Jeremy Stahl for Slate:
On Wednesday, a member of the Arizona election audit team that has been heavily touted by former President Donald Trump revealed that its examination of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County will include a “forensic” analysis of ballots to determine if the paper is made of bamboo—in order to determine whether or not China delivered tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots to tip the state to Joe Biden.
If that sounds much too crazy for an audit that was initiated by the Republican-led Arizona legislature and whose communications are being spearheaded by Republican former secretary of state, Ken Bennett, it very much is not.
On Wednesday, audit liaison John Brakey told a reporter from the local CBS affiliate in Phoenix that the audit team was checking to see if 40,000 Biden ballots were smuggled into Arizona from Asia by checking the paper’s fiber to try to detect bamboo..
“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 Dennis Welch of CBS5 News.
Welch asked Brakey a series of follow-ups, such as “Why do you check for bamboo?” and “This is part of what you’re looking for?” and he answered that others were searching for the bamboo ballots because “people in Southeast Asia…use bamboo in their paper processing” and “this is part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about.”
As Slate put it, this is literal pulp fiction.