We have all heard Trump make the claim, sometimes he gets the states confused, “Arizona,” or maybe Pennsylvania,” it’s never like “Alabama,” because Trump won Alabama and so clearly the election was clean. No, what Trump likes to say is quote a guy like Doug Logan, the leader of the Arizona election review team, who will then say that there were more than 74,000 “phantom” mail-in ballots that were counted even though there was supposed “no record of them being sent.”

In other words, there were more people who voted than were registered to even vote, and – obviously, they all went to Biden because no extra vote went to Trump in a state controlled by Republicans.

Well, according to the Arizona Mirror, all one needs to do is sorta “look” and it just doesn’t hold up:

“There’s no record of them being sent, but they were counted. So, nobody knows where the hell are they?” Trump told the crowd at Arizona Federal Theatre on July 24.

The former president didn’t realize it, but Trump personally found a voter who had cast one of those ballots. Later in his speech, he asked each of the Republican gubernatorial candidates who had spoken earlier in the day to stand up and be recognized. Among those candidates was state Treasurer Kimberly Yee, who was one of the 74,000 voters. 

She was, in fact, very real, and had cast a perfectly legal ballot. According to Maricopa County’s files, Yee cast her ballot in-person at an early voting center on Oct. 28.

We used to laugh at these audits because they were nothing more than desperate attempts to show that Trump actually won because Trump said he actually won. But as they continue on and continue to get shot down, these audits are actually performing a bit of a public service:

“ABC15 and the Arizona Mirror examined the same records that Logan has, and found 74,241 people who are listed as voting by early ballot but aren’t on the EV32 reports,” the paper writes. “Of those voters, 74,238 appear in the master file of general election voters. More than 99.4% of those people — 73,819, to be exact — voted in-person at early voting centers.

These audits are verifying in painfully accurate ways that the vote in the United States is secure, at least with respect to the counts. Now, whether the new legislation allows certain votes to be counted or not is a completely different question. But each allegation as to “fraud” put forth by Trump – and there have been too many to count – have all been found to be a fraudulent assertion, and that is important to prove.

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[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak