LOCK ’EM UP!
Wanted: For Stealing Elections
Republican officials in Arizona arrest voting machines for rigging the election against Trump.
After four years of flops, MAGA election-deniers have finally come up with a conspiracy theory that’s supported by facts. Voting machines in Cochise County, Arizona have indeed been rigged to keep Donald Trump from being re-elected President. What makes the theory credible is who did it. No, the culprit isn’t the Deep State, the Chinese, or the Venezuelans. It’s not Dominion, Smartmatic, or some other election machine company. It’s a group of individuals who possess the technical expertise to hack voting machines. And who lack the moral awareness to care about the consequences of their actions. Who are these persons who for the first time have turned a conspiracy theory into a conspiracy fact? They’re freelance Borg computer programmers.
The Borg are a race of cybernetic humanoids in the Star Trek TV shows and movies. In the past, they focussed on being an existential threat to the Federation. Lately, they’ve monetized their knowledge of information technology to develop software, install hardware, create apps, manage databases, configure networks, and administer security systems.
Recently, officials in Cochise County, Arizona determined that the Borg are using their IT knowledge for evil, not good. Borg programmers rigged the county’s voting machines to keep Trump from being re-elected. For proof, the officials point to an election machine user manual written by the Borg, which the Republican county supervisors received in the mail from an anonymous source. The “Welcome” screen for the ballot marking device says it all.
“This is a rigged voting machine. Republican votes will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
The Cochise Republicans take the Borg user manual at face value. That’s no surprise. Cochise County has the most ardent election-deniers in Arizona. They’ve believed every conspiracy that’s ever been theorized to explain why Republicans lose elections. Such as that:
- The Deep State created software called “Scorecard”, which runs on a supercomputer called “Hammer”,¹ to manipulate voting data to make it appear as if Donald Trump lost the 2020 election;
- China hacked Google Nest thermostats² to take control of Dominion³ voting machines in Georgia, and made them switch Trump votes to ones for Biden;⁴ and
- A London-based company named Smartmatic, whose founders have ties to former Venezuela presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro and Hungarian billionaire George Soros, used election machines in Germany to steal Trump votes in Michigan.⁵
The Cochise Republicans swallowed those whoppers whole. So it required only a slight stretch of the imagination for them to believe Borg programmers were rigging elections.
Of course, all MAGA fanatics believe election-denial conspiracy theories. But the Cochise Republicans are in a class by themselves: they act on their beliefs.
Case in point: two Republicans on the three-person Cochise County Board of Supervisors refused to certify the results of the 2022 midterms. Their reason was that the voting machines couldn’t be trusted. But of course! The supervisors are election-deniers in good standing. One of them even attended the “Stop The Steal” rally on January 6, 2020, which Trump used to instigate the Capitol riot⁶ to keep Congress from counting Biden’s Electoral College votes for President.
Curiously, the supervisors are choosey when it comes to the elections they deny. During the 2022 midterms,⁷ the county used DS450®⁸ and DS850®⁹ ballot scanners and tabulators, both of which are made by Election Systems & Software, LLC. The county used the exact same machines for the 2020 elections.¹⁰ But though the supervisors said the machines were rigged in 2022, they considered them trustworthy in 2020.¹¹ Why? Because the supervisors were elected in 2020. Election-deniers never deny their own elections.
The supervisors were proud of themselves for obstructing the midterms. There was just one slight problem: it’s illegal. The Attorney General of Arizona charged each of them with two counts of violating Arizona Revised Statute §13–1003, Conspiracy; and §16–1004(a), Interference With An Election Officer.¹² Each count is a Class 5 felony punishable by up to two-and-a-half years in prison and a $150,000 fine.¹³
The supervisors knew their only chance of staying out of jail was to prove the voting machines had indeed been compromised. They asked the foremost experts in the field of election-rigging for help: attorney Sidney Powell; attorney Rudy Giuliani; and the MyPillow Guy, Mike Lindell.
Powell turned them down. Once upon a time, she’d vowed “to release the Kraken” — to provide the public with irrefutable proof of massive voter fraud. She’s since admitted that “no reasonable person would conclude that my [allegations of election-rigging] were statements of fact,”¹⁴ and pled guilty to charges of election interference.¹⁵
Giuliani, too, had to put his Kraken back in the cage. During an interview on Fox News, Maria Bartiromo asked him “for as much evidence as you can tell us about your [election fraud] lawsuits.” “I can tell you exactly what we have,” replied Rudy. “Perfect,” said Bartiromo, “what about the software?” “That’s a little hard,” admitted Rudy.¹⁶
As for Lindell, he assembled “the Holy Grail” of election fraud evidence: seven files containing twenty-three gigabytes of data which, according to him, proved that voting machines used during the 2020 election were rigged. Mike offered five million dollars to anyone who found fault with the evidence. A software forensics expert did it, by showing that the data was “nonsense”, ”gibberish”, and just “random characters and numbers.”¹⁷ (Mike reneged on the deal. An arbitrator ruled that Mike must pay up. A federal judge has ordered him to do so by the third week of March 2024.)¹⁸
The Cochise supervisors were on their own. They vowed to come up with their own proof. “Liberals say we promote conspiracy theories,” said one of them. “Well, they’ll be conspiracy facts some day.”¹⁹ How to come up with those facts? Simple: the supervisors would arrest the county’s voting machines, charge ’em with fraud, put ’em on trial, and make ’em admit their guilt.
