by phone, Piton told The Daily Beast he was working on the audit in an unofficial capacity, after Logan asked him for his assistance. Piton said he and Watkins had been in touch last year and had recently reconnected to discuss the Arizona audit.

“He just reached out and said, ‘I see you’re doing God’s work,’” Piton told The Daily Beast. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m trying, I’m trying.’ And, you know, he feels the same way about what he’s doing. And we just, we just kind of spoke about, I guess about the ballots. We were just talking about the UV lights [auditors are shining UV lights on the ballots]. We just kind of kick the tires around that and different technologies that could be used to expose voter fraud in the future, how we can maybe come up with ideas that we share with the public and collaborate.”

Piton said he didn’t know much about QAnon and that Watkins had denied being Q. That said, Piton noted, he wouldn’t really care if Watkins was behind the conspiracy theory.

He just wanted to proceed with the absurd exercise in Arizona.

“I have no idea what his involvement is or anything like that,” Piton said. “Frankly, it doesn’t really matter for what I’m working on with them.”

The Courts need to shut down this crime against democracy.

UPDATE:





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6 thoughts on “So Now ‘Q’ Is A Consultant On the AZ Senate’s Sham ‘Fraudit’ of Maricopa County Ballots”

  1. How has this totally insane sack-o-shit not already been disbarred? “Trump-loving lawyer Lin Wood bizarrely claims he roamed White House — and found ex-president still there”, https://www.rawstory.com/l-lin-wood-2652826035/

    Trump-loving lawyer Lin Wood bizarrely claimed to his 840,000 followers on Telegram that he was in the White House looking for President Joe Biden, but instead found Trump behind the Resolute Desk — proving he was still president, reported The Daily Dot.

    “I was right. No Joey in the Oval Office. But I did run into our President of the United States,” Wood posted. “President Trump is hanging out and working in the office in which we re-elected him to serve in a historic landslide victory on November 3, 2020.”

    Wood posted photos of empty rooms in the White House and another of Trump seated in the Oval Office — which he previously posted in February and was originally taken in March 2020 — as “proof” of his claims.

    The attorney, who’s facing possible sanctions from the Georgia Bar Association, then shared a post from QAnon promoter GhostEzra, who claims Biden is actually dead and was replaced by a body double.

  2. Vice News reports “QAnon Is Obsessively Watching for the Arizona Recount to Bring Trump Back”, https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xv3x/qanon-is-obsessively-watching-for-the-arizona-recount-to-bring-trump-back

    For the last five days, Trump supporters and QAnon followers have been obsessively monitoring livestreams of auditors re-counting ballots from the November presidential election in the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix—a GOP-led effort that’s shrouded in mystery and is at least in part being funded by taxpayers.

    A roster of people have signed up to ensure all the cameras inside the building are monitored at all times. Anything suspicious is flagged, shared on MAGA forums and QAnon Telegram channels, and endlessly scrutinized for evidence of wrongdoing. The counting began Friday and is expected to last for 16 days, with 250 people working in two shifts to do the job.

    Audit update videos are published breathlessly on YouTube, maps showing the positions of tables within the count center are created and shared—and pretty much everyone is pushing wild and baseless conspiracy theories about the operation.

    The reason for this intense focus on Maricopa County is that all these people still believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump and that if the audit reveals any discrepancy in the original count, it will trigger some sort of nationwide recount of votes that will lead to Trump’s triumphant return to the White House.

    Of course such a scenario isn’t remotely possible, but that hasn’t stopped a 24-7 torrent of disinformation emerging from the MAGA fever swamp.

    Leading the charge is Ron Watkins, the administrator of the message board 8kun … and who was recently outed as the likely anonymous leader of QAnon, has been sharing videos of what he claims is suspicious activity of individual auditors.

    He even shared a diagram of the layout of the count center to his 180,000 Telegram followers showing the position of cameras in relation to tables within the building.

    “We are watching the auditors,” Watkins wrote. “No shenanigans will get through the sharp eyes of the watchers.”

    On Patriots.win, a rabidly pro-Trump forum formerly known as TheDonald, members were glued to every update. The top pinned post on the message board Monday was a detailed list of links to all the livestream cameras and other resources for people who wanted to watch events in real time.

    On QAnon Telegram channels, the conspiracies grew even wilder.

    One prominent influencer known as Joe M. wrote that Ducey’s refusal to provide security for the audit was a signal that “domestic paramilitary paid mercenaries, cunningly named ‘Antifa’, are on standby and will be deployed against American civil servants, and the public at large, when political and media subterfuge is no longer effective, and the true result is finally revealed.”

    Another prominent QAnon influencer, Mel Q, posted a message that said no matter what happens in the real world, even an earthquake, supporters should “keep your eyes on the Audit.”

