A review by the Associated Press of voter fraud investigations in Arizona has uncovered just how flimsy that claims of systematic election fraud propelling Biden to victory really are. Republicans from the Arizona state Senate subpoenaed and obtained materials from last year’s presidential election in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and these Republican leaders have tasked a company called Cyber Ninjas with leading an audit effort — although, as the Associated Press reports, Maricopa officials have “identified just one case of potential fraud out of 2.1 million ballots cast.” Just one. (That finding is separate from the so-called audit that’s been unfolding.)
The single case in Maricopa County that local authorities uncovered involved “a voter who might have cast a ballot in another state,” the Associated Press explains, and that “case was sent to the county attorney’s office, which forwarded it to the state attorney general.” Meanwhile, across the state as a whole, “Arizona county election officials have identified fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud out of more than 3 million ballots cast in last year’s presidential election,” the Associated Press reports. The exact number of cases is apparently 182, and so far, just four cases have culminated in criminal charges. In no instance was an Arizonan’s vote counted twice, the Associated Press notes.
The findings from the Associated Press confirm, yet again, that there is no meaningful evidence of systematic election fraud connected to last year’s presidential race. It’s obvious that 182 instances of issues that authorities have decided warrant further scrutiny in a state where over 3 million ballots were cast in no way suggest some kind of secret fraud scheme to elect Biden. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs noted to the Associated Press that the “fact of the matter is that election officials across the state are highly invested in helping to ensure the integrity of our elections and the public’s confidence in them,” adding that “part of that entails taking potential voter fraud seriously.”
The Associated Press conducted a review of potential voter fraud cases in Arizona by submitting public records requests to each county in the state. In 11 of Arizona’s 15 counties, local authorities said that they had not forwarded a single potential voter fraud case to local prosecutors.
Most of the possible fraud cases where further scrutiny has been undertaken were in Pima County, and the Associated Press notes that the “Pima County Recorder’s Office has a practice of referring all cases with even a hint of potential fraud to prosecutors for review, something the state’s 14 other county recorders do not do.” That difference in practice connects to the higher number of reported cases of potential fraud. The fact that only four cases in the entire state have resulted in criminal charges helps show that it’s not simply as though authorities in Pima County are more to attuned to an actual problem than authorities elsewhere. Systematic election fraud is, in fact, not a substantive problem in the United States.
Read the report from the Associated Press at this link.
