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A widely criticized, GOP-led “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, concluded that Joe Biden received more votes for president than Donald Trump.
In fact, according to the review, Biden exceeded the county’s tally by 99 votes, while Trump received 261 fewer votes in a hand recount compared to official results. At a presentation of the final version of the report on Friday, Senate President Karen Fann confirmed it.
“That is a true statement,” she said.
The announcement was a blow to Trump’s supporters — and even the former president himself — who’ve latched on to the so-called Arizona “audit” as evidence the election was rigged.
Even before the scheduled release of the findings Friday afternoon, some Republicans had already claimed there was enough evidence to “decertify” or overturn Trump’s loss in Arizona — a prospect that had been dismissed by legal scholars.
But the report presented Friday threw cold water on the grandest claims of fraud, as Fann confirmed the authenticity of draft copies that were leaked to the media one day earlier.
The draft and final report show a hand recount of the nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County hewed closely to the official canvass of the results. Still, Fann and Sen. Warren Petersen, the Republicans who issued subpoenas that obtained the ballots and voting materials needed for the investigation, gave the contractors they hired to conduct the review a platform to explain their findings.
Doug Logan, a cybersecurity expert with no previous elections experience whom Fann hired to lead that review, also acknowledged the accuracy of the county’s vote tally — an outcome that had already been certified by county and state officials and confirmed by two prior audits.
“We can say that the ballots that were provided to us to count in the coliseum very accurately correlate with the official canvass numbers,” Logan stated.
Still, Trump claimed vindication, declaring “massive fraud” was found even though officials with the election review explicitly said otherwise. Many Arizona Republicans, including some state senators in Fann’s GOP caucus, similarly claimed victory and continued to demand the election results be overturned.
Arizona’s Senate agreed to spend $150,000 on the review, plus security and facility costs. That pales in comparison to the nearly $5.7 million contributed as of late July by Trump allies. Maricopa County will also have to pay $2.8 million for new voting machines for the 2022 midterm elections. That’s because the machines subpoenaed by the Senate were decertified and can’t be used for future elections.
