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.
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, who became a minor celebrity in MAGA world in the weeks after the election for sharing conspiracy theories about election fraud.
The results of the audit will not change the election outcome in the state or the nation, but it will serve to further fuel conspiracy theories about election fraud.
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.”