State Senate leader: Election audit plans aren’t broad enough

Two Arizona Senate leaders say they are not satisfied with the new audit of voting systems the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved earlier this week.

Saying that the audit must be broader than the one proposed by the vendors the county plans to hire, Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott, announced Friday that the state Senate “has hired an independent, qualified, forensic auditing firm to analyze 2020 election results in Maricopa County.”

Fann did not name the company and a spokesperson for Senate Republicans did not immediately respond to a request for information.

The county has not provided the Senate access to the 2020 ballots.

The county supervisors said in a statement on Friday that the board “respects the Arizona Senate’s decision to hire a company to audit the elections data and documents the board has provided to date.”

The board said its legal team continues to work “in good faith” with the Senate.

The Senate announcement continues the feud between Senate Republican leaders and the Republicancontrolled supervisors over the 2020 election results.

The Senate issued subpoenas to the supervisors in December demanding the board turn over a multitude of election material, including images of all mail-in ballots, detailed voter information and machines used to count votes, so the Senate could conduct an audit.

After attempting to negotiate with the Senate, on Wednesday the supervisors voted unanimously to hire two independent companies to conduct an audit of county voting systems. The supervisors said this was not in direct response to the subpoenas, but rather in an attempt to calm concerns about the integrity of the November general election.

The supervisors said before the vote that they still have full confidence the election ran smoothly and votes were counted accurately, after multiple audits and hand counts came back without errors and after election challenges were dismissed by the courts.

Why senators aren’t happy with the county’s new audit

There are a few distinctions between the type of audit the senators want to perform through the subpoenas and the type that the county approved.

The county’s audit will not study November 2020 ballots, which it says state law requires to be locked up for a certain period after the election. Therefore, another hand count of those ballots will not be performed.

The audit will, according to the county:

● Analyze the county’s voting system’s hacking vulnerability.

● Verify that no malicious malware was installed.

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

● Confirm occurred.

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

The county chose its own companies to perform the audit, rather than handing over material to the Senate. Those companies, the county says, are certified voting system testing laboratories by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The Senate has called on the county to use auditors certified by the commission, but the commission does not certify auditors.

That’s one reason why the Senate isn’t satisfied, according to Fann.

“The other primary reason is that the scope of the audit must be broader than the one proposed by the County’s vendors,” Fann said in her statement. “Our firm will perform everything we have required in the subpoenas. We must bring back confidence that the election results reported are how votes were legally cast. The Senate’s forensic audit will bring accuracy and detail to the process, and with that restore integrity to the election process.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Warren Petersen said Friday that the subpoenas “called for a deep forensic audit.”

“We need to do more than make basic checks on the machines,” Petersen said.

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County audit may cost between $50K and $100K

It’s unclear how much the Senate audit would cost.

The county’s audits of machines and software may cost between $50,000 and $100,000, according to county spokesperson Fields Moseley based on county estimates. The county’s contracts with the audit companies are not yet final.

The audit would take place in February and March, according to a county document.

In the board’s meeting Wednesday, Scott Jarrett, director of election day and emergency voting for the Maricopa County Elections Department, outlined the steps the county already has taken since starting to use the new Dominion Voting Systems machines to ensure that the machines worked properly and votes were counted accurately in the general election.

That includes a 100% hand count of a previous election, the Madison School District Election, four separate hand counts and independent logic and accuracy tests for the general election. The hand counts are performed by the political parties themselves, not by county election officials, Jarrett explained.

Sellers told The Republic on Tuesday that the supervisors feel “the amount of money that it is going to take to do this is worth it to try to calm people down and make people understand that the election is fair and honest and their votes do count and if there is anything wrong we want to be the first to know that.”