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The circus-like review of the 2020 Arizona Republican-commissioned vote took another crazy turn on Friday when seasoned election experts accused that the very basis of its findings – the results of a manual tally of 2 , 1 million ballots – was based on numbers so unreliable they appear to be guesswork rather than tabulations.
The organizers of the review “invented the numbers,” says the title of the experts’ report.
The experts, a data analyst for the Arizona Republican Party and two retired executives from a Boston-based election consultancy firm, said in their report that investigator workers had not counted in the thousands of ballots in a pallet of 40 filled ballot boxes delivered to them in the spring.
Investigators went through more than 1,600 filled ballot boxes this summer to conduct their manual recount of elections in Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state. They and the Republican-controlled state Senate, which ordered the election inquiry, refused to release details of that hand count.
But a spreadsheet containing the results of manually counting 40 of those boxes was included in a final report on the election investigation released a week ago by Cyber Ninjas, the Florida company hired to conduct the investigation. .
The three election experts said the manual count could have missed thousands or even hundreds of thousands of ballots had all 1,600 ballot boxes been similarly counted. Their findings were first reported in the Republic of Arizona.
The Republican investigators’ final report concluded that President Biden actually won 99 more votes than announced, and former President Donald J. Trump had 261 fewer votes.
But given the significant undercoverage found in just one of the 2.1 million ballots, it would effectively be impossible for Republican investigators to come up with such precise numbers, experts said.
Noting that Arizona’s review leaders had “no experience with election audits,” experts concluded: the country is laughable.
Rod Thomson, a Cyber Ninjas spokesperson, dismissed the report’s claim. “We are maintaining our methodology and completing the final report,” he said.
Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said the report’s findings justified criticism of the Cyber Ninjas process.
“It was clear from the start that Cyber Ninjas were just inventing as they went,” Ms. Hobbs said in a statement. “I’ve always said that no one should trust the ‘results’ they produce, so it’s no surprise that their findings are called into question. What can be trusted are the real election officials and experts, as well as the official collection of results. “
The election probe has been repeatedly condemned as a sham by election experts and denounced by the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the 2020 vote.
Critics note that Cyber Ninjas chief executive had spread false claims that Arizona’s voting machines were rigged to secure Mr. Trump’s defeat. The summer investigation was funded almost entirely by nearly $ 7 million in donations from Trump supporters.
Experts based their conclusion on a spreadsheet containing part of the manual count results Republican investigators published in their investigation report. The spreadsheet shows that investigators counted 32,674 ballots in 40 of the 1,634 ballot boxes they were examining.
But official records show – and investigators’ automatic count of 2.1 million ballots has indeed confirmed – that those 40 ballot boxes actually contained 48,371 ballots, or 15,692 more than what had been previously reported. account.
The worksheet indicated that nine of the boxes had not been counted at all. But even if those ballot boxes were excluded from the count, the tally of the remaining ballot boxes fell to 4,852 ballots below the correct total, experts said.
With similar exams now scheduled for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas, it’s increasingly clear that Arizona’s partisan exam passed when it failed – amplifying baseless talking points at all. by failing in any way to substantiate Mr. Trump’s claims of a rigged election.
Arizona-style journals in other states appear to be following the same scenario with the blessing of the Republican political leaders who promote them, said Nate Persily, Stanford University law professor, election expert and law scholar. democracy.
“For those who push the fraud account, the real truth is irrelevant,” he said. “The idea that the election was stolen becomes a belief that defines the tribe. It’s not about proving anything at this point. It is about showing loyalty to a particular description of reality.
Indeed, in the wake of Cyber Ninjas’ initial report, Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate have only strengthened their resolve to move forward with an election review, which includes a request for license numbers from Pennsylvania. drive and partial Social Security numbers of all 7 million Pennsylvania voters.
“The historic audit in Maricopa County has been completed and important findings have been brought to light,” State Senator Doug Mastriano, a Republican and main supporter of the election review, said in a statement last week. . “If these types of issues were discovered in Maricopa County, imagine what could be brought to light by a full forensic audit in other counties in the United States that processed massive amounts of mail-in ballots. “
In fact, election experts and Maricopa County officials debunked almost all of the 22 cases in which the Arizona inquiry report suggested irregularities.
On Friday, Robin Vos, President of the Wisconsin Assembly, signed several subpoenas issued to the head of the Election Commission of Milwaukee, the largest city in the state and home to the largest concentration of Democratic voters, with a substantial demand for documents, including communication between the city and the electoral boards of the ‘State.
Mr Vos, in an interview this week, reiterated his commitment to investigate the 2020 election, with a presumption that there had been errors in the administration.
“I think we have to sort of accept that some things were done wrong – figure out how to fix them, otherwise we will never have the public’s trust,” Vos said.
Reid Epstein contributed reporting.
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