PHOENIX, ARIZONA - NOVEMBER 07: A supporter of President Donald Trump stands outside a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in front of the State Capitol on November 7, 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
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“There’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in and stuffed into the box and it came from the Southeast part of the world, Asia. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper,” Brakey told CBS5 News.“They use bamboo in their paper processing, people in south-east Asia” Brakey added, before saying he doesn’t believe the conspiracy theory. “I’m just saying that is part of the mystery we want to un-gaslight people about.”Brakey added that in order to see if a ballot contains bamboo, the auditors are using a camera with a resolution of 5K to take a picture of the ballot. “They can really look at depth and find out is it a hand-marked paper ballot.”So where did the conspiracy theory about Asian paper ballots come from? Well, as far back as June 2020, Trump himself was pushing the conspiracy theory.Then in December, a month after the election, a number of tweets related to Arizona went viral, shared tens of thousands of times, without any evidence to support their claims.
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The audit is perpetuating the “Big Lie” that the election was somehow stolen from Trump, and the former president is now reportedly obsessed with the recount, raising it to people he sees at his resort in Mar-a-Lago.
While the ludicrous claims about UV lights and bamboo fibers may sound funny, critics have raised serious concerns about the integrity of the election after Logan was given complete control of the ballots, calling their chain of custody into question. “From a legal standpoint, chain of custody, ballot integrity has been so destroyed by a lack of procedures that moved into evolving procedures” Matthew Masterson, a former senior cybersecurity advisor at the Department of Homeland Security, said at a press briefing Wednesday. “You can’t reestablish that chain of custody and integrity after the fact. So, from just a legal standpoint, I don’t know how you can establish proper chain of custody, evidence standards, anything for a court, or otherwise, it’s gone.”At the same briefing, Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman called on the Department of Justice to investigate.