Inside Arizona election audit, workers searching for fraud
PHOENIX — On the floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where Sir Charles Barkley once dunked basketballs and Hulk Hogan wrestled King Kong Bundy, 46 tables are arrayed in neat rows, each with a Lazy Susan in the middle.
Seated at the tables are several dozen people, mostly Republicans, who spend hours watching ballots spin by, photographing them or inspecting them closely. They are counting them and checking to see if there is any sign they were flown in surreptitiously from South Korea. A few weeks ago they were holding them up to ultraviolet lights, looking for a watermark rumored to be a sign of fraud.
This is Arizona’s extraordinary, partisan audit of the 2020 election results in the state’s most populous county — ground zero for former President Donald Trump and a legion of his supporters who have refused to accept his loss in Arizona or in other battleground states. These ballots have been counted before and certified by the Republican governor. Much of the country has moved on.
And yet, in this aging arena, Republicans are searching for evidence to support claims they already believe.
The effort has alarmed voting rights advocates, election administrators and civil rights lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice, who this past week demanded confirmation that federal security and anti-intimidation laws are being followed. Senate President Karen Fann responded Friday by telling the department it had nothing to worry about.
“They lost, and they can’t get over it,” said Grant Woods, a former Republican Arizona attorney general who became a Democrat during Trump’s presidency. “And they don’t want to get over it because they want to continue to sow doubt about the election.”
The 2.1 million ballots were already counted by Maricopa County election officials in November, validated in a partial hand recount and certified by Gov. Doug Ducey. Two extra audits confirmed no issues. No evidence of fraud sufficient to invalidate Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Arizona and Maricopa County has been found.
Still, counters are being paid $15 an hour to scrutinize each ballot, examining folds and taking close-up photos looking for machine-marked ballots and bamboo fibers in the paper. The reason appears to be to test a conspiracy theory that a plane from South Korea delivered counterfeit ballots to the Phoenix airport shortly after the election.
When the recount started, the ballots were viewed under ultraviolet light to check for watermarks. A theory popular with QAnon followers has it that Trump secretly watermarked mail ballots to catch cheating.
There are no watermarks on ballots in Maricopa County. The effort has since been abandoned.
Despite their obvious partisan biases, the auditors insist they can be trusted because they’re running an independent and transparent operation. Yet they’re recruiting from right-wing groups. They tried to block media access. They fought in court to not disclose written procedures they’re using to count votes and keep ballots secure. They lost.
And it’s entirely unclear who is paying for it and how much it’s costing. Taxpayers, through the Senate’s operating budget, chipped in $150,000, but the CEO of the small company leading the audit has acknowledged that won’t cover costs.
Fundraisers, one from the conservative One America News Network and another tied to Patrick Byrne, a former CEO who promoted election conspiracies, are raising hundreds of thousands more.
Critics call the undisclosed private funding a huge red flag — the audit could be funded by foreign governments or people with a stake in the outcome like ardent Trump supporters.
Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state who is serving as the Senate’s liaison to the auditors, dismissed mounting criticism.
“I think Republicans can count votes on ballots as well as Democrats or Libertarians or independents,” Bennett said.
All of it is made possible by the GOP-controlled state Senate, which issued an unprecedented subpoena demanding access to all ballots and the machines that counted them in Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix area and 60% of Arizona voters.
After months of court battles with the GOP-controlled county Board of Supervisors, which maintains the election was well-run, the Senate got hold of the ballots. That came despite repeated audits and a hand-count of a sample of ballots that showed the results were accurate.
Fann, the Republican Senate president, insisted again Saturday that the audit has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with the large segment of GOP voters who he convinced that he actually won, despite the lack of evidence.
“Everybody keeps saying, oh, there’s no evidence and it’s like, yeah, well let’s do the audit and if there’s nothing there, then we say look, there was nothing there,” Fann said. “If we find something, and it’s a big if, but if we find something, then we can say, OK, we do have evidence and now how do we fix this.”