A report on mail-in voting in Arizona’s Maricopa County has laid out evidence of fraud that may have swayed the outcome in favor of Democrat candidate Joe Biden.
The take-home figures revealed that 173,104 votes known to have been cast were lost or missing. Meanwhile, 96,389 “ghost votes” were mysteriously added to the tally, despite the supposed voters being unaccounted for.
“These results are a travesty to our democracy and our voting rights,” said the canvassing report, which was not associated with the long-awaited report from the state’s independent forensic audit of Maricopa’s 2.1 million votes.
The canvassing effort came courtesy of Liz Harris, a Republican candidate for the state legislature who was defeated in the 2020 election. She subsequently went door-to-door cross-checking addresses with those of voters who requested and cast absentee ballots.
“It is obvious to anyone that voting by mail is ripe for fraud,” said the 11-page report’s “solution” section. “The US Mail is not meant to be a secure transactional system.”
Both the false-positive (ghost) votes and the false-negative (lost) votes would potentially have swung the outcome of the presidential race, in which Biden officially defeated incumbent President Donald Trump by an alleged margin of only 10,457 votes statewide.
While Arizona’s 11 electoral votes alone would have been insufficient to secure an election victory for Trump, several other states currently in the exploratory states of possible audits may use Arizona’s findings to guide and buoy their own efforts.
Those notably include Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump won all four of the tossup states in the 2016 election, and all currently have GOP-led state legislatures.
Perhaps more notably, the inconsistencies may have contributed directly to Democrats having gained control of the US Senate.
Democrat candidate Mark Kelly allegedly defeated GOP incumbent Martha McSally in the special election to fill the late John McCain’s seat by a margin of 78,886 votes statewide.
Arizona’s Senate is still awaiting the final submission of an overdue report on the independent forensic audit it commissioned firms including Cyber Ninjas to conduct.
In addition to verifying the absentee ballots, it was tasked with examining other areas of concern. Among those were the possible hacking of the supposedly closed-system polling place equipment furnished by Dominion Voting Systems and the county’s use of Sharpie markers with bleed-through paper for provisional paper ballots.
During a July hearing, Cyber Ninjas head Doug Logan said the preliminary analyses of their audit also showed several inconsistencies that went well beyond Biden’s margin of victory.
He noted, among the absentee ballot issues he identified, that there were “70,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent” and other residences that received more ballots than there were residents listed.
“Based on the data we’re seeing, I’d highly recommend that we do the canvassing,” Logan said. “… I think when we’ve got 74,000—it merits knocking on a door and verifying.”
