“The Inquirer is not currently referring to attempts by Pennsylvania Republicans to investigate the 2020 presidential election as an audit because there’s no indication it would follow the best practices or the common understanding of an audit among nonpartisan experts. When asked by The Inquirer, lawmakers leading the effort have not explained how it will actually be run, including whether and how best practices will be followed; who will be involved, including the extent to which Republican politicians will play a role; how the review will be documented; how election equipment and ballots, if obtained, would be secured; and what the scope of any review would be. Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes. State and county audits affirmed the outcome, and there is no evidence of any significant fraud” says an aside from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editors on a Monday article (and presumably others) about the “audit”.

National Zero opted for putting “audit” in quotation marks in most contexts related to ongoing efforts to contest the outcome of the 2020 election (among other ways of denigrating them, like “fraudit“), particularly the Cyber Ninjas clusterfuck in Maricopa County, Arizona, but cannot 100% guarantee every single article in which we referred to such attempts affirmatively did as such, particularly when we were using verbatim clips sourced from other publications’ articles.

There’s also a question of presumption – Yes, we all know that when Trump and his minions say they want an “audit” in this state or that one, they don’t actually want, for example the kind of audit Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has conducted in Cobb County, as in a legitimate one. The true hardcore just want whatever it takes for a state to be “decertified” and for Trump to be declared the winner. Others are marginally less insane and more technocratic, as in Texas they’re probably doing a real, professionally conducted audit even if the reasons for doing so are complete bullshit. Sometimes this is obvious beforehand, others not so much, but until whatever the fuck it is Republicans think they’re doing in these states becomes public knowledge, we do have to give them at least a small shred of the benefit of the doubt as far as their methods go. Intent we don’t however, because at this point, this long after the 2020 election, it’s very much safe to say they’re all designed to justify voter suppression in one way or another.

We’re on board with what the Inquirer is doing here and hope it’s adopted elsewhere in reporting on this unending temper tantrum by a cult desperate not to lose its power, we just opt for brevity.