Arizona Official Sternly Fact-Checks Trump’s Post Audit Fraud Claims

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The accurate conclusion by the Arizona election auditors that Joe Biden was victorious in Maricopa County doesn’t erase the fact that these auditors led an operation defined by incompetence. Throughout the process, audit leaders showed that they possessed little apparent understanding of the way that local elections are actually handled, leading to conclusions that concerning issues were present even when such was not the case. In the wake of the emergence of findings from the audit, leaders in Maricopa County published fact-checks of claims made by Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by Republicans from the Arizona state Senate to lead the highly disputed audit.

Before taking on the task of the Maricopa County audit, Cyber Ninjas possessed no election auditing experience, and their lack of prior experience showed. In a thread posted on Twitter this week, Maricopa County identified a few high-profile claims made by Cyber Ninjas and dismantled each one.

For starters, Maricopa County noted that the auditors insist that “23,344 mail-in ballots voted from a prior address” — but there’s no actual suggestion of fraud here. As the county put it regarding the voting from a prior address claim:

‘Cyber Ninjas still don’t understand this is legal under federal election law. To label it a “critical” concern is either intentionally misleading or staggeringly ignorant. AZ senators should know this too.’

Explanations include the fact that, as the county noted, ‘Military and overseas voters can cast a “federal only ballot” despite living outside the U.S. The address tied to their ballot would be their prior address in AZ.’ Meanwhile, the county also addressed the identification by Cyber Ninjas of “10,342 potential voters that voted in multiple counties,” pointedly observing as follows:

‘There are more than 7 million people in Arizona and, yes, some of them share names & birth years. To identify this as a critical issue is laughable.’

Maricopa County also discussed the presence of multiple files for the same voter in records of ballots returned to authorities. In cases with issues like the absence of appropriate signatures, a “record for the original ballot is entered into the EV 33 file (where we track returned ballots,” and then a “second entry is recorded when a ballot envelope is signed or the signature discrepancy is resolved,” as the county explains. These explanations are quite straightforward and reveal a lack of understanding on the auditors’ part of the basic processes that they were tasked to examine.

See fact-checks from Maricopa County authorities of election-related claims below:

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