On Monday, Dan Bongino provided an overview of the numbers that came out of the Maricopa County election audit and presented some of his “major concerns.” Keep in mind that in the entire state of Arizona, the so-called margin of victory between Biden and Trump was just over 10,000 votes. It’s impossible to overstate how important accuracy was in this unbelievably close election, especially in a huge metropolitan area such as Maricopa County.

Bongino introduced his discussion by explaining the difference between reliability and validity. If a scale is calibrated to measure 10 pounds over what the real weight is, that is a reliable measure, even if it’s wrong. You know it’s always going to be 10 pounds heavier than what the scale says. “Something can be reliable but reliably wrong,” he said. So the result it’s giving you is not valid. It’s inaccurate, and you’d have to take that into account.

Likewise, even if you know that elections are reliably off by one or two percentage points because of fraud, that doesn’t mean the results are valid. In a case where the “winner” is shown to be ahead by less than the reliable margin of error, there is no valid measure of the outcome. I would add that in an election as close as Arizona’s, that would seem to be the case.

A Look at the Numbers

Let’s look at a few of these numbers. At first glance, they are staggering. Just in Maricopa County, roughly 23,300 mail-in ballots came from people who were not residing at the address from which they voted.

Also, there were 17,300 duplicate ballots, as well as 2,300 voters who cast a vote in Maricopa County but had moved out of that county.

But voting officials say they can explain at least some of this. For example, of the 23,000 mail-in voters who didn’t reside at the address the ballots had been mailed from, it appears that about 15,000 had simply moved within the county and put the old address on the envelope. So those 15,000 weren’t necessarily from people who voted twice, and they do count. Even so, and very importantly, that still leaves 8,000 ballots.

Officials also say that about 1,700 of those 23,000 had moved out of Maricopa County entirely and were living elsewhere in Arizona, so they were still entitled to vote for President. They weren’t necessarily committing fraud (unless they voted again in their new county; we don’t know).

Officials also determined, he said, that about 33 percent of those mail-in ballots with different addresses were from Republican voters. The rest, presumably, came from Democrats. (I could make a joke here about Democrats being twice as likely not to even know their own addresses, but I will refrain.)

There were also 3,432 “excess” votes. That means they were part of the count but didn’t show up as actual votes. County election officials have offered an explanation: that those votes might have been cast by victims of domestic abuse who were under protective orders and whose records were not publicly available for the audit. That does seem like a great many people, county-wide, to be under protective orders; I’m sure that figure will be looked at more closely in coming days. Could officials not make available the redacted records, just to show there really were that many?

Of the more than 17,000 duplicate ballots, officials say that about 9,000 were “cured.” In other words, about 9,000 people submitted one ballot but were called back because of some problem with it. Then they submitted a new, corrected ballot, and presumably, that was the only one counted. I don’t know how auditors check that; maybe there’s a way. But even if those are explained, that still leaves about 8,000 cases of duplicate balloting that are not explained. Combine that with the roughly 8,000 ballots that had unexplained incorrect addresses and you’ve got 16,000 potential tabulation errors in Maricopa County alone. Again, the margin for the entire state was just over 10,000.

“If There Was Fraud, Wouldn’t You Want to Know That?”

“Arizona’s got some explaining to do,” Bongino said, wondering what it is about facts and data that seem to bother people so much when you bring them up. “If there was fraud, wouldn’t you want to know that?” he asked.

Well, I’d say that if you’re a Democrat — or an anti-Trump Republican — and the discovery of the fraud might mean the Democrat didn’t really win, the answer to that question is a hearty no. You would not want to find that out. It’s quite simple, really.

And in battleground states such as Arizona, state officials are fighting tooth-and-nail to avoid election audits. What does this tell us? Even if the fraud isn’t to the level that would prove Trump actually won, Bongino said, “the Democrats still don’t want you to see the extent to which our elections are a mess without really good, strong voter I.D. where it’s easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

Dominion Voting Systems — Litigation as a Public Relations Strategy

Of course, this audit didn’t even get into the accuracy of the voting machines. Not that the auditors hadn’t hoped to, but neither government officials nor Dominion Voting Systems cooperated. Apparently there’s one master administrative password that Dominion won’t relinquish. They’ve tried to have it both ways by withholding supposedly exculpatory evidence and suing their critics.

So far, they’ve sued or threatened to sue a host of entities, including NEWSMAX, OAN, OAN CEO Robert Herring and his son, OAN president Charles Herring, FOX NEWS, Lou Dobbs, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Rudy Giuliani, Patrick Byrne (who was working with the Arizona audit), Mike Lindell and others. They say they’re considering suing Donald Trump. They’ve sent out over 150 cease-and-desist letters. Smartmatic, another electronic voting systems company, is suing Lou Dobbs, Judge Pirro and Maria Bartiromo.

Dominion made a splash suing Sidney Powell, hoping that would silence her, and the litigation did dramatically lessen her media presence. But now Powell is countersuing Dominion, saying that company has adopted litigation as a public relations strategy. As part of its “lawfare” campaign, she says, Dominion has “filed billion-dollar-plus lawsuits against separate defendants at critical and strategically planned times.” She claims that this behavior is an abuse of process and demands $10 million in damages, plus punitive damages.

She also warns that “continued scrutiny of the vulnerabilities of the Dominion voting systems would likely open its executives to criminal and civil liability.” Despite executives’ sworn statements and assurances, she says, “the Dominion patents and manuals expressly provide for remote access to real-time election results, to adjudicate or flip votes, to delete audit logs and votes and other vulnerabilities.”

Powell hits them with no less than 25 different affirmative defenses. Details here.

Withholding Evidence Rather Than Allowing Transparent Analysis

Please note that unlike the linked-to opinion piece detailing Powell’s defense, we are not calling the Dominion executives “illegal fraudsters.” Certainly not. But there is still no valid reason we have seen to discount the possibility that they are. Perhaps if they gave auditors the password and allowed a transparent analysis of their system, that would give us a reason. In the meantime, they do seem to be using offensive tactics as their defense, which strongly suggests that they have no real defense besides “lawfare” and withholding evidence that auditors need.

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN. 

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.