Brnovich: GOP has no basis for new vote audit in Arizona

The Arizona Republican Party is suing Maricopa County election officials to try to force an additional hand count of ballots in a way the party argues would “potentially result in a more precise sampling of votes.”

But the Attorney General’s Office, led by Republican Mark Brnovich, says the party has no legal basis for its claim.

County election officials must perform hand count audits using a random sampling of ballots to ensure the accuracy of electronic counts. The Maricopa County Elections Department already has completed one for the general election, officials said Monday, and it matched electronic counts exactly.

State law indicates officials should audit ballots from two county precincts or 2% of county precincts, whichever is greater, but that assumes a precinctbased model, where voters are assigned specific polling places they must use to cast their votes. For the 2020 general election, Maricopa County instead used vote centers, which were open to any voter throughout the county.

For vote center audits, the secretary of state’s election manual indicates officials should consider each center to be a precinct for hand count purposes. “The officer in charge of elections must conduct a hand count of regular ballots from at least 2% of the vote centers, or 2 vote centers, whichever is greater,” the manual states.

The Republican Party argues state law explicitly referred to “precincts” for a reason, and contends there is a “fundamental difference” between sampling 175 vote centers and 748 precincts.

“The legislature could have chosen to use the language ‘two percent of the polling places,’ as evidenced by the fact that it did use that language to define the scope of the hand count for presidential preference elections,” the lawsuit, filed Thursday evening, states.

In a statement, Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward said the “question here is one of statutory construction, and whether the Secretary of State’s Elections Procedures Manual is able to supersede Arizona’s state law.”

“Arizona voters deserve complete assurance that the law will be followed and that only legal ballots will be counted in the 2020 election,” she said.

The attorney general addressed the claims in a letter to Republican legislative leadership on Thursday, saying his office had “received a number of inquiries regarding the scope and nature of the manual hand count audit required under” state law.

Brnovich noted the Legislature authorized the use of voting centers nearly a decade ago, in 2011, and that it “correctly recognized” at the time “that it could not predict all of the variations between voting centers and precincts that counties might adopt.”

“Instead, the Legislature directed the Secretary of State to do so through the Election Procedures Manual, which is approved by the Governor and Attorney General,” he wrote. “This is not a new procedure.”

Brnovich also took aim at the idea that officials should only conduct hand count audits using polling precincts because state statute explicitly references them.