Arizona Senate President Karen Fann said the audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County found a discrepancy in the vote totals submitted by county officials.
“They haven’t released a number yet,” Fann said during a radio interview when asked how big of a discrepancy the audit discovered. “However, we do know that those numbers do not match with Maricopa County at this point.”
Arizona Republicans said they expect a detailed report from the audit to be ready by September.
However, state Democrats and Maricopa County officials have already blasted the audit as a waste of time, claiming the state Senate’s audit team was “woefully underqualified” to complete the task.
Fann pushed back and said she was confident the independent firm state Senate Republicans hired, Cyber Ninjas, investigated potential voter fraud in Maricopa County thoroughly.
“I’m confident because it’s not just them,” she said. “Everybody keeps just counting on them when actually they are working with a number of other contractors that have experience in audits and in their expertise in their own fields … This is a joint effort.”
Though the audit has technically concluded, Fann said the state Senate is using “independent machines” to recount the county’s nearly 2.1 million ballots once again before they are returned to Maricopa County so state Republicans can confirm any discrepancy in the vote totals.
“That’s when we said let’s get a couple of our own independent machines in, not Dominion’s, separate ones, and do our own independent — and all we’re doing is just counting the number of ballots,” she explained. “It’s a paper-counting machine is all it does.
“That will help us give a third check-and-balance to see if those numbers are closer to the vendors’ numbers or Maricopa County’s or they all three could be right on target.”
