Arizona auditors appeared to confirm the suspicions and fears of many, highlighting “significant discrepancies” in the Maricopa County ballot counts.
Breaking Update: As we open boxes of ballots delivered by Maricopa County, we are discovering significant discrepancies between the number of ballots therein and the batch reports included in the boxes.
— Maricopa Arizona Audit (@ArizonaAudit) May 13, 2021
From the outset, Democrats have fought the effort tooth and nail, using every possible recourse at their disposal to thwart—and later to discredit—the audit commissioned by the Republican-led state senate.
Instead, their fierce aversion to transparency has left skeptics of the disputed 2020 outcome wondering what the Democrats were so afraid of.
On Wednesday, GOP legislator Karen Fann, president of the Arizona state Senate, answered that question in a letter to Maricopa board chair Jack Sellers.
Fann raised what she said were three serious issues with the audit process:
- Ongoing Non-Compliance with the Legislative Subpoenas
- Chain of Custody and Ballot Organization Anomalies
- Deleted Databases
SUBPOENA NONCOMPLIANCE
The first of these stemmed from a refusal to grant access to passwords and virtual images of the routers used for the election.
Maricopa officials—led by George Soros-funded Sheriff Paul Penzone—have claimed that the requested material might expose sensitive information, including law-enforcement data that would “endanger” lives.
But many wondered why the sheriff’s office would have kept this in the same database as the voter data, fully aware that the voting information would be subject to audit.
“If true, the fact that Maricopa County stores on its routers substantial quantities of citizens’ and employees’ highly sensitive personal information is an alarming indictment of the County’s lax data security practices, rather than of the legislative subpoenas,” Fann observed in the letter.
She also dismissed a separate claim that the cost would be prohibitively expensive after county officials claimed it would cost $6 million to supply the routers.
Fann said the claim was at odds with earlier reports that “the routers already had been disconnected from the County’s network and were prepared for imminent delivery to the Senate.”
But she agreed to a compromise by allowing the county to retain custody and for the auditors to review them within a county facility.
Regarding the passwords—which the county claimed it didn’t have, Fann said it was equally alarming that it would have relinquished control of these to a private company, Dominion Voting Systems, which has faced widespread allegations of having manipulated the voting to favor Democrat Joe Biden.
“[I]t strains credulity to posit that the County has no contractual right to obtain (i.e., control of) password information from Dominion,” Fann wrote.
CHAIN OF CUSTODY / BALLOT ANOMALIES
Fann outlined five separate issues regarding Maricopa’s handling, organization and storage of ballots, first noting that the county had produced no documentation at all about the chain of custody.
She also said the bags storing them were not sealed and that the seals initially placed on them appeared to have been cut.
Boxes containing the ballots were poorly organized, and they also appeared to have been sealed only with adhesive tape, presenting the possibility of tampering.
Most damning of all, however, was that several of the ballot counts appeared to have major discrepancies.
“The audit team has encountered a significant number of instances in which there is a disparity between the actual number of ballots contained in a batch and the total denoted on the pink report slip accompanying the batch,” she wrote.
“In most of these instances, the total on the pink report slip is greater than the number of ballots in the batch, although there are a few instances in which the total is lower,” she said.
It was unclear whether the discrepancies might have resulted from the poor organization or from intentional vote tampering.
However, the third issue Fann outlined seemed to be more nefarious.
DELETED DATABASES
A “database” directory was deleted from the primary machine used in the county’s Election Management System software, which included some of the materials covered by the Senate subpoena, Fann said.
Another primary database labeled “Results Tally and Reporting,” which was widely referenced on some of the client servers, was nowhere to be found in the mainframe.
“This suggests that the main database for all election related data for the November 2020 General Election has been removed,” Fann said.
Fann said she hoped to resolve the issues without the need for another subpoena, and she invited Sellers to a meeting next Tuesday, which would be live-streamed for the public.
Former president Donald Trump issued a statement in response to the “devastating” developments outlined by Fann and denouncing the Left’s efforts to quash the story.
“The Fake News and Lamestream Media is doing everything they can not to cover this major story,” he said.
“They just refuse to talk or report about it,” he continued. “They don’t want the United States or World to see what is going on with our corrupt, third world election.”
At least two activist groups linked to Soros have been part of the smear campaign, waging legal challenges and presenting partisan disinformation that is widely echoed by the mainstream media.
Others have high-level ties to Democrats including former president Barack Obama, as well as links to an institute backed by the Chinese Communist Party.
