that county s election. instead they are being defamed, they say, by false information some sort of election evidence or materials are destroyed. in fulton county, florida, ballots from the 2020 election can be reviewed. investigators did not find a valid absentee ballot of an audit of over 17,000 votes and signatures by individuals who chose to vote that way. republicans in arizona and three other states who tried to overturn the 2020 election results are now running to become election officials in their home states. the american democracy crisis continues, even if the last election was not ultimately stolen. with that in mind we turn to our strategists tonight, a staff writer of the new york times, emily bazelon. good to have you here. thank you. i will start with you on the law because this could look like a story in decline.
of. and they are trying to pick up the machine as a democracy and not having it used towards a party s end. and to me, that is clear. i did a lot of reporting around the election about the work that was going under the have scrutiny, the dropboxes, how secure they were, counting. it was a remarkably well run, pret kwlien election. the story that s being told from trump and his supporters are completely at odds from that reality. and that was tough if you actually worked on it. yeah. waneta, i want to put on the screen a quote republicans who sought to undercut or overturn biden s election win are launching campaigns to become the state s top elected officials next year. we all know in the news perhaps
a little unfortunately when planes last safely, it s considered less of a big story than when they tragically crash. while politicos and people interested in this stuff may have followed this closely, i think the fact the plane did not ultimately crash in the largest sense of the election results were honored and inaugural election occurred may leave some people underestimating how different it could have been, juanita, in just a couple of these states, two, three states, you had people willing to take it to the max and try to overthrow everything. they want to win these secretary of state offices now. yeah, ari, the first thing that came to my mind seeing that political headline, what if one of these pm were in raffensperger s spot when you call and say, can you come up with 11,000, 12,000 votes? absolutely, let s go. the fact you got this call into a maricopa county elected official, trump s call to
people who don t follow this daily could say a lot of noise but the guy does go back to florida to blog. the other guy became president and vice president. when you look at where we end tonight s report at the top of the program, the reason it s the top story, the people who want to cheat and end democracy in america are running to get more power are in positions where in a different election, they might have gotten away with it, emily. yes. we are talking about an election which the system held because the folks who actually have to conduct and administer the elections made sure it did so. they resisted an enormous amount of political pressure. they did that whether they were republicans or democrats because they were dock their job. doing their job. they re now in a position, particularly arizona, where they re watching all of their work in effect made a mockery
off okay, an election that took place during a pandemic no less. we know they put everything they had into making sure this was a safe and fair election, which it has been confirmed to be and now have their work undermined at what expense? to make trump feel better? we know biden is not going to leave the white house while he s legally certified to be in that role. what s the goal here? right. the goal here is undermine the institution, undermine the people and no voter in this country deserves to be undermined in this way. as you said, it s not an audit down tlxt you can call it a confidence audit, which is what the mafia and cartels do, where they use the word audit to try to take something that s not theirs. but, no, it s not a real audit. it s very seriously a problem. i want to play a little bit of george will, who has been a very strong conservative, very much right winger, he would say himself for a long time. here s what he said about where