Let me see if I can try to make the case for the other side here.

> Did you get that? Trump loses Arizona, demands a recount, gets the recount, recount determines Trump did in fact lose, Trump claims exact opposite, and millions of people follow his lead and repeat this lie.

Here's the results of said audit:

https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/cyber-ninjas-report

They found a lot of irregularities, e.g.:

> Official Canvass has 3,432 more ballots cast than the list of people who show as having cast a vote (VM55)

> 9,041 mail-in voters show returning more ballots (EV33) than they were sent (EV32).

> 277 Precincts show in the Official Canvass as having more ballots cast than people who showed up to vote (VM55) for a total of 1,551 excess votes.

> There are 2,472 ballots shown in EV33 that don’t have corresponding entries in the VM55, and only 2,042 ballots show as rejected in the Official Canvas for a discrepancy of 430.

> 397 mail-in ballots show as received (EV33) that never show as sent (EV32).

> 255,326 Early Votes show in the VM55 that do not have a corresponding EV33 entry.

The trouble with this is that you can find that the numbers don't add up, but then what? You don't know which ballots were the extra ones. All you can do is count them again and then you get the same count from before.

There was one category of irregularity where they could actually redo the count. Ballots that were in some way messed up get "duplicated," i.e. copied onto clean ones. But they still had both the originals and the duplicates. The counts didn't match, which is bad. They had more duplicates than originals. But they could redo them.

The assumption in doing this was that the "extra" duplicates should be discarded, rather than that some of the originals had been lost. Under that assumption, Trump lost a few hundred votes. Naturally this is the only part of the report of any significance to media outlets on the blue team.

Trump goes the other way. Declares that all of the remaining irregularities would have been votes in his favor.

There is apparently no way of proving it one way or the other at this point; the information is not available. We don't know which ballots were the "extra" ones in the other cases. Which means he can't prove it. Because nobody can prove it one way or the other. But something went wrong.

Having a number of unexplained irregularities that exceeds the margin of victory for the state is bad. "Undermines confidence in the election," as they say. If nothing else we need to make sure this doesn't happen again by figuring out how it happened this time and keeping better records going forward.

> The most telling instance if this in the last year was Rudy Giuliani refusing to make a claim of “fraud” in front of any judge after the 2020 election, but claiming “fraud” as often as he could in front of any TV camera.

This is why the media is such a trash fire.

After the election they were filing a zillion lawsuits all over the country. Some of them were alleging fraud. IIRC one in particular was about something like the state violating its state constitution, or violating election laws, something like that. So he says it on camera in court; that particular case wasn't about fraud. The media picks it up like he's made a confession of wrongdoing.

All of the coverage was like this. One side: Massive fraud unprecedented mountains of evidence! Other side: There is no fraud whatsoever stop looking immediately STFU!

As far as I can tell what actually happened was something like this.

Most elections are pretty messed up. There is some fraud here and there, and a vast sea of incompetence. The 2020 election was like that on meth, because of COVID.

Then it all mostly just cancels out. If each party commits a similar amount of fraud, and the effects of incompetence are random, it doesn't change the outcome. Also, most elections aren't close enough for it to matter.

Then Trump figured out you can challenge individual districts. If you go into a district that went 80% for Biden and find all of the problems that actually did happen there, you might invalidate enough ballots to matter, and probably the same 80% of them went for Biden.

This is kind of a dick move, but in theory it's a valid thing to do and the response from the other side should be to go into a district that went 80% for Trump and find all the problems there. Then if the problems cancel out it doesn't change the outcome and all you're doing is excluding all the ballots that actually ought to be excluded.

In practice there are two reasons Democrats didn't want to do that. First, it would have taken a long time and they wanted to be able to declare victory. This isn't really a legitimate reason but you can see why they would want to do this.

Second, mail-in ballots. If a higher percentage of mail-in ballots were messed up than in-person ballots, and more of the mail-in ballots went for Biden, uh oh. You don't know that's going to happen before you look, but it could, so do you really want to look?

So then it's a media war. Trump sucks. He's making a zillion fraud claims and most of them are crap because he's just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. But if they just let him, something might stick. Maybe not, but "maybe" is a big risk. So the other side decides that they want to suck too. If a report comes out, it's bad for Trump. It doesn't matter what it says; strip out anything that helps him, remove all context, find some excerpt that sounds like it's bad for him, whatever it takes.

Then everybody is doing the Big Lie. Mischaracterizing everything the other says, acting as political operatives instead of journalists. It's not the truth vs. the lie; everybody's lying. The other side is evil. They must be stopped.

Come on. The other side is the guy sitting next to you on the subway.