The Findings of Arizona's 2020 Election Audit Just Leaked: 'Both Encouraging and Alarming'
A draft report of the audit of the November 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, agrees with initial findings that President Joe Biden won the county.
Randy Pullen, a spokesman for the election review, said the draft was “not the final report, but it’s close,” according to KJZZ-FM.
“What has been found is both encouraging and alarming. On the positive side, there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvass results for the county,” the draft states, according to a document published on the station’s website.
“Was there massive fraud or anything? It doesn’t look like it,” Pullen said.
But he cautioned that the leaked document was not the entire range of information to be released.
Pullen said there were “anomalies” in the county’s voting records.
And despite saying that there was no apparent fraud, he indicated the issues were serious enough to throw the final vote county in question.
For example, the draft said, “None of the various systems related to elections had numbers that would balance and agree with each other. In some cases, these differences were significant.”
Further, it said there “appears to be many ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election. Missing files and sloppiness also impeded the effort to audit the election, the report said.
Maricopa County officials, who fought the audit tooth and nail from its inception, also came in for a scolding.
“Had Maricopa County chosen to cooperate with the audit, the majority of these obstacles would have easily been overcome,” the report said.
The draft audit report said that Arizona needs to make some changes.
“[T]here are sufficient discrepancies among the different systems that, in conjunction with some of our findings, suggest that the delta between the Presidential candidates is very close to the potential margin‐of‐error for the election,” it said.
“It is recommended that legislative reform be passed that tightens up the election process to provide additional certainty to elections going forward and that several specific findings of our audit be further reviewed by the Arizona Attorney General for a possible investigation,” the draft said.
The audit said that a hand recount added 99 votes to Biden’s column but took 261 votes away from former President Donald Trump, who has frequently complained that election misconduct was a critical factor in his loss to Biden.
Although the audit had sections that were marked for revision, those dealing with the overall summary of the audit’s findings did not.
Jack Sellers, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement that the controversy over the election should now end, according to CNN.
“You don’t have to dig deep into the draft copy of the Arizona Senate/Cyber Ninja audit report to confirm what I already knew — the candidates certified by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General — did, in fact, win,” he said.
“This means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters,” Sellers said. “That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.”
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