PHOENIX — Donald Trump came to Arizona over the weekend to praise Republicans in the state Senate for their insistence on an election audit. Now there are calls from some of those very same senators to shut the audit down.
Scottsdale State Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R ) Scottsdale District 23 tweeted, “it's become clear that the audit has been botched. The total lack of competence by @fannkfann over the last five months has deprived the voters of Arizona a comprehensive accounting of the 2020 election.”
I wanted to review our election processes and see what, if anything, could be improved. Sadly, it’s now become clear that the audit has been botched. The total lack of competence by @FannKfann over the last 5 months has deprived the voters of Arizona a comprehensive…(4of5)
— Michelle Ugenti-RITA (@MichelleUgenti) July 25, 2021
“I would agree with that it's been botched,” said State Senator Paul Boyer (R ) Phoenix-Glendale District 20.
Boyer said at the outset he supported the audit but he can't now. “A comprehensive review, we were all fine with that. We just didn't think it would be done by a firm that didn't have a clue of what they were doing. That they were partisan with a preordained idea going into what they were going to come up with,” Boyer said.
Cyber Ninjas, the company hired to do the audit, consistently fought attempts for an outside review of its ballot counts. Senate liaison Ken Bennett did it anyway, sending 24 boxes of machine-counted ballots to Larry Moore, the retired CEO of Clear Ballot an election technology company that does election audits.
“We found of the 24 boxes that were sent, 20 had perfect matches,” Moore said. In fact, Moore said the Cyber Ninja numbers and the counties matched 99.9% of the time. “If you extrapolate that to the full 2,089,563 count, they would be off by 124 ballots,” Moore said.
Bennett told azcentral.com he did the review out of curiosity but said it's premature to draw any conclusions from the sampling.
Still, it's a result that after Saturday's visit by Trump, the Cyber Ninjas and the Republicans pushing stop the steal probably didn't want to hear.
“You don't like the third result, we’ll go with the fourth result. When they don't like that, they'll come up with a fifth.” Senator Boyer said. “Again they are trying to come up with their own preconceived notion of what they want to come up with, they don't know what they're doing.”
The auditors have said they should complete their work at the State Fairgrounds this week.
Late Monday afternoon the state Senate issued new subpoenas to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. The state Senate wants routers and other election data as well as the county's voter registration rolls.
