The Arizona Republic

Election audit is more prone to fraud than the election

- Your Turn Jeff Greeson Guest columnist

Let’s compare and contrast to see which voting operation is more likely to commit fraud, the actual election or the audit.

In the election, every election task was undertaken by a team that consisted of people from different political parties – signature verificati­on, ballot batching, ballot duplicatio­n (when the machines could not read the ballot due to tears or stains or the like), adjudicati­on, conducting the hand audit, and even mundane things like driving the trucks to deliver and pick up the ballots from the polling places.

In the audit, people won’t tell us who is filling their roles and are making no claims that each team is represente­d by more than one party.

In the election, Republican officials at all levels participat­ed. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisor­s (four of the five are Republican) had overall responsibi­lity for the election. The county GOP chair at the time, Linda Brickman, worked as a ballot counter in the hand audit. The state GOP chair, Kelli Ward, signed off on the post-election accuracy test. Gov. Doug Ducey signed off on the whole state election.

In the audit, besides the state Senate, the only Republican involved is former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, who so far is acting more like a Cyber Ninjas spokespers­on than performing the role of enforcing state guidelines like he promised. All other Republican voices are silent.

The election procedures are defined at length in the Elections Procedure Manual that is produced by the secretary of state and which can be downloaded by anybody with no restrictio­ns.

The audit people wanted their procedures to be secret – not told even to a judge – until the courts ordered public disclosure.

The state-issued election procedures are explicit that anyone working the election cannot use pens or markers that can be read by the machines. In Maricopa County, that meant only red pens (not black, blue or even green) could be used when handling ballots.

The audit ignored that and initially issued blue pens to its counters who could easily use them to mark the ballots they are handling.

A stray mark could easily be used to change a clear vote for Biden to an overvote (by marking a vote for another candidate), which would then be ruled as a no vote for any candidate and thus erase the vote for Biden.

And once that ballot is marked, it can never be made right.

The election tallying of early (Permanent Early Voting List, or PEVL) ballots are in a room that is surveilled using eight cameras, while the audit is in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum that is much, much bigger but is using only nine cameras. Viewing the audit video livestream­s will not provide any informatio­n other than people are shuffling paper given the cameras are so far from the counters.

At the election center, media can come and observe and record at any time, albeit through windows that look out directly at the machines and other equipment in the room. The press can get as close as 5 feet from the scanners, though it is through the glass (you can see the videos they take on any local media website). In the audit, no press was initially allowed in the coliseum anywhere.

In summary, the real election involved dozens and dozens of Republican­s as well as Democrats in all tasks and was run in a transparen­t fashion. The audit is being run by a company whose leader is on record as being a proponent of the lie about election fraud and is using their own handpicked personnel following a secret procedure with no attempt to keep it nonpartisa­n.

So which operation is most likely to be fraudulent?

Jeff Greeson is a retired avionics engineer who has worked as an observer for the Democratic Party in the Ballot Tabulation Center (where early ballots are counted) since 2018, including the Presidenti­al Preference Election, the primary election and the general election in 2020. Reach him at greesonj@cox.net.

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