PHOENIX — Everyone wants work to be double-checked.
That’s exactly what Larry Moore and Benny White of The Audit Guys did by conducting an analysis of the 2022 election using the cast vote record, a digital copy of all 1.5 million ballots cast in November.
Moore is the former CEO of the election auditing firm ClearBallot.
He told ABC15 the primary reason for GOP losses in high-profile races last November came down to more of their traditional voters being disaffected.
“People who did not vote for the candidate at the top of the ticket, but yet voted down ballot for their own party. We termed those people 'disaffected voters,'” Moore said.
The Audit Guys’ findings on disaffected voters go a long way to explain the eventual outcome.
In most areas of Maricopa County, there were 14 to 16 partisan races on the ballot.
White and Moore identified “disaffected voters” as those who voted for one party or the other in a majority of those contests but chose to either vote for the opposing party in high-profile races or left it blank.
Republican Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem suffered from the most disaffected voters — 73,099 in Maricopa County that favored Republicans in most races did not cast a vote for him.
Kari Lake lost the support of 39,937 voters that otherwise supported Republicans down the ticket.
Attorney General Candidate Abraham Hamadeh saw a similar peel-off of 40,996.
In Lake’s case, the number of disaffected Republicans exceeded the eventual margin of victory for Katie Hobbs by 168%.
Democratic candidates also experienced disaffected voters but to a lesser extent.
The net difference of disaffected voters in the Secretary of State race was 60,129 in favor of Adrian Fontes.
The Audit Guys found that the net margin of disaffected voters was determinative in the victories of Hobbs and Mayes.
Treasurer candidate Kimberly Yee was the only statewide Republican in which the net margin of disaffected voters was in her favor.
Benny White found an interesting pattern in disaffected Republican voters.
“They are in the more economically affluent areas of Maricopa County in the Scottsdale north part of the county going over into the Sun City area, and out into the East Valley area as well,” he said.
The Audit Guys did not just look at disaffected voters. They also approached the election from a different angle; accounting.
“When it comes to auditing elections, many people think of it as a statistical problem,” Moore said. “Take a random sample and compare it to another total somewhere. But, we thought of it as a gigantic accounting problem."
The two numbers that Moore and White looked at were the number of voters that checked in to vote either by submitting an early ballot or by voting on Election Day and the ultimate number of votes recorded in the cast vote record.
They found the number of checked-in voters in Maricopa County to be 1,563,021 compared to 1,562,758 ballots tabulated — a difference of 263.
White told ABC15 the difference is due to 2,649 voters with protected addresses being included in the check-in number.
The voting history of confidential voters is not public record so there is no way to know how many of them cast a ballot.
Questions always come up about ballots reviewed, or “adjudicated” by county staff.
The Audit Guys found 18,382 ballots were adjudicated in the Governor’s race.
The vast majority, 11,766 were left blank by voters. A further 4,434 ballots contained “unqualified write-ins", or voters that wrote in their name, or a pop-culture figure like Mickey Mouse.
The Attorney General contest ended with a margin of 280 votes between the two candidates, but 50,246 voters chose to leave the contest blank.
Democrat Kris Mayes did net 221 votes from adjudicated ballots.