    As a result, members of these forums are now seeing everything else happening in the world as an effort to distract from the audit.

    But oddly, Trump’s supporters or QAnon followers don’t seem to be too concerned about Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that’s leading the audit.

    The company is a complete unknown, even among Republicans in its own state, according to a Politico report citing numerous GOP officials in Florida who said they’d never heard of Cyber Ninjas or its founder, Doug Logan.

    • Psychology textbooks will now be using the MAGA/QAnon conspiracy cult as an example of “collective insanity” for decades to come.

  3. Arizona Mirror reports, “GOP secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem will appear on QAnon talk show”, https://www.azmirror.com/blog/gop-secretary-of-state-candidate-mark-finchem-will-appear-on-qanon-talk-show/

    Oro Valley Republican state legislator [and insurrection instigator] and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem is scheduled to appear on a popular far-right QAnon talk show in May.

    “I’ve scheduled him on the show, he has agreed to come on the show. He is going to do a full two hours,” Zak Paine of QAnon talk show “RedPill78” said in a clip posted by Alex Kaplan of liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America. Paine said Finchem will be on his show the first weekend of May.

    RedPill78 is hosted by Paine and has been a platform for QAnon and a number of other unfounded conspiracy theories, leading to his YouTube channel being removed last year by the platform. Paine and a host of other conservative and QAnon channels who were removed by YouTube have been attempting to sue the platform over their removals.

    [I]t also appears that Paine has been communicating with Finchem for some time.

    “Let me tell you, from my conversations with (Finchem), this is not going to be some fly-by-night thing like we have seen in the past in other states where we have had audits that took 24 hours,” Paine said about the Arizona Senate’s audit of the Maricopa County election results.

    The channel has also interviewed others involved with the Senate’s audit, including Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, an icon among election fraud believers who has a role in Arizona’s audit by supplying technology that can allegedly spot “counterfeit” ballots. No counterfeit ballots have been found in any United States election.

    Paine was also present at the U.S. Capitol during the failed Jan. 6 coup and admitted to going past the barricades that lead to the Capitol entrance.

    [Finchem was also in Washington D.C. on January 6.]

    If he goes on RedPill78, Finchem will be appearing on a platform that has promoted the “Great Reset” conspiracy popular among QAnon believers, alleged connections between cancer and vaccines, a belief that a Korean Air plane flew fraudulent ballots into Arizona and numerous interviews with people well known in QAnon circles.

    Finchem himself has dabbled in QAnon, sharing a widely debunked photo on Gab that actor Paul Walker was killed by the Clinton’s because he was “coming forward” with information about alleged crimes against the Clinton Foundation in Haiti. The actor died in 2013 when the sports car he was a passenger in crashed into a lamp post and a gas pipe, which burst into flames.

    “Another clintoncide,” Finchem commented on the photo. The Clintons are a major target of those in the QAnon community.

  4. The only crime here is Fann’s and Borrelli’s. Putin would be proud if their techniques.

  5. Daily Beast reporters Sam Brodey and Asawin Suebsaeng report Donald Trump is plotting revenge against Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a conservative Republican, for certifying now-President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory in his state. “Trump Plots to Ruin GOP Guv Over Election Vendetta”, https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-vendetta-against-arizona-gov-doug-ducey?ref=home (subscriber content):

    In an article published on April 26, Brodey and Suebsaeng explain, “It’s April 2021, and Donald Trump still can’t get past his grudge with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona. The ex-president is still so bothered by Ducey’s refusal to try to throw out Democratic votes in Arizona that he’s told associates he would gladly and personally spoil any of Ducey’s future political plans.”

    “In other conversations since his post-presidency began,” Brodey and Suebsaeng note, Trump “has repeatedly discussed the importance of hobbling Ducey’s future prospects at every possible turn, hoping to make the Arizona governor a pariah in his own party.”

    “In recent weeks, the twice-impeached former president has gone so far as to tell some close associates that if Ducey decided to run for Senate and managed to lock up the Republican nomination in 2022, he would consider traveling to Arizona to campaign for Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, according to two people familiar with the ex-president’s private rantings,” Brodey and Suebsaeng write. “Neither of the sources believed the former president was being entirely serious, in the sense that Trump and his current political operation aren’t going to be ‘caught dead campaigning to keep the Senate more Democrat,’ as one of them said. But his offhand remarks drove home the point of how much Trump wishes to see the Arizona governor run out of the Republican Party.”

    See, “How Donald Trump hopes to take revenge against Arizona’s Republican governor: report”, https://www.salon.com/2021/04/27/how-donald-trump-hopes-to-take-revenge-against-arizonas-republican-governor-report_partner/

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