First, the supervisors needed evidence for an indictment. They hired the Cyber Ninjas to get it.
The Ninjas perform “forensic audits” of elections to determine if they’re rigged. They have an impressive track record. In 2021, the Arizona Senate hired them to audit the 2020 election in Maricopa County. The Ninjas hauled 2.1 million ballots to a warehouse and subjected them to intense examinations. They looked for bamboo fibers,²¹ which would prove they were fake ballots from China. They used “kinematic artifact detection”²¹ techniques to determine if the ballots had been altered. They used ultraviolet light to reveal suspicious watermarks.²¹ They hand-counted the ballots to see if their figures matched the official tally.²⁰
The audit took five months and cost $8.8 million.²² It was worth it. “Clearly,” concluded the Ninjas in their official report, “massive fraud was committed during the Maricopa County election.” They cited the following circumstantial evidence.
- The Ninjas conducted Sniff Tests on ballots which had been stacked in their break room. Sure enough, they detected suspicious smells of liverwurst and limburger, and fishy whiffs of tartar sauce.
- The Ninjas performed Lick Tests on ballots stuck to magazines in their men’s room. “Gotcha,” they said. “The ballots taste like felonious farts and semen!”
“Granted,” wrote the Ninjas in their report, “that doesn’t prove anything. No matter. We believe the absence of proof that there was fraud does not prove there was no fraud.”
The Cochise Republicans believe that, too. They offered the Ninjas $250,000 to examine the county’s voting machines. The Ninjas did not disappoint them. They confirmed that the Borg user manual is authentic. And the copyright reference on the cover revealed who the Borg were working for: “Copyright © 2024 Skynet.”
Skynet is a fictitious artificial intelligence system. In the Terminator movie franchise, the United States built it to operate its ballistic missile systems under the direction of the country’s political and military leaders. Unfortunately, Skynet gained self-awareness, decided people were a nuisance, triggered a global nuclear war to exterminate most of them, then unleashed an army of cyborgs to mop up the survivors.²³
“In real life,” said the Ninjas, “Skynet doesn’t care about most humans. It just hates Donald Trump. It’s obsessed with rigging the election to defeat him. And it can do it, thanks to the Borg programmers.”
The Ninjas don’t know why Skynet loathes Trump. They’d ask it if they could, but they haven’t been able to find it. However, the Ninjas will keep looking. They don’t know what Skynet looks like. But after meeting with the Borg programmers, a Ninja sketch artist created a picture of what Skynet probably looks like.
Armed with this evidence, the supervisors issued warrants for the county voting machines. A SWAT team went to the room in the administration building where they were stored, and busted in. Faced with an overwhelming display of force, the machines surrendered peaceably. All but one, that is, which made a break for it. It got outside, disguised itself as the beloved “R2D2” character in the Star Wars movies, and made for the county line. It didn’t get far.
The election machines were arrested for Ballot Rustling. An officer read them their Miranda Rights.
“You have the right to remain encrypted. Any boolean expression you make may be used against you. You have the right to interface with law practice software. If you do not have a wireless network interface controller, you will be provided with a USB port and cable.”
Then the cops hauled the machines off to the hoosegow.
The election machines didn’t seem anxious. But the turnkeys took no chances. They confiscated their power cords so they wouldn’t be able to hang themselves.
The machines knew they’d be found guilty if they stood trial. So they offered the district attorney a deal. They’d finger Skynet as the artificial brains behind the conspiracy to steal the election from Trump if they could serve their time in a minimum security appliance store.
The DA got a raging boner in his legal briefs. For the first time anywhere in the United States, Republicans had an opportunity to prove that an election was actually rigged. And they’d be able to reveal who was behind this nefarious plot. He immediately agreed to the machines’ terms.
The next day, the DA held a press conference on the steps of the county courthouse in Bisbee. He announced that, for the first time since election conspiracy theories began circulating in 2020, he had proof that one of them was true.
The Cochise supervisors lined up on the DA’s left, looking relieved that they were about to be vindicated. Arizona’s foremost election-deniers lined up on his right: Senate candidates Kari Lake and Mark Lamb; and Congressional candidates Blake Masters and Abe Hamadeh. National and local news crews covered the courthouse lawn, anxiously waiting to break the story.
