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How Arizona’s Ballot Audit Is A Disinformation Exercise | NPR

To Matt Masterson, the review of 2020 ballots from Maricopa County, Ariz., that’s currently underway is “performance art” or “a clown show,” and definitely “a waste of taxpayer money.”

But it’s not an audit.

“It’s an audit in name only,” says Masterson, a former Department of Homeland Security official who helped lead the federal government’s election security preparations leading up to November’s election. “It’s a threat to the overall confidence of democracy, all in pursuit of continuing a narrative that we know to be a lie.”

By lie, he means the assertion from former President Donald Trump and some of his allies that election fraud cost him a second term in the White House.

And, Masterson says, the strategy chosen by the state’s Republican state Senate leaders is working as intended to undermine confidence in the outcome of last year’s vote.

The process is a simple exercise in how disinformation spreads and takes hold in 2021. And experts fear it presents a blueprint for other states and lawmakers to follow, one that is already showing signs of being emulated around the country.

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Source: How Arizona’s Ballot Audit Is A Disinformation Exercise : NPR