Maricopa County supervisors to vote on 2nd election audit

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will vote Wednesday on whether to conduct another audit on the county voting system in an attempt to placate any concerns of voter fraud or election misconduct during the 2020 general election.

The public can watch at 9:30 a.m. as the board considers an item at its public meeting that proposes “hiring two independent, qualified firms to independently audit tabulation hardware and software in a way that protects private voter information and our investment in the machines,” according to a statement from Chairman Jack Sellers.

“It is my belief these audits will prove our machines were not vulnerable to hacking or vote switching,” Sellers said.

The supervisors, four Republicans and one Democrat, are expected to approve the item, considering they have all for months now expressed an interest in performing another audit — even though a bipartisan postelection audit of results came back with 100% accuracy.

The supervisors would perform this audit voluntarily and separately from their response to the Arizona Senate, which issued subpoenas to the supervisors in December demanding the board turn over a myriad of election material, including images of all mail-in ballots, detailed voter information and machines used to count votes, so the Senate could conduct the audit.

Fields Moseley, a county spokesperson, said the supervisors are still negotiating with the Senate, and still maintain the position that the 2020 ballots cannot be turned over to the Senate because it is against state law to unseal the ballots at this time.

If approved, the county’s audit would come far too late to overturn the results of November’s general election, considering the board certified the results in November and President Joe Biden already has taken office.

Rather, it’s an attempt to restore voter trust in the county’s elections.

“While I am confident in our staff and our equipment, not all our residents are,” Sellers said in his statement. “This is a problem. A democracy cannot survive if enough of its people doubt elections are free and fair. Some will never be satisfied, but this vote is not about them. The best we can do, in my opinion, is to err on the side of transparency, to embrace the opportunity to once again show our work, and to put facts in their proper place at the center of public discourse instead of the periphery.”

If approved, the audit would take place in February and March, according to a county document.

The pay for audit.

The county doesn’t have a final estimate of how much it would cost at this time, Moseley said.

The county will use the two companies that are certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to conduct the audit.

Those companies, according to a commission spokesperson, are Pro V&V and SLI Compliance.

Those companies declined to provide an estimate of their services to The Arizona Republic.

The proposed audit would do the following to ensure that the county’s voting system worked properly in the general election, according to a county document:

● Analyze its hacking vulnerability.

● Verify that no malicious malware was installed. county would this additional

● Test that tabulators were not sending or receiving information over the internet.

● Confirm that no vote switching occurred.

● Verify state and county procurement regulations were followed when leasing the equipment from Dominion Voting Systems.

Part of the scope would be conducting another logic and accuracy test to verify that the county’s machines are counting votes correctly.

The supervisors have said for months that they are supportive of doing another audit of results, if that’s what is needed to restore voter trust.

But they didn’t act fast enough for the Arizona Senate, which issued the two subpoenas to the supervisors last month.

Instead of responding to the subpoenas, the supervisors sued to stop the subpoenas, saying, in part, that state law prohibits the county from turning over copies of ballots and arguing the Senate was overreaching its powers.

After negotiating, last week Senate President Karen Fann announced that the Senate and supervisors had reached an agreement regarding the audit. But the supervisors said at the time that nothing was final.

The supervisors are hoping this audit will satisfy those with concerns about the election, including state senators, Moseley said.