Draft of Arizona GOP’s election review finds Biden won
The draft report of an election review in Arizona’s largest county by supporters of former President Donald Trump found that President Joe Biden won the 2020 race there, an embarrassing end to the quest to find evidence supporting Trump’s claim that he lost because of fraud.
The final report was set to be released Friday, the result of the monthslong partisan review funded partly by taxpayers. The draft circulated Thursday night, showing the results of the review’s hand-count of all 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. The tally in the draft document showed a net gain of 360 votes for Biden over the official results.
The Maricopa County attorney’s office provided the draft to The Associated Press. Republican Senate President Karen Fann said in a text message that the document was “a leaked draft from three days ago” but did not dispute its authenticity. She would not say if the vote tally in the draft had changed over the course of the week, saying she had signed a nondisclosure agreement.
Whatever the final count in the report, it has no bearing on the official, certified reports in Maricopa County or Arizona. Previous reviews by nonpartisan professionals that followed state law have found no significant problem with the election.
Still, for many critics, the draft’s tally underscored the futility of the exercise, which has helped fuel voter skepticism about elections and spawned copycat audits.
“This was an audit in which they absolutely cooked the procedures,” said Ben Ginsberg, prominent Republican election attorney. “This was Donald Trump’s best chance to prove his case of the election being rigged and fraudulent, and they failed.”
Maricopa County’s government is controlled by a Republican-majority board, which has condemned the review as a scam. Adrian Fontes, the Democrat who oversaw the Maricopa County election office during the 2020 election, said political noise is the true purpose of the review.
“They are trying to scare people into doubting the system is actually working,” he said. “That is their motive. They want to destroy public confidence in our systems.”
The draft claims a number of shortcomings in election procedures, suggested the final tally still could not be relied upon, and recommended several changes to state law. But the review previously made a series of false allegations that have since been retracted about how the election was handled in Maricopa County.
“Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election,” county officials said on Twitter.
Election officials say that is because the review team is biased, has no experience in the complex field of election audits, and ignored the detailed vote-counting procedures in Arizona law.
Two of the recommendations in the draft stood out because they showed its authors misunderstood election procedures: that there should be paper ballot backups, and that voting machines should not be connected to the internet. All Arizona ballots are already paper, with machines only used to tabulate the votes, and no election equipment is ever connected to the internet.
Despite being mocked, the Arizona review has become a model that Trump supporters are pushing to replicate in other swing states where Biden won. Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general sued Thursday to block the GOPissued subpoena for a wide array of election materials. In Wisconsin, a retired conservative state Supreme Court justice is leading the Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 election, and this week threatened to subpoena election officials who don’t comply.
None of the reviews can change Biden’s victory, which was certified by officials in each of the swing states he won and by Congress on Jan. 6, after Trump’s supporters, fueled by the same charges that generated the audits, stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent certification of his loss.
The Arizona review did not uncover one example of fraud, but the draft report makes misleading assumptions about the reliability of the election that Trump amplified in his series of statements, claiming it demonstrated “fraud.”