Biden won the state by more than 10,000 votes.

If ever there were a news story destined to change not a single person’s opinion, this is it. If you’re MAGA, only the verdict of the “Cyber Ninjas” conducting the ballot audit in Arizona might conceivably change your opinion. After all, how can we rule out that the county officials who say they didn’t see any voter fraud weren’t in on the plot to steal the state for Biden?

If you’re not MAGA then you already know Biden won and you moved on from this eight and a half months ago.

An Associated Press investigation found 182 cases where problems were clear enough that officials referred them to investigators for further review. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice…

Arizona’s potential cases also illustrate another reality: Voter fraud is often bipartisan. Of the four Arizona cases that have resulted in criminal charges, two involved Democratic voters and two involved Republicans…

The AP tallied the potential cases after submitting public record requests to all Arizona counties. Most counties — 11 out of 15 — reported they had forwarded no potential cases to local prosecutors. The majority of cases identified so far involve people casting a ballot for a relative who had died or people who tried to cast two ballots.

Maricopa County, which is subject to the disputed ballot review ordered by state Senate Republicans, has identified just one case of potential fraud out of 2.1 million ballots cast. That was a voter who might have cast a ballot in another state. The case was sent to the county attorney’s office, which forwarded it to the state attorney general.

Most of the 182 cases referred to prosecutors came from Pima County, which traditionally has had a low threshold for probing possible fraud. A bunch of people there ended up voting twice, possibly because they were spooked by the Postal Service warning about delays last fall, possibly because Trump himself once half-joked that supporters who mailed their ballots early should go to the polls on Election Day and vote in person too if the poll workers can’t confirm that their ballot had been received. In any event, all of the double votes from Pima were counted only once, according to the AP.

My guess is that this story was spoon-fed to them by Arizona Democrats eager to counterprogram the still ongoing “audit” in Maricopa County. The gears on that first started turning all the way back in December and was supposed to take 60 days. It’s now mid-July and the head Cyber Ninja is insisting that he still doesn’t have enough information to issue a report. He wants state legislators to subpoena more records from Maricopa County and has even proposed going door to door to canvass voters about their ballots, a prospect that drew a warning from the Justice Department months ago about voter intimidation.

Slate foresaw how this fiasco is destined to end in a piece published a few days ago about the latest “hearing” held by the state senate into the audit’s progress:

The breadcrumbs that Logan, Petersen, and Fann laid out in the hearing were enough to preview what is likely in store when Logan releases his report in the weeks ahead.* Without specifically challenging the vote count, Logan spent much of the hearing dropping outrageous-sounding numbers of suspicious vote tallies to insinuate fraud without actually proving anything. This appears to be Logan’s ultimate game plan, straight out of the Kraken playbook: Drop dozens of disproven or easily disprovable charges into a report, claim there is a massive cover-up of election fraud, and wave his hands at the big picture even as his charges are easily shown, one by one, to be lies.

Warren Peteresen, the chair of the state senate’s judiciary committee, has already begun laying the groundwork for disappointment by insisting that the report will necessarily be “incomplete” unless head Cyber Ninja CEO Doug Logan gets everything from the county that he’s asking for. That’s Logan’s escape hatch to avoid frankly asserting in the final report that a particular number of votes were fraudulent and that Trump was certainly the real winner: “The county stonewalled us so we weren’t able to draw a conclusion.” In fact, Karen Fann, the state senate president spearheading the audit, claimed a few days ago that she’d been told by the Cyber Ninjas that their total of votes cast in Maricopa County didn’t match the county’s official total — but she wasn’t told how much of a discrepancy there was.

Which is odd, no? Why wouldn’t they tell her if there’s a meaningful difference between the numbers? Or are they not confident enough in their own data to go all-in on it?

The most sensational claim made at the hearing this week is that there were 74,000 mail ballots recorded as tallied even though there’s no record of those ballots being sent out. But that was a misunderstanding: The “mail ballots” the Cyber Ninjas were describing were actually a combination of mail votes and early in-person votes.

CLAIM: Maricopa County received 74,000 more mail-in ballots than we sent.

FACTS: In Maricopa County, we allow people to vote early in two ways: 1) by mail and 2) in-person at Vote Centers. These are all considered early votes.

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) July 16, 2021

In addition, the EV32 Returns & EV33 files are not the proper files to refer to for a complete accumulating of all early ballots sent and received.

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) July 16, 2021

The Maricopa County Twitter account has essentially become one long fact-check aimed at countering misinformation amplified by the audit, including a reprise of the “Sharpiegate” nonsense that circulated in the weeks after the election. Liberals are now going on offense against the Cyber Ninjas and their sponsors in the state senate, suing for documents to find out who’s paying for this audit operation and to what extent the senate and the Ninjas are coordinating behind the scenes. The senate sought to block that document request, arguing that the audit is a private outfit and thus not subject to state disclosure rules — and lost. The court may pull back the curtain on who’s really behind the audit now.

I’ll leave you with this.

The Cyber Ninjas have everything qualified auditors would need to check the results of the election. Now we hear they may be asking for more. This can only be due to 2 reasons: They don't know what they're doing, or they're going beyond their scope of work.

— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) July 16, 2021