A new, independent analysis of Maricopa County voter data indicates Republican-leaning voters in wealthier areas were more likely to reject Donald Trump in the 2020 election, contributing to the former president’s loss in Arizona.
The analysis was conducted by a bipartisan trio of election retirees: Benny White, Larry Moore, and Tim Halvorsen. The team said they embarked on their own audit hoping to debunk myths about the Arizona election and restore the public’s confidence in the voting process.
White is a Republican operative in Arizona, while Moore and Halvorsen are former executives at Clear Ballot, an election and auditing firm. Their efforts were completely separate from the Arizona Senate-sanctioned audit conducted at Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
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, which begin tonight on ABC15 News at 6.
To begin this analysis, the trio obtained and pored over Maricopa County’s cast vote record, a database that contains the results from each of the 2.1 million ballots cast in November.
Maps generated from Maricopa County's 751 precinct cast vote record data show high-wealth precincts around Paradise Valley and the Arcadia area of Phoenix collectively had some of the highest numbers of committed Republican voters who did not vote for Donald Trump. These areas also tend to have residents with higher levels of education.
Darker red areas on the interactive map below show where higher numbers of Republican voters, by Maricopa County precinct, did not choose Trump.
Palo Cristi, for example, a precinct adjacent to Camelback Mountain, was carried by Trump 55% to Biden’s 44%, but 6.3% of voters who supported most other Republicans on the ballot did not back Trump.
The team made their conclusions after looking at people who voted in the same party for at least 8 of 15 partisan races. They found that 13,000 more people voted for mostly Republican candidates than mostly Democratic candidates in Maricopa County, which should have given former President Donald Trump a partisan advantage.
The map below shows geographic differences in percent of majority-Republican voters, per precinct, who failed to vote for Trump. Darker red areas indicate higher concentrations of the disaffected Republicans.
There were many more majority Republican voters, nearly 60,000, who did not vote for Trump than majority Democratic voters, nearly 39,000, who did not vote for President Joe Biden. The margin was nearly 21,000 voters, erasing the overall Republican advantage. The team says this helped to explain how Trump lost in Maricopa County when nearly all the Republicans in countywide races won.
Democrats had fewer total voters, but those voters were also more loyal to Biden at the top of the ticket.
The map below shows the percentage of disaffected Democratic presidential voters, by precinct.
White, Moore and Halvorsen noted that disaffected voters impacted both Biden’s and Trump’s vote totals, and many precincts had at least a few of these voters. They say this is evidence that the votes were legitimate and not part of some larger effort to game the system.
Take a look at the map below, which shows the number of disaffected Democrats presidential voters, by precinct.
