You Can't Spell Maricopa Without RICO

Topic: Perspective

We are less than two weeks from Election Day, and the soggy bottom of Kamala Harris’s burrito is about to rip wide open.  Desperation is in the air with several easily debunkable hit pieces floating around, and other stories that are so made up not even the mainstream media will touch them.  Pollsters are looking for ways to preserve credibility, even if it means labeling states as “ties” and calling the polls their last of the cycle as a way of washing their hands of all the chaos and the burden of distributing false hope to their sycophantic followers.

Are elections still winnable?  We are about to find out.  I am not sure that a front-door steal is in the cards this year, and I will elaborate on that later.  Even if I were 100% wrong about the 2020 and 2022 elections (which I am most certainly not, as proven by four years of constant revelation), I maintain that even the appearance of impropriety in our elections is enough to undermine the public trust and create its own mandate for election reform.

Enter the usual suspects.  Somehow, for many decades we were able to receive clear election results in all but the tightest circumstances on Election Night.  Despite the advances in technology that corrupt elections officials swear by, counting ballots in key states has been delayed and is usually blamed on the law.  Florida has three times the population of Arizona and will have most of its results posted by midnight the day of.  Maricopa County announced yesterday that it will take up to 10 to 13 days to count ballots.  In fact, Daily Mail reports all seven expected “battleground” states plus Alaska will possibly not be able to project the winner on Election Night.  What a coincidence – just those states?

Imagine you are at a table playing Texas Hold ‘Em poker with a group of guys.  You are in the most crucial hand, win or go home, and on the river card, you pull a three of a kind with kings.  It comes time to show the cards, and you throw your hand on the table.  Your lone opponent who stayed in that long excuses himself from the table, goes to the men’s room, and ten minutes later emerges with a three of a kind of his own, but with aces.  He sweeps his hands across the table and takes all your chips, sending you home in disgrace.

Would anyone let that situation stand?  Hell no - people came to blows in the Arizona Wild West over far less than that. This is exactly what is happening in our elections.  Maricopa County accounts for roughly 60% of the statewide vote in Arizona, and combined with Pima County, which contains metro Tucson, accounts for more than 3 in 4 statewide ballots.  There are 13 other counties that collectively make up less than a quarter of the vote in the state, including a few small Democrat-won counties - Apache, Coconino, and Santa Cruz.

Pinal County has one-tenth of Maricopa’s population.  They will have totals nearly completely published on Election Night.  Why can’t Maricopa County plus up its staffing, or better yet, return to precinct-level voting and break down the massive vote load, likely over 2 million ballots, into manageable components?  We all know why – it is because eliminating transparency and relying on mail-in ballots that are flying all over the place (see what is happening in Pima), and then observing how things are going in the rest of the state plays a major role in how long the count needs to go on.

No one on the left would accept a close Republican state, like North Carolina waiting out Raleigh and Charlotte before posting vote totals, so I’m not sure why we shrug it off on the right when Maricopa County is ground zero for the elections crisis as we know it.  So, this leaves only two things to be done:

I.                             Lawsuits

Every GOP lawyer in the state and national infrastructures should have already papered Maricopa in so many lawsuits they couldn’t see the light of day.  Given the corruption of Arizona’s courts, this is likely not a winning strategy, but it must be done to prove the point and to check the procedural boxes before moving to the next step.

II.                         Monkey See, Monkey Do

American governments are supposed to exist to protect citizens and their rights; therefore, it is the duty of county governments to protect their citizens’ rights from infringement by Maricopa County, and to a lesser extent, Pima County, which will make the same excuses and belch out ballots for days as long as there are races within striking distance (looking at you, Kari Lake, and any legislators hanging on to tight seats with one-seat majorities in both chambers).

Pinal, Yavapai, Mohave, and other red counties should have already announced that they will not report a single ballot until Maricopa County reports all their ballots.  This will activate the Democrat lawyers and create a fiasco, forcing Kris Mayes to exercise her usual heavy-handed tactics against these people wanting a fair shake.  This may not end well in terms of consequences, but exposing the reeking unfairness in this arrangement is critical for long-term success.

Conclusion

Only third-world countries engage in strong-arm tactics like this, complete with last-second procedural changes and public announcements after four years of intense scrutiny that the count will take nearly two weeks as the country hangs in the balance (and we all know they don’t perform real signature verification, regardless of what apologists say).  Maricopa appears to be positioning itself to come in clutch for Harris if Trump can’t be stopped in the Rust Belt or Georgia, and everyone is freaking out over this because they lived through the 2020 and 2022 elections.  If we ever want this nonsense to stop, someone is going to have to do something drastic.

That means refusing to forward your vote counts until the big bully on the block forwards his own.  I am sure the Maricopa intelligentsia will pile onto this article like ants on a popsicle, but there is no fair explanation to the other counties in the state as to why the dominant political force in Arizona can count ballots for as long as it deems fit. If they wanted to run trustworthy elections, they’d have made a plan to do so in these past 48 months.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.