The bamboo ballot menace
In Arizona, spurious auditors and observers (who have actually signed non-disclosure agreements, more on that later), have now started photographing ballots looking for traces of bamboo. The theory goes, and it’s being advanced with a straight face by people too dumb to understand the absurdity, that “Asians” flew ballots to Arizona filled out for Biden in order to “throw the election.”
“There’s accusations of 40,000 ballots were flown in, OK?” said one supervisor. “Into Arizona?” A reporter asked. “Into Arizona,” the man explained. “And it was stuffed into the box, OK? And it came from the southeast part of the world. Asia, OK? And what they’re doing is to find out is if there’s bamboo in the paper. That camera right there [points at camera outside the frame], that they take a picture of the ballot…”
I was intrigued to know where “the southeast part of the world” actually was. So I examined a conventional Mercator projection map. Could he have been talking about Australia or New Zealand? No, that’s not Asia.
Perhaps the clue is in the word “bamboo.” Was the supervisor darkly hinting that China is somehow involved? Have we been, as it were, “bamboozled” by China? The plot, as the saying goes, thickens.
And why on earth did these observers of the Arizona audit sign non-disclosure agreements? Could it be that they have something to hide? What, precisely, do fearless searchers for truth and transparency have to hide?
But the fact remains, in their desperation, Trump supporters have now convinced themselves that China lacks the technology to manufacture paper without bamboo, and that a “special camera” can find traces of bamboo in some ballots. Once found they can “prove” that China shipped cartloads of ballots to America and “dumped them in the boxes.” Presumably these ballots look just like real ballots. Except for the bamboo. Which their “special camera” will find any day. Wow.
Ladies and gentlemen I give you the perfect storm, where quintessential stupidity meets unbridled desperation. The effort in Arizona to re-examine millions of ballots for bamboo is a Donald Trump-supported project. It may very well be one of the legion of reasons why Trump is not being allowed back on social media. After all, if Trump finds a platform upon which to proclaim this ridiculous rubbish, millions of mental lightweights are going to believe him.
Meanwhile the anti-Trump Republican minority in congress are being excoriated by their own party bosses for substandard zeal and not believing in tripe like this. It’s a chilling reminder that Trump still animates much of the Republican Party, and that the “you lost, get over it” crowd of the 2016 election believes in the Big Lie simply because they lost and they can’t get over it. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.