In late September, the Republican-backed “audit” of votes in Maricopa County confirmed—yet again—that Joe Biden had legitimately won the electoral votes of the State of Arizona. To summarize: This was an unprecedented extra review of votes based in conspiracy theories that happened after certification of the results by the (Republican-led) Board of Supervisors, conducted by a company who had never audited an election before and whose founder claimed the election was rigged beforeconducting the audit—all while costing Maricopa County millions of dollars in the process.
The entire recount was a mess and a circus. An expensive mess and circus. Despite a prior agreement to cover expenses, GOP state senators forced the Maricopa County and taxpayers to foot the bill for new voting machines following the audit under threat of the state government pulling hundreds of millions in revenue sharing funds.
We should not let a similar costly frivolity occur here in Pima County.
Sadly, the cancerous movement to hamper Arizona democracy is somehow still growing. Conspiracy-fueled advocates of “Stop the Steal” have yet to back down despite the fact that even the partisan-led, amateurishly handled Cyber Ninjas report demonstrated no evidence of widespread voter fraud. State Senate President Karen Fann can claim any nonsense she wants, but Arizona’s election was completely aboveboard.
Still, on Friday Oct. 15, the GOP push to invalidate the legitimate results of the Arizona 2020 Presidential Election returned in force. An e-mail statement from former President Donald Trump claimed that “A new analysis of mail-in ballots in Pima County, Arizona means the election was Rigged and Stolen [sic] from the Republican Party in 2020, and in particular, its Presidential Candidate.” This is patently false, but what’s new?
Just when you thought talk of an Arizona recount was dead… here we go again.
Honestly, we should have seen this coming. Contention surrounding the results of the Pima County election is nothing new. On Nov. 17, just a few weeks following the 2020 election, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to formally certify county-wide election results in what is usually a vote of formality. However as with everything, 2020 proved far more complicated. Republican supervisors claimed there were voting irregularities despite having no evidence and that Arizona’s Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich found no validity in their claims. The supervisors who voted against certification peddled the same ‘SharpieGate’ conspiracy theory that right-wing activists espoused on election night (and yes, the theory was summarily debunked).
What’s scarier is that Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem (you know, the one who was at the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6 fomenting insurrection) is supporting the former president’s claims. At a Trump rally earlier this month, Finchem claimed to have a source that more than 30,000 fictitious votes were registered in Pima County. Unsurprisingly, the Oro Valley Republican has been unable to provide any tangible proof for this claim. Instead, he has relied on video “analysis” from Shiva Ayyadurai—a self-proclaimed audit and elections expert—who has repeatedly failed to understand Maricopa County ballot procedures during State Senate testimony and claimed to be the inventor of e-mail (he is not).
In response to the hubbub, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry re-iterated the validity of the election results: “Pima County conducted a free, fair, secure, and accurate election.” Huckelberry also pointed out that a public, hand-counted audit was already conducted by both the county Democratic and Republican parties. Huckelberry concluded his statement by noting that “if there is anyone who believes they have evidence of wrongdoing, they should provide such evidence to proper investigative authorities…” I’ll translate: There is no evidence of this fraud, and if there were these right-wing activists would have submitted it already.
Trump, Finchem and Shiva’s claims have also been debunked by Benny White, a Republican who used to sit on the Pima County Election Accuracy and Certification Board and who was party’s 2020 nominee for County Recorder, the office that oversees voter rolls and early voting. After all that, if you still have doubts, at least take the word of Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cazares-Kelly and the multi-partisan Pima County Election Integrity Commission that found “no reason to question the results of the 2020 Pima County Election.” None.
So, if local officials do not believe the lies being peddled, why is a known conspiracy theorist sharing lies from an MIT graduate and supporting a president he’s long been tied to so concerning?
First, there’s now an ongoing petition to start a forensic audit in Pima County much like the one in Maricopa that wasted taxpayers’ time, money and patience. As part of this request, Finchem and Trump are also asking for the Arizona election results to be decertified. That alone is corrosive to local democratic values.
Still, at this point it feels like far-right throwaway attempts at democracy subversion are a dime a dozen. Finchem, however, seems to have plans that are far more concerning. See, he is currently running to control elections throughout Arizona as Secretary of State on a platform centered around “fixing” our electoral system. So, Finchem and Trump are not just coming for the results of the Pima County election this time around but want to be put in charge of Arizona elections in the future too.
Now that’s terrifying. This whole push for a recount is subversive political theater at worst, and a deranged conspiracy at best. Either way, it only serves to hurt the constituents of Pima County and erode faith in our democratic system. Don’t listen to Trump or Finchem, it’s the same tired lie—this time just with some Pima-centric spin.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2021.
