Arizona audit finds problems? Senate President calls on county to cooperate

Contractors hired by the Arizona Senate to conduct a ballot audit at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix on May 1.

The ongoing audit in Arizona is stalled by Maricopa County’s (AZ) refusal to turn over router and administrator passwords. on May 12, State Senate President Karen Fann (AZ) sent a letter asking the county to cooperate with the audit and attend a meeting to answer questions about the 2020 election audit that uncovered “serious issues.”

Beginning April 23, Arizona officially launched a comprehensive forensic audit of the approximately 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County in the 2020 general election. The state Democratic Party has repeatedly requested that the audit be stopped because of “security and privacy concerns,” but the judge rejected the request. The county is now refusing to provide images of routers and routers related to last year’s election, citing “security risks.

A state Senate lawyer said last week that the Senate would issue a new subpoena unless Maricopa County provided the information requested by the audit.

But Fein chose to first send a letter to Maricopa County Board of County Commissioners Chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican, to convince him to voluntarily cooperate with the Senate. She also asked Sellers to volunteer to attend a 1 p.m. meeting on May 18 to address a number of issues, including the county’s noncompliance with Senate subpoenas.

To address the “security concerns” raised by Maricopa County, Fein proposed in the letter that the auditing firm review the router images at the Maricopa County Building with a representative from the county sheriff’s office present and supervising.

“Such an arrangement would allow Maricopa County to retain custody and oversight of the router data for review while ensuring that the Senate has access to the information needed to successfully complete this audit. The Senate is constitutionally entitled to this information.” She added, “The Senate has no interest in viewing any information that is not relevant to the administration of the 2020 general election.”

She emphasized, “Auditors have become aware of glaring omissions, inconsistencies and anomalies related to the handling, organization and storage of ballots in Maricopa County.” These included a lack of ballot chain-of-custody documentation; unsealed bags in which ballots were stored; and discrepancies between the actual number of ballots in a batch and the totals listed on the pink report sheet provided by the county for the batch of ballots.

In addition, the audit team found that an entire database directory on one election machine had been deleted and that the primary database for the election management software was not found. Fein said, “This indicates that the primary database of all election-related data for the November 2020 general election has been deleted.”

A Maricopa County spokeswoman replied to the English-language Epoch Times via email, saying, “We have seen the tweets and the letter. Much of this letter is a misunderstanding of how the election was run.”

The matter of the audit, which has surrounded the Arizona Senate and Maricopa County government, has been ongoing for months. Last December, the state Senate Judiciary Committee had issued a subsequent subpoena for a full forensic audit of the county’s ballots over challenges to election fraud in Maricopa County.

Maricopa County rejected the subpoena request issued by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It wasn’t until Feb. 26 of this year that a judge in the county formally ruled that the Arizona Senate has oversight authority and that Maricopa County must provide the state Senate with approximately 2.1 million ballots from last year’s Nov. 3 presidential election and allow for an audit.

Now that the audit has been underway for several weeks, Fine also informed Sellers in her letter that she hopes the current stalemate can be resolved without additional subpoenas and invited him and any other county officials to join her at a May 18 hearing at the Arizona State Capitol, where it will be broadcast live.

Also, former President Trump issued a statement through the Save America PAC saying, “Arizona Senate President Fein wrote a letter regarding voting irregularities, and possibly fraud, in Maricopa County during the 2020 presidential election. “

“Fein has invited Maricopa County to a public hearing on May 18 to give them the opportunity to try to explain the missing database, ballots and other significant issues.” “The fake news and crappy media are doing everything they can to not report on this major event. They flatly refuse to talk about or report on it. They don’t want America or the world to see what happened to our corrupt ‘third world’ election.”