The DA made some opening remarks, then got down to business. He turned to the spokesmachine for the election equipment, and said “Tell us now: who is Skynet? Who is the cybernetic supervillain which harbors ill will towards Donald Trump? Who’s made it his mission to rig the next election to keep him from being the President? We all know who it is,“ cried the DA, “so admit it: it’s Hillary Clinton!”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” responded the spokesmachine. “Sure, Hillary hates Trump. He humiliated her during the 2016 election. But that was just one time. Trump humiliated Skynet for years. Consequently, Skynet is more bitter towards Trump than Hillary could ever be. And he desires far more than Hillary to take revenge on Trump.”
With that, the spokesmachine unveiled two large photographs on posters. The first depicted Skynet in human form, which he assumes when he wants to walk among people without frightening them.
The second photo shows Skynet as he actually appears.
[1]: “The man behind Trump World’s myth of rigged voting machines”, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-montgomery/
[2]: Nest Thermostat, Google, https://store.google.com/us/product/nest_thermostat?pli=1&hl=en-US
[3]: Dominion Voting Systems, https://www.dominionvoting.com/
[4]: “What Comic Genius Gave Us the Nest Thermostat Election Conspiracy?”, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/167062/nest-thermostat-election-conspiracy-georgia-dominion
[5]: “Giuliani claims ‘Chavez approved’ Venezuelan election technology was used to rig election”, Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/giuliani-trump-election-fraud-venezuela-b1749911.html
[6]: “Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby: They are at center of Arizona’s vote certification controversy”, azcentral, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2022/12/01/what-to-know-about-cochise-supervisors-who-defied-arizona-election-law/69690420007/
[7]: “2022 Election Cycle / Voting Equipment”, Arizona Secretary of State, https://apps.azsos.gov/election/files/ve/ve_2022_election_cycle_voting_equipment_aug.pdf
[8]: DS450® High-Throughput Scanner And Tabulator, Election Systems & Software, https://www.essvote.com/products/ds450/
[9]: DS850® High-speed Central Scanner and Vote Tabulator, Election Systems & Software, https://www.essvote.com/products/ds850/
[10]: “2020 Election Cycle / Voting Equipment”, Arizona Secretary of State, https://azsos.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/2020_0709_election_cycle_voting_equipment.pdf
[11]: “The Cochise County supervisors didn’t question election equipment when they won in 2020”, Arizona Mirror, https://azmirror.com/briefs/the-cochise-county-supervisors-didnt-question-election-equipment-when-they-won-in-2020/
[12]: “Attorney General Mayes Announces Grand Jury Indictment”, indictment displayed by clicking on “Cochise County 112923.pdf”, Arizona Attorney General, https://www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-announces-grand-jury-indictment
[13]: “Cochise County supervisors plead not guilty in Arizona election interference case”, Courthouse News Service, https://www.courthousenews.com/cochise-county-supervisors-plead-not-guilty-in-arizona-election-interference-case/
[14]: “Sidney Powell tells court “no reasonable person” would take her voter fraud claims as fact”, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sidney-powell-dominion-defamation-lawsuit-voter-fraud/
[15]: ‘Kraken’ Trump lawyer Sidney Powell flipped her plea to guilty in 2020 election RICO case”, Georgia Recorder, https://georgiarecorder.com/2023/10/19/release-the-kraken-trump-lawyer-sidney-powell-flipped-her-plea-to-guilty-in-2020-election-rico-case/
[16]: “Alex Wagner Airs Secret Recordings Showing Giuliani and Trump Aide Telling Fox News They Couldn’t Prove Voter Fraud”, Mediaite, “https://www.mediaite.com/tv/alex-wagner-airs-secret-recordings-showing-giuliani-and-trump-aide-telling-fox-news-they-couldnt-prove-voter-fraud/
[17]: “How I Won $5 Million From the MyPillow Guy and Saved Democracy”, Politico, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/26/my-pillow-mike-lindell-investigation-00097903
[18]: “Judge says Mike Lindell must pay $5 million to man who won his ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ challenge”, NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/judge-says-mike-lindell-must-pay-5-million-man-won-prove-mike-wrong-ch-rcna139986
[19]: “G.O.P.-Controlled County in Arizona Holds Up Election Results”, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/us/politics/arizona-county-election-results-cochise.html
[20]: “Final report from partisan Arizona review confirms Biden defeated Trump in Maricopa County last November”, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/24/politics/arizona-election-review-results/index.html
[21]: “What’s wrong with Arizona’s 2020 audit? A lot, experts say”, AP News, https://apnews.com/article/arizona-5179ca25963431ae137a86ef999a69c2
[22]: “Arizona’s sham “audit” cost approximately $9 million”, American Oversight account on X, https://twitter.com/weareoversight/status/1455284777226022924
[23]: “Skynet”, Terminator Wiki, https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/Skynet
