I’ve stayed away from writing about the election audit in Arizona’s Maricopa County because I felt that, until the audit was completed, there wasn’t much point in trying to offering commentary about its progress. The big outlines were known: The audit was being carried out meticulously and both Democrats and NeverTrumpers objected vociferously. On Monday, though, a conservative reporter with a good reputation revealed some really stunning facts: Several hundred thousand ballots are missing and boxes that purported to hold ballots for counting contained only blanks.

Here’s Patrick Howley’s report (emphasis mine):

Several hundred thousand votes that were counted in Maricopa County, Arizona are associated with missing ballots, according to an audit organizer who is speaking regularly with people on the audit floor.

“We found a ballot shortage, anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the votes,” Josh Barnett, an audit organizer who led the affidavit drive to make the audit happen, tells NATIONAL FILE. “It looks like a couple hundred thousand ballots are unaccounted for. The ballots are missing.”

“I also know that there were boxes filled with blank ballots in those pallets. There were blanks in there,” Barnett said, citing a person who is frequently at the audit site as part of the audit process. “They (election officials) were doing it for appearance, to try to hide the fact that ballots are missing by saying, ‘It’s okay, they’re all right here.’ But the ballots are blank.”

Read the rest here.

It’s always possible, of course, that the missing ballots will still turn up. However, given that Trump lost Arizona by only 10,457 votes, the fact that 5 to 10 percent of the votes are currently missing is staggering in its implications.

Certainly, that’s what Sundance, who has been all over this story like white on rice, thinks:

If this reporting turns out to be accurate, this will be an explosive development.  However, that said, if this report is accurate… this is likely the reason why Maricopa County officials have been fighting the audit, hiring lawyers and positioning themselves in an attempt to undermine the chain-of-custody of the ballots.

If Democrats and NeverTrumpers were confident in their victory, they would have encouraged the audit -- provided, of course, that they got to watch and record every single movement to ensure the auditors’ honesty and accuracy. Their desperate opposition to the recount doesn’t suggest confidence; instead, it strongly suggests that they know the jig soon will be up, in Arizona at least.

Moreover, if the recount shows fraud in Arizona, at least some of the other states in which Biden’s victory was suspect will do recounts as well. No wonder AG Merrick Garland is doing everything he can to block the recount movement. And no wonder that some of our most popular posts at American Thinker are beginning to think the unthinkable: What if Trump really did win the election?

As for me, I continue to hew to a theory I put forth some time ago, which is that, since the Constitution is a contract between the American people and their government, common law fills in the blanks when the Constitution is silent about an issue. In this case, because the Founders never contemplated fraud on this scale, the common law offers the doctrine of “void ab initio.”

This long-standing legal rule (which I believe was in effect when the Founders ratified the Constitution) holds that, if a contractual obligation is entered into through fraud, everything that followed that fraud is void. That means that Biden’s six months of executive orders, statements, and everything else will be wiped clean. It’s certainly an enjoyable thought, even if it’s not correct or, if it’s correct, it never comes to fruition.

IMAGE: Audit in Maricopa County. YouTube screen grab.

Correction: changed "won" to "lost" when discussing Trump's election outcome

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