Advertisement

Arizona GOP’s election audit confirms Biden win, Texas’ new 2020 election audit

Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman breaks down the latest news on audits regarding the 2020 Presidential election.

Video transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

AKIKO FUJITA: Another election recount funded by Republicans confirms that President Biden did, in fact, defeat Donald Trump in Maricopa County in Arizona. A recount of more than 2 million ballots cast during last fall's presidential election shows vote tallies that were nearly identical from the original results that were reported.

Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman, who is on top of the story. Rick, it's kind of hard to keep track of where these recounts/audits, however you want to characterize it, are happening. What is the final tally say? And what does this mean about some of these Republican-led efforts to try and overturn the results?

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, I'm here, Akiko, to report that everything is exactly as anybody who knows what's going on here knew it was going to be. So there was no cheating in the Maricopa County Arizona election. This audit by this group called Cyber Ninjas, which has little to no experience doing this kind of thing, actually tallied a few additional votes for Joe Biden and took away a few votes from Donald Trump.

And so those results were leaked ahead of whatever you might consider the official thing. But, I mean, this has been an absurd effort to try to find some kind of fraud that was never going to go anywhere any place. And I think we should just remind everybody, this was not any kind of official recount.

The state of Arizona and the counties and the election authorities there did everything they were supposed to do to count this, do the recounts. In some cases, they did hand counts to make sure they got it right. And they did a great job. And it was a totally legitimate election.

This is financed by Republican groups closely aligned with Donald Trump, who in various ways, profit from this ongoing lie that the election was somehow rigged. And one of the ways these groups and probably Trump himself profit from just continuing to pitch this bogus storyline is they continue to raise money off of it.

I'm on some of these email lists, Akiko. And they just come along all the time. Can you believe the Democrats are now trying to steal blah, blah, blah? Send-- if you believe in patriotism and overturning a rigged election, send $20 to-- I've never sent $20 or even one penny to any of these groups. But they are apparently raising money.

And my guess is they're going to continue trying to raise money. So without a doubt, they're going to find a way to appeal to people who don't like the outcome of this audit and when you don't like the outcome. Some people just say, well, because it's not the outcome I wanted, it must, therefore, be rigged. I'm sorry to be ranting about this it's absurd. But it's going to continue for a little longer at least.

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, let's talk about how long this is going to continue. Now, you've got Texas saying they're going to conduct audits, recounts in four counties. Number one, how much is this costing? And is it all fully funded by this group Cyber Ninjas? Is it going to cost taxpayers any money?

RICK NEWMAN: Let's just remind everybody. Trump won Texas. So why would he have a recount in Texas? This is akin-- I have to say this is really akin to what the Russians tried to do with disinformation campaigns in democracies on Facebook and on other social media sites which is just so confusion and try to create clouds of dust that will obscure what's really going on, which is I think Texas also ran its election in an honest and credible way.

In terms of cost, Akiko, I think the one in Arizona cost almost $6 million. That is largely being funded by private groups. But, of course, you know, there are county officials and election officials on public payrolls who I'm sure have to do something to spend some part of their day in order to comply with these groups doing these investigations, just provide the resources that they need to get the job done.

So I'm sure if you're on the public payroll in Arizona and you've had to deal with this-- you don't feel like this is what you get paid to do. We're now going to go through the same exercise in a couple of counties in Texas, I guess. This is probably going to happen if you're in a place-- I think the real question here is, is this ever going to run out of steam? And my guess is that the funding for this will just continue to diminish, because the fundraising groups that are asking people to finance this, they cannot go back and say, hey, guess what. We now can declare this great victory. You helped us uncover fraud because there was no fraud.

Basically what you're doing is you're funding these groups that have Trump and Trump-- former Trump advisors on their payrolls. You're basically in many cases, putting money into these people's pockets. And that's not necessarily illegal because they just take paid staff jobs on some of these fundraising groups.

So if that's what you want to do, if you're a Trump supporter and you want people like Mike Flynn or Steve Bannon to get a little bit more of your hard-earned money, keep sending it in. But you're not going to change anything about the 2020 Election.

AKIKO FUJITA: I mean, Rick, I'm looking at my calendar. It's September 2021. This election happened in November of 2020. And here we are still talking about it. Rick Newman always on top of it for us. Thanks so much for that.