Audit of votes dragging in Arizona; 10% counted
PHOENIX — On the floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Arizona’s extraordinary, partisan audit of the 2020 election results in the state’s most populous county is 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.
Seated at 46 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.
The effort has alarmed voting-rights advocates, election administrators and civil-rights lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice, who last week demanded confirmation that federal security and anti-intimidation laws are being followed. Arizona 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.
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, which they lost.
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.
After months of court battles with the GOP-controlled county Board of Supervisors, which maintains the election was well-run, the Republican-controlled state Senate got hold of the ballots in Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix area and 60% of Arizona voters. 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.
Senate Republicans are threatening to issue another subpoena demanding passwords for voting machines and internet routers. County officials are balking, saying they’ve turned over all passwords they have and that giving up routers would jeopardize a wide variety of sensitive data, from health records to confidential and classified information at the sheriff’s office.
The Senate leased the Coliseum for four weeks as part of an audit that was supposed to take “about 60 days.” But with one week left before the auditors have to vacate the arena for a series of high school graduations, only about 10% of the ballots have been counted.
Bennett said the count may continue into July.