By Kyle Becker
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann held a public briefing on Thursday with the leaders of the ongoing election audit that she authorized. The auditors’ update was harrowing: 74,000 absentee ballots lacked documentation, thousands of ballots were duplicated without proper documentation, and most shockingly, over 11,000 voters were not on the November election voter rolls, but showed up later on the December voter rolls.
As a reminder, Donald Trump lost Arizona to Joe Biden by 10,457 votes, or merely 0.3 percent of the state’s certified count.
The two-hour Arizona State Senate briefing is provided below.
The testimony of digital forensics expert Ben Cotton discussed the rigorous procedures that were undertaken, including 24/7 surveillance, and processes to ensure that not a ‘single bit’ of the election data could possibly be changed.
Cotton’s testimony rebutted claims that the voting machines were compromised and thus could not be used in future elections.
“I have this question, I don’t understand,” Fann said, “How can the Secretary of State say that she can’t certify the machines weren’t tampered with, when supposedly we have people that… certified people that come in to certify machines aren’t tampered with? It doesn’t make sense. Could you explain that to me please?”
“Madame President, I certainly undertand your confusion, and I share that with you,” Cotton said. “I’d also like to reiterate that as part of our evidence handling procedure, we had cameras watching over our evidence storage facilities and our acquisition and replication procedures 24/7.”
“So, any form of tampering certainly would have been caught,” he added.
Former Arizona Secretary of State and State Senate liaison Ken Bennett discussed the chain-of-custody procedures and the questions involving duplicated ballots.
The ballot boxes for the independent audit were received from Maricopa County and then locked up in cages with 24-hour guarded armed security, both inside and outside the facility, as well as 24-hour livestreamed surveillance video, Bennett said.
He said that there was “continuous and complete” chain-of-custody documentation for all the ballot boxes and voting equipment.
The Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan revealed a number of alarming ballot issues. Many of the ballots had “bleed through” and printer calibration issues. Logan said there were “roughly 160,000” ballots-on-demand in Maricopa County on Election Day. These ballots were unlikely to be ‘Vote Safe’ by using standardized paper for elections.
Arizona Senate President Fann noted that the media had earlier questioned those who had raised such issues, mockingly labeling them as purveyors of ‘Sharpiegate.’
Fann pointed to canvasing as one of the possible solutions to resolving issues of voter intent, while pointing out the hypocrisy of critics, even those in the Biden Department of Justice, who pointed at the practice as one that could potentially lead to ‘voter intimidation.’
“I do know of a case where one house got 25 ballots in the mail and only two people live there,” Fann said. “And so we had talked about how we verify that. And there was a question about canvasing.”
“The Department of Justice sent us a letter about four or six weeks ago,” she continued. “And said, ‘we’re concerned about you actually knocking on doors, that it might be… voter intimidation or civil rights violation or something’.”
“Which I find it interesting, after the White House last week said ‘we’re going to knock on doors to see if you are vaccinated or not’,” she added. “But that’s a side point,” she noted, then said that such a canvasing effort is postponed conditional upon the results of the audit.
“Based on the data we’re seeing, I highly recommend canvasing,” Logan said. “Because it is the one way to know for sure whether some of the data we’re seeing, if it’s real problems or whether it’s clerical errors of some sort.”
“For example, 74,243 mail-in ballots, where there is no clear record of them being sent,” Logan said. “And just to be clear, here in the state of Arizona there is EB32s and EB33s. EB32s is supposed to give a record of when a mail-in ballot is sent. And EB33 is supposed to give a record of when the mail-in ballot is received.”
“So there should be an equal… there should be more EB32s, more sent out then there are received. Specifically, with these we can tie them to a specific individual it was mailed to,” he continued. “And so, we have 74,000 where we have, it came back from individuals where we don’t have a clear indicationthat it was ever sent out to them.”
“But I think when you have 74,000, it merits knocking on a door and validating some of this information,” he added.
Logan then talked about the lowering of signature-matching standards on envelopes to allow more absentee ballots through. He pointed to a legal affidavit.
“When mail-in ballots were received, that so many of them were received, that the standards reduced over time,” he said. “They originally talked about, there was initially 20 points of comparison on the signature, then after some time they were told to go to ten points a signature, ten points of comparison, and then five,” he noted. “And then eventually, they were just told to let every single mail-in ballot through.”
“We think it’s important to get the mail-in ballot images,” he added. “And see how many, if any, blank signatures came through.”
Then Logan revealed one of the most bewildering preliminary findings of the audit: Voter rolls issues.
“We have also seen some interesting things related to the voter rolls,” Logan said. “So, for example, we have 11,326 people that did not show up on a November 7th version of the voter rolls, and after votes were cast, but then appeared on the December 4th voter rolls.”
“Just to be clear, they show as voted this past election,” he added. “But they were not on the November 7th version of the file, but they did show up on the December 4th version.”
The news follows upon massive developments in the Fulton County election audit, which shows thousands of ballots were wrongfully counted for Biden in the ballot tallies. Tucker Carlson revealed the evidence in a bombshell segment on Wednesday night.
Author: Kyle Becker
Source: Becker News: Maricopa County Audit Reveals 2020 Election Disaster: Absentee Ballot Records Missing, 11,000 Votes Not on November Rolls