Maricopa County rebuts ‘audit’ findings, bogus election claims

Nearly every claim that Senate President Karen Fann’s so-called audit team made about the 2020 general election was either inaccurate, misleading or patently false, according to a long-awaited rebuttal by Maricopa County.

County officials have spent months since the audit team presented its findings in September examining the allegations, which included tens of thousands of possibly questionable votes, ballot tabulation equipment being improperly connected to the internet, illegally deleted files and early ballots being inappropriately counted despite missing signatures from voters. 

During a four-hour presentation on Wednesday, members of the county’s elections team laid out a point-by-point refutation of the claims made by audit team leader Cyber Ninjas and other members of the team that spent six months hand-counting ballots, examining machinery and probing other aspects of the 2020 election. The county also issued a 93-page report on its findings. 

Of the 75 claims that the audit team made, Scott Jarrett, Maricopa County’s director of election day voting, said the county’s analysis debunked nearly all of them, finding 38 to be inaccurate, 25 to be misleading and 11 to be completely false. They found one claim, that 50 ballots might have been accidentally scanned and counted twice, might have merit. 

Claims were deemed inaccurate when the auditors used methodology that was either incorrect or faulty, or they simply lacked understanding of federal and state laws governing elections. For example, Cyber Ninjas claimed about 53,000 ballots were questionable because the voters’ addresses didn’t match up with voter registration records. But the auditors reached that conclusion using commercial databases that are often inaccurate combined with partial information about voters, Jarrett said. 

Misleading claims were those which were technically true, but presented in a way that would lead people to a faulty conclusion, such as claims by CyFIR, one of the companies that was part of the audit team, that several pieces of equipment from the elections department were connected to the internet. Two were, Jarrett said, but those were web servers that are supposed to be connected. Tabulation machines and other parts of the county’s election management system are air-gapped, meaning they’re physically unable to be connected to other computer systems. 

And claims deemed false were those that the audit team should have known were wrong, even with their lack of knowledge about elections. Jarrett pointed to the audit team’s claims that they knew the county used the wrong kind of paper because ink from markers that were provided to voters bled through the paper, part of the long-debunked “Sharpiegate” conspiracy theory. Jarrett said the audit team would have learned the truth if it had bothered to contact the company that manufactured the paper. 

Fann initiated the audit in response to the false claims that former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters spread that the 2020 election was rigged against him. She hired Cyber Ninjas despite the company’s lack of relevant qualifications or experience with election-related matters. Doug Logan, the company’s founder and the leader of the audit team, had actively promoted those false claims and had even actively participated in the “Stop the Steal” movement that attempted to legitimate those allegations and overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.

Though Cyber Ninjas’ hand count of ballots, which used frequently-changing methodology that didn’t comply with industry standards, confirmed that Biden won Arizona, the audit team made myriad other claims that cast doubt on the results. Much of the information that Jarrett and the report provided on Wednesday debunking those claims elaborated on information the county released last year in response to the audit team’s final report.

Of the 53,304 ballots that Cyber Ninjas deemed questionable, the county found 32 instances in which someone might have illegally voted twice. The county referred those cases to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, which is investigating the audit team’s findings at Fann’s request.

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