What Does Arizona Election Audit Mean?

             The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns election integrity and validity. Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate President received the final audit report from the Cyber Ninjas. According to the report, the final hand count by the auditors found about the same numbers as the official machine count for Maricopa County after they performed a quadruple-checked all 2.1 billion ballots. This audit report has Democrats lauding the report. However, the hand count of the ballots was only one part of the forensic audit.

            No one complained about the counting of the ballots, and the forensic audit was not about suspected miscounting.. The question was not about the number of ballots, but there was a question about the validity of the ballots. Where did the ballots come from? Who voted? Did anyone vote more than once? Andrea Widburg studied the situation and discussed why the Democrat celebration could be problematic. 

There are two documents at issue here, one of which is a purported final draft of the executive summary from Cyber Ninjas, … and the other of which is a cover letter that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate President, sent to Mark Brnovich, the Arizona Attorney General. I quoted above from Fann’s cover letter, which offers the meaningless conclusion that a hand count matched the machine count….

However, the same letter, in a small bow to honesty, also points out systemic problems with election security. The five bullet-points can be summarized this way:

·         absentee ballots were inadequately verified,

·         voter rolls do not match the ballots, as well as showing duplicate and dead people,

·         amateurs oversaw election technology and machinery they didn’t understand and misused,

·         private companies had the passwords to the vote-counting machines, and

·         election officials deleted material making it impossible to do a truly accurate audit (or, in legal terms, they deliberately spoliated evidence, which I’m guessing might be illegal under statutory requirements that all voting data must be preserved for 22 months after an election).

In other words, even though the hand-counted paper ballots matched the machine count, there were some huge and dangerous irregularities going on with the election.

But wait! There’s more – and this is the really important part because it shows the Big Lie. As Gateway Pundit notes, a purported final draft of the actual audit summary said that “the 2020 presidential election had 57,734 ballots that should not have been counted and should have been set aside, investigated or removed.”

Considering that the margin of Biden’s victory was only 10,457 votes, the presence of 57,734 ballots that were improperly counted is highly relevant. And that’s where we get to the actual audit info from Cyber Ninjas. Their letter does not say that everything is fine and Biden absolutely won.

Instead, having found invalid ballots in numbers more than five times greater than Biden’s “victory,” the audit’s conclusion is that “the election should not be certified, and the reported results are not reliable.”

            As I understand news reports, Fann will now turn the results of the forensic audit over to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who has stated that he will do his own investigation. He has the power of subpoena and indict if his investigation shows election fraud. The story is far from over, so Democrats should hold their celebration. Meanwhile, forensic audits are moving forward in other states, such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Texas.