THE 2020 ELECTION WAS A TOTAL FRAUD. BIDEN LOST BY A LANDSLIDE! THE DEMONRATS LIED, WE KNOW THEY LIED, THEY KNOW WE KNOW THEY LIED!
REPUBLICKUNTS ARE DELUSIONAL AND THINK THAT ELECTIONS ARE WON BY WHO CAN PROTEST THE MOST. DEMOCRATS SHOULD HAVE PROTESTED THE 2016 ELECTIONS TILL HELL FROZE OVER BECAUSE THAT WAS THE ELECTION FRAUD. TRUMPONS THOUGHT THEY COULD DO IT TWICE BECAUSE DEMOCRATS DON’T PROTEST RESULTS AND CONCEDE WITHOUT MUCH ADO! DIEBOLD , PUTIN AND THE RUSSIANS, TRAITOROUS REPUBLICKUNTS, AND CULT WORSHIPPING MORONS HELPED DRUMPF IN 2016 AND THAT WAS YOUR EFFEN FRAUD!
Mail in ballots allowed dems to cheat. They do it well.
“…the GOP push to invalidate the legitimate results…”
You can’t make that statement truthfully. Why? Because there are many ways that the 2020 election could have been corrupted and this audit has not yet been completed.
You simply don’t have a clue as to whether the results were legitimate.
We know that the Democrats cheated and that the cheating resulted in their victory in 2020. How do we know? Because we are not stupid. Any party that was willing to pay $12 million to fabricate a “Russian Dossier” that trashed our politics for four years would be more than willing to pay $100 million out of their $2 billion 2020 campaign stash to steal the whole thing.
Did the Democrats penetrate the security of the MVD signature file and forge thousands of voter registrations and thousands of mail-in ballot requests?
We don’t know. Registrations and mail-in ballot requests haven’t been audited.
Did the Democrats set up an illegal voter harvesting scheme, diverting and harvesting tens of thousands of ballots? We don’t know because voting wasn’t audited.
Did Democrats run busloads of operatives from polling polling place on election day, having them vote fraudulently over and over again? We don’t know because there have been no audits in counties that don’t require voter I.D.
Did Democrats swamp the polling place worker system with operatives and stuff the ballot box? We don’t know because the 2020 poll workers were not audited.
What did Biden’s “1,500” fraud workers do? We don’t know because they haven’t been deposed yet.
Summary of the Arizona Audit and Canvass Reoprts
https://wendyrogers.org/summary-of-the-az-audit-and-canvass-reports/
The Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit report was presented by Doug Logan of Cyber Ninjas on 9/24/21. Refer to Volume 3 of the audit report (which you can find at https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/audit):
Paper Count: You can count the paper ballots (both real and fake), and it will always equal the total paper count showing Biden won Maricopa County by 45,469 physical votes.
Sect. 5.3.1: 23,344 cast from prior voter addresses
Sect. 5.4.1: 9,041 more il-in ballots returned than were sent out to voters.
Sect. 5.4.2: 5,295 voters voted in multiple counties
Sect. 5.5.1: The official totals do not match those who voted by 3432 ballots
Voting Machine Findings:
Sect. 6.4.1: The Election Management System Database was purged, and all tallies were cleared. This violates the law.
Sect. 6.4.2: A large number of election files had been deleted. This violates the law.
Sect. 6.4.3: Beginning November 1st, ~50% of the ballot images (263,139) were corrupt and unreadable. These ballots could not be counted/validated.
Sect. 6.5.1: 21,273 ballot images are missing, substantially less than the total number of paper ballots.
EchoMail report on Early Voting Ballot Envelopes:
Identified 34,448 mail-in ballot envelope images being 2 copies, 3 copies and 4 copies (duplicate voters).
6,545 more envelopes were processed by Maricopa than identified by EchoMail
1,919 envelope images with blank signature regions
2,580 envelope images with scribbles in the signature regions
The total questionable ballot count from the audit report (more is listed within the report) is:
Physical Count discrepancies (top 3) 37,680 3x margin of victory
Machine discrepancies (top 1) 284,412 28x margin of victory
EVB Envelopes 45,492 4.5x margin of victory
Total potential ballot discrepancies 367,584
Total is 36x the margin of victory
The primary point mispresented by the Media, Ken Bennet and others was that Biden won since the physical count was essentially the same, showing candidate Biden had more votes. However, this is not supported by the data within the report. The facts from the report and our canvassing report support each other. Due to these significant disparities, the outcome of the election is truly unknowable.
