It’s time for an update on the Maricopa County 2020 election audit, which continues despite the tiny amount of media attention devoted to it.

Dan Bongino, through a source whom he says has “never, ever fed [him] anything but the truth,” said Thursday that the audit has turned up three big findings:

1) There are people who are still not complying with subpoenas. We reported last week that this was a problem; apparently, it continues. “Why wouldn’t you comply with a subpoena if the election was free and fair,” Bongino asks, and I think we all know the answer to that. The information turned up by the subpoena would make them look worse than the act of noncompliance does. Otherwise, they would comply.

2) A large number of files were deleted from a database ten days before the start of the election audit. Of course, this would be a YUUUUGE story if Trump, rather than Biden, had won by a razor-thin margin in Arizona and Democrats had later discovered something like this. (And how much would you bet that the Democrats would blame Russian intervention?) But even to bring this matter up and ask questions about it makes us perpetrators of “The Big Lie” (to use the term even “Republican” Liz Cheney has used) that the 2020 election was stolen. News flash: asking questions about the election does nothing of the sort.

Perhaps we’ll find out what was in those deleted files. Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation. Perhaps there isn’t.

3) Apparently, the chain of custody for the ballots was not adequate. Perhaps that would explain some of the discrepancies turned up by the audit. For example, aside from missing documentation, there are disparities between the number of ballots in a batch and the total number of ballots tallied in “pink slip’ reports. For a race in which the two candidates were separated by only about 11,000 votes, that’s a big deal.

Bongino had a great observation: “The Democrats can’t have it both ways. You can’t say on one hand, we don’t want any voter ID, we want unsecured ballot boxes, and massive numbers of ballots mailed out to people [where] we don’t know where they’re going, and complain when Republicans say, ‘Hey, but that could lead to fraud,’ and want the [potential] fraud investigated. You can’t have it both ways. And we’re not gonna play your game. Either support free and fair elections, through voter ID, secured ballots and secured locations where people can vote, or shut up.”

In other election news, recall that we reported on an organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which was funded to the tune of about $400 million by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In turn, the money was used to fund grants to key states to pad their election budgets, and it definitely had strings attached. At John Solomon’s website JUST THE NEWS, Natalia Mittelstadt has a story about a report, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, from the Detroit Department of Elections on its use of the $7.4 million it got from CTCL.

The department was so glad to get that money, they now want it to be a yearly thing. “We created a new expectation for the public, because we significantly increased the number of ways [a] voter can vote,” their report says. (Editorial note: these also significantly increase the number of ways one can cheat.) “We have created a new normal in terms of how voters expect to vote in the City of Detroit. The funding structure established must be preserved for future elections. We are requesting grant funds for the current year.”

According to the report, three-fourths of the money was spent in the category of “poll worker recruitments funds, hazard pay and/or training expenses.” They said that the money enabled them to hire “more quality staff” because they were able to pay them more.

“We are requesting additional Grant Fund assistance for the 2021 election cycle,” the report says (again).

One thing about this request for more money leaps out at me. The original grant was specified as being for “CTCL COVID-19 Response.” The reasoning was that because of COVID-19, states would need help providing voters with more ways to exercise their right to vote in 2020. So why are they asking for the Mark Zuckerberg gravy train to continue every year? Why is this a “new normal”? Are we going to be dealing with viruses at the polls for all “future elections”?

According to the report, Detroit spent $160,000 on ballot drop boxes –- our assumption is that these were placed where CTCL had determined they should go, as happened in Wisconsin –- and also $200,000 on nonpartisan voter education. (I’m thinking we might need quotation marks around the word “nonpartisan.”)

As we wait for results of the Arizona audit, Mollie Hemingway is busy writing a full account of the 2020 election called “RIGGED: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” published not by a mainstream press but by Regnery, which brings out books of interest to the conservative market. (They published Josh Hawley’s new book about Big Tech after Simon & Schuster dropped it.)

“Americans who feel silenced, subjected and betrayed are about to learn the truth about a scandalous election,” the publisher says of Hemingway’s book.

If you missed her column announcing her upcoming book, read it here.

This extremely capable, candid and courageous journalist will be shamed and likely canceled in many forums simply for relating facts and questioning what happened during the election. Of course, only Republicans are prohibited from questioning election outcomes; Democrats do it all the time. As Mollie says, “If questioning the results of a Presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election.”

Expect to see “never-before-told eyewitness stories of what really went down in 2020.” These will pertain not just to the Presidential race but also to down-ballot races. This will be a big-picture analysis, not just of Election Day vote counts but also of “how media and Big Tech oligarchs used their power to control information on the internet and to manipulate people’s behavior before and after the 2020 election.” I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg will garner a few pages.

Of course, much new information will be coming out in the next few weeks and months, so Mollie will be working down to the wire to have the book as up to date as possible for its September release. Yes, we have to wait till September –- and that means the media also have to wait for their chance to ignore it completely. “I have no doubt that the powers that worked to oust Trump in 2020 will do everything they can to suppress this book in 2021,” she said.