THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 13
vote alone had been verified several
times.) Fuelling their concern was the
fact that Cyber Ninjas had never con-
ducted an election audit, and that it is
led by Doug Logan, who openly pro-
moted allegations of voter fraud. Those
officials are no doubt relieved by the
outcome. But, as was to be expected,
Donald Trump, for whom all facts are
relative, rejected the findings. He told
a crowd at a Save America rally in Geor-
gia, “We won on the Arizona foren-
sic audit yesterday at a level that you
wouldn’t believe.”
A more subtle mind than Trump’s
would see the futility of having a ques-
tionable firm undertake an unneces-
sary recount only to offer findings that
are counter to his immediate interests.
But the point of the exercise, and of
others like it taking place across the
country, is not so much to delegitimize
the past election as it is to normalize
specious reviews of future ones—in-COMMENT
COUNTONIT
C
rises, at least of the American va-
riety, sometimes announce them-
selves long before the fact, like a save-
the-date notice for a future cataclysm.
The decade before the Civil War was
so rife with talk about potential con-
flict over slavery that the shots fired
at Fort Sumter seemed almost a self-
fulfilling prophecy. Prior to the 2008
housing crisis, several analysts recog-
nized that market conditions could
potentially culminate in a catastrophic
crash. For many years, scientists have
sounded alarms about rising tempera-
tures and emerging viruses. The com-
mon theme in these warnings is our
collective unwillingness to address
them beforehand. At present, this ap-
pears to be the situation regarding Amer-
ican democracy.
Late last month, forty-six weeks
after voting in the 2020 Presidential
election had concluded, Republicans
in the Arizona State Senate unveiled
the results of a so-called audit of more
than two million ballots cast in Mar-
icopa County. The recount, which they
had commissioned from the Florida-
based firm Cyber Ninjas, determined
that President Joe Biden had not only
won the county but had done so by
three hundred and sixty more votes
than was previously known. Both Dem-
ocratic and Republican officials in Mar-
icopa County had denounced the re-
count, fearing that it would be used to
cast further doubt on the most thor-
oughly scrutinized and legitimate elec-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDAtion in recent history. (The county’s
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
cluding, perhaps, a 2024 race in which
Trump’s name is on the ballot. We have
seen too much of this form of main-
streaming of the absurd in recent years
to note every example, but its origins
likely lie in Trump’s fixation on Barack
Obama’s birth certificate. In that case,
once the birther myths were finally dis-
pelled, Trump pivoted to congratulat-
ing himself for forcing people to get to
the bottom of the issue. In effect, he
recast a conspiracy theory as a legiti-
mate inquiry resolved by legitimate
means. The danger is the probability
that some illegitimate future inquiry
will be used to achieve illegitimate ends.
The groundwork for this is more ad-
vanced than we care to contemplate.
Trump’s defeat, by more than seven
million votes, was taken to be a sign
that the most anti-democratic forces he
represented would also be vanquished.
The failed January 6th insurrection,
which he encouraged and which sent
his own Vice-President scrambling to
escape a mob threatening to lynch him,
seemed a fitting epitaph for his Presi-
dency, and for the malice and the chaos
that it engendered. His own incompe-
tence had proved a great asset to Amer-
ican democracy. Since his loss, however,
more efficient actors have stepped up
to do his bidding.
After Georgia’s Republican secre-
tary of state, Brad Raffensperger, re-
fused to throw the Georgia vote in
Trump’s favor, the G.O.P.-controlled
state legislature passed a bill diminish-
ing the authority of his office, and giv-
ing itself greater control over the way
elections are administered. The leg-
islature now has the power to, among