One of the lingering conspiracies involving the 2020 election is that thousands of fraudulent Biden-only ballots were counted in Maricopa County, which helped the Democrats win the county and the state.
However, a bipartisan team of analysts told ABC15 that publicly accessible election data can debunk these claims. The team calculated Trump-only ballots in Maricopa County and they exceeded Biden-only ballots by 450.
FULL COVERAGE: The 'other' Arizona election audit
Benny White, Larry Moore, and Tim Halvorsen performed their unsanctioned audit using data from Maricopa County's cast vote record. The record is a public database with results from all 2.1 million ballots cast in the November 2020 election.
What did an independent audit team find when looking at detailed Arizona voting data? See their data-backed answers to claims about bamboo-fiber ballots, illegal voting, and error rates in a series of exclusive reports, airing tonight and Friday on ABC15 News at 6 p.m.
The team isolated data where voters made a selection in the presidential race but left the rest of the ballot blank. The team identified nearly 6,500 ballots Biden-only or Trump-only votes, and the group shared that data with the ABC15 Investigators.
The map above depicts the net distribution of the Trump-only and Biden-only ballots across hundreds of Maricopa County precincts. The deeper red precincts received more Trump-only ballots. The deeper blue precincts had more Biden-only ballots. No precinct had a net difference in president-only votes greater than 25, according to the team's analysis.
In all, 3,024 Maricopa County ballots were only marked for Joe Biden. Donald Trump received 3,474 of these. It’s a difference of 450 in favor of Trump, according to the team's data analysis.
"It's 3,024 total, out of 2 million ballots," said White. "It's an extremely low number."
The team concluded the president-only ballots actually worked against Biden. They also found no anomalies, no large caches of these ballots to suggest a fraudulent effort to help Biden.
"This looks like a really clean election," Moore said.
President Joe Biden won Arizona by about 10,000 votes.
This trio is working separately from the Arizona Senate's forensic audit occurring now at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. The results from the Coliseum audit are expected in about six weeks, but those results would have no impact on the 2020 election outcome.