If we presented any particular area as the only discrepancy, it still exceeds the margin of the win.
The Liz Harris Voter Integrity Project Canvassing Report
The Liz Harris Voter Integrity Project canvassed throughout Maricopa County and published the first report on September 8th, 2021. Within this report, they reported two primary categories of ineligible ballots: lost votes and phantom voters. The findings are incredibly close to the machine discrepancy count.
Within this report, almost 12,000 registered voters had been surveyed by her canvassers. The canvass as conducted generally yields a confidence interval of 1.5% at a confidence level of 95%. Said another way, very similar to voting polls, the accuracy of these results applied to the county as a whole is within +/- 1.5% with 95% certainty, which is the scientific, statistical standard for samples such as this.
Lost Votes: These are American citizens living in Maricopa County who cast a vote, primarily by mail, in the election, yet there is no record of their vote with the county, and it was not counted in the reported vote totals for the election.
Ghost Votes: Mail-in votes were cast under the names of registered voters who were either unknown to the residents of the registration address or who were verified as having moved away before October 2020.
Lost Votes: 173,104 17x margin of victory
Ghost Votes: 96,389 9.5x margin of victory
Total 269,493 27x margin of victory
The Solution
There is but one solution that could immediately stop all the fraud and provide cost savings within the process. A single bill to change the election process to the following would remove all threats to our republic.
Single Day Voting
In-person (except for military and severely handicapped)
Voter ID (Driver’s License, State ID)
Paper Ballots
Hand Count (this saves money!!)
Smaller Precincts
Results by 9 PM
Demand our elections are fraud-free, and this is the quickest and most affordable method to guarantee your vote counts as much as every voting citizen.
You can access a copy of the canvass report at http://www.canvas50.org
Have you read the report? Why is your reporting resorting to inflammatory words to prove your point? Because most people read headlines and not the meat of the articles? And the meat of your article does not prove your point only your opinion by cherry picking some of the findings.
What are you afraid of with an actual audit compared to a recount of counterfeit ballots? Counting the same ballots over and over gets you the same results. Looking at the ballots and analyzing the ballots in full detail will give you the real results. Or have you not seen the testimonies of eye witnesses and the videos from other states that are VERY suspect? So if you have nefarious actions in one state on video who had the same stoppage that happened in other states about the same time you don’t think that is suspicious? You know this president was elected by a landslide because he is so popular he can’t draw a crowd. Oh I forgot, he does get a lot of response. Let’s go Brandon.
“DEMOCRATS SHOULD HAVE PROTESTED THE 2016 ELECTIONS TILL HELL FROZE OVER BECAUSE THAT WAS THE ELECTION FRAUD.”
Democrats did protest the 2016 elections till hell froze over. That was the whole purpose of them spending $12 million to fabricate the “Russian Dossier” and spend $64 million of taxpayer money and four years investigating Republicans.
And, finding no evidence of any fraud whatsoever.
They should have investigated Hillary’s invitation to every government on the face of the earth to intervene on her behalf, of which many did.
Sect. 5.3.1: 23,344 cast from prior voter addresses
Sect. 5.4.1: 9,041 more mail-in ballots returned than were sent out to voters.
EchoMail report on Early Voting Ballot Envelopes:
Identified 34,448 mail-in ballot envelope images being 2 copies, 3 copies and 4 copies (duplicate voters).
******************************************
Amidst all the smoke, perhaps some substantial fire. These 34,448 mail-in ballot images and 9,041 more returned than sent out, and 23,344 from prior addresses need to be compared with prior election trends, 2012 and 2016.
If you rely on court suits to flood the zone with a glut of bad ballots, knowing that people will send them in voted without signatures then use government employees to turn these fraudulent votes into legal votes after the election is finalized, that’s a felony.
But, a quick check could put this to bed. For example, they found that more of the voters who were dead before election day were Republicans, making it likely that Trump won the dead people vote.
Do the same analysis with these corrupted ballots.
why do you continue to state there is no fraud on our elections…..why do you lie ….please help me understand more??? where are you coming from??? Did you notice the likes and dislikes on your article?? Maybe you should recheck the facts and redo your article,,,,why do you go against the american people
The Huppster personally saw Hillary Clinton throwing out only Republican votes, as she ran up the Grassy Knoll chasing John Birch, while a horde of AOC socialists danced around a demonic bonfire with pizzagate boxes. This was confirmed by the Cyber Ninjas. Why wasn’t any of this investigated?