“After all the scurrying, searching, sifting, speculating, hand-counting and bamboo-hunting had ended, Republicans’ post-mortem review of election results in Arizona’s largest county wound up only adding to President Biden’s margin of victory there. But for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest.”

“Former President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists redoubled their efforts to mount a full-scale relitigation of the 2020 election. Any fleeting thought that the failure of the Arizona exercise to unearth some new trove of Trump votes or a smoking gun of election fraud might derail the so-called Stop the Steal movement dissipated abruptly. As draft copies of the report began to circulate late Thursday, Trump allies ignored the new tally, instead zeroing in on the report’s specious claims of malfeasance, inconsistencies and errors by election officials. Significant parts of the right treated the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication – offering a fresh canard to justify an accelerated push for new voting limits and measures to give Republican state lawmakers greater control over elections. It also provided additional fuel for the older lie that is now central to Mr. Trump’s political identity: that the 2020 election was stolen from him” – New York Times.