Donald Trump, in Ohio on Saturday, looked like he had never left the campaign trail from the 2020 election. My colleague Jennifer Van Laar went over the whole rally right here

I don’t want to say that just one part of the speech caught my attention (Trump rallies are chock full of good quotes) but he did make me stop and think for a moment during one part. He listed some states that might do an audit and then he praised the one state that IS doing one:

The Grand Canyon State, Arizona.

Unless you have been living underneath a rock you know that since late April the Arizona Senate has been doing an audit in Maricopa County to see if the election results were correct and if there were any irregularities in the process of counting votes. This has been a bit of a hot topic in Arizona and the rest of the country and naturally, Trump brought that up in his speech last Saturday in Ohio.

I want to thank the brave Republican Senators in the State of Arizona for what they are doing. Because they saw what was happening and what is going to happen is they are going to issue a report in the not too distant future and it will be interesting to see.

Trump continued…

A lot of states have gone to watch them and have come out with praise, so let’s see how that turns out it is a big deal.

You can check out the entire rally at Trump’s official Rumble page right here.

The former President did not indicate that he had any special knowledge of what is happening behind the scenes currently with the audit. Anyone who wants a bit of a deep dive about Arizona or some of the other states considering an audit can check out this piece by Stu Cvrk A.U.D.I.T. of Elections: Is the Dam Breaking? to learn a bit more.

I know that both sides of the political spectrum have been going at each other’s throats about the merits of this audit being done because the election has been certified. Yet the same anger or annoyance was not on display back in 2000 in the months after George W. Bush was inaugurated and a recount was done in Florida.

If you recall, neither the Florida Senate nor any elected body did the recount but the media itself. From PBS…

In the first full study of Florida’s ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled “undervotes” — ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through — to be counted.

The study, conducted by the accounting firm of BDO Seidman, counted over 60,000 votes in Florida’s 67 counties, tabulating separate vote totals in several standards categories.

Of course, the issues are not the same exactly from the 2000 election to the 2020 one, but the Florida debacle in Bush vs. Gore did improve Florida’s handling of elections. While Arizona took weeks to call who won last year the state of Florida announced its winner before midnight eastern on Nov 3rd. The state was able to adjust to the COVID restrictions and still pull off a competent election night.

States like Arizona and Pennsylvania were not able to manage the same feat.

Even if Arizona does find that the vote tally was off and gives the overall count to Trump that would not have changed the electoral count to give him the Presidency. However, it would shove a huge wrench down the talking points tube of people like Liz Cheney. That, of course, would put pressure on the other states with problems on election night to do a similar deep dive.

The notion that taking the time to actually do a review of why it took you weeks to count votes is somehow controversial, stumps me and many others. Why wouldn’t those who claim to want free and fair elections want to do an exhaustive review that would assure the voters and themselves that everything was counted correctly? Plus, just like Florida in 2000, you can implement reforms from this audit that will make elections run more smoothly in the future.

Seems like a win-win to most who are truly interested in every vote being counted correctly according to the laws of your state.

Donald Trump said that what was going on in Arizona was a “Big Deal” and he very well may be right once again.

Wouldnt that just tick off the mainstream media? And it would be glorious to watch.