In Arizona 2020 Review . . . Democrats Try To Make It Harder To Audit Votes Than To Have Cast Them

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — While auditing the accuracy of Maricopa County’s November 2020 voting results stretched out longer than had been expected, attempts to hinder or negate the review process kept rising from the political left.
The audit originally was reported as expected to conclude by May 14. However, in a video posted May 11 by Phoenix-based KFYI news-talk radio (550 AM), the director of the audit, Ken Bennett, said he thought that by the end of that week, “I think we’ll be about a third of the way through,” with 15 to 16 pallets of the 2.1 million ballots done.
That would mean about 30 pallets remaining to be counted at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, said Bennett, the liaison to the Republican-majority Arizona Senate for the audit and a former Arizona Republican secretary of state, a position responsible for certifying state election results.
Arizona was one of the battleground states supposedly narrowly won by Democrat challenger Joe Biden, but victories in these battlegrounds by incumbent Republican Donald Trump would have given the billionaire developer a second term in the White House.
Leading backers of the Arizona audit said they weren’t trying to overturn the result, but to allay people’s doubts and to see if technical improvements were needed for future elections.
Biden supposedly won Arizona by about 10,000 votes of a total of more than 3,333,000 votes cast between the two of them. The McCain political machine that survived the late U.S. Sen. John McCain supported Biden.
During the May 11 KFYI video with talk host James T. Harris, Bennett said the audit would have to pause during the week of May 17 because 18 Phoenix-district high schools already were scheduled to hold their graduation ceremonies in the coliseum. Bennett said he thought the audit would resume probably on May 24.
Bennett told Harris that the audit can’t release interim findings on its examination of the ballots.
A report posted May 12 by Phoenix-based KTAR news radio (92.3 FM) said lease of the coliseum for the audit was being extended to June 30. The KTAR report said Bennett estimated that about 400,000 ballots had been counted since the process began on April 23, and 28 pallets of them remained.
Different Democrat officials tried to stop the audit, including current Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who had tweeted in 2017 that then-President Trump was “more interested in pandering to his neo-Nazi base” than being president for all Americans.
In a May 5 letter a little over five pages long whose salutation was only “Mr. Bennett,” instead of “Dear Mr. Bennett,” Hobbs presented various concerns.
Hobbs’ worries included: “The procedures are vague and insufficient to ensure accuracy and consistency,” “The counting process incorporated the use of untested, uncertified systems,” “The counting process departs from best practices for accurate hand tallying of ballots,” “The procedures do not detail a clear process for aggregation,” and “The procedures fail to adequately protect and document chain of custody of ballots.”
On May 7 KTAR news reported that Bennett in a letter replied to Hobbs that her complaint “reads like a political press release calculated to undermine a process that you have opposed since its inception.”
Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, also a partisan Democrat, blasted an audit request to check computer routers, claiming that his own office would be negatively affected. Amid various assertions of potential calamity, Penzone said that the “most recent demands jeopardize the entire mission of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
“We are talking about confidential, sensitive, and highly classified law-enforcement data and equipment that will be permanently compromised,” Penzone said. “The current course is mind-numbingly reckless and irresponsible. I look forward to briefing them on the horrendous consequences of this demand and the breadth of its negative impact on public safety in this county.”
However, in a video on May 10 Arizona Republican Party chairman Kelli Ward, D.O., said that law-enforcement data can’t be on election routers.
Ward was doing frequent video updates on audit developments. Many of her videos were picked up by the Citizen Free Press site.
The Gateway Pundit site on May 10 posted that Ward said “if an election is to be certified, its routers should not and could not be shared with law enforcement. This is not allowed.”
Along with the Just the News site, Gateway Pundit carried regular updates on Maricopa County audit developments.
On May 11 Gateway Pundit recalled testimony that some ballot counting last November had been done off-site by a private company, Runbeck Election Services, and that more truckloads of ballots kept coming in to the election center even though workers believed the counting was done or almost done.
Reporter Howard Fischer, of Capitol Media Services, posted on May 11: “The routers themselves contain no information on what was transmitted or received. But what they would show are the unique IP — for Internet protocol — addresses of any traffic, both sent and received. And that could answer the allegation that someone, somehow, electronically injected extra votes for Joe Biden into the results.”
The Republican-majority county Board of Supervisors refused to cooperate with Senate requests for election materials until a Superior Court judge said they must. Subsequently, county officials said they lacked passwords to some counting equipment — a claim that raised serious questions.
Capitol Media Services’ Fischer wrote: “County officials have said they don’t have those in their possession because they belong to Dominion Voting Systems, from whom the county leases the equipment.”
However, he wrote, Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, “said she is skeptical, given that the county has claimed to have done its own forensic audits. She questioned how that could have been done without being able to look at everything, including the source code.”
On May 7 Breitbart News reported that Hannah Klain, the daughter of Biden’s White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, “recently signed a letter urging the Justice Department to deploy federal monitors to monitor the Arizona State Senate’s audit of 2020 presidential votes in Maricopa County.
“The letter, from three groups — the Brennan Center for Justice, the Leadership Conference Education Fund, and Protect Democracy — was sent last week to the Justice Department, expressing concern that the auditors are ‘engaged in ongoing and imminent violations of federal voting and election laws’,” Breitbart said. The three groups are left-wing.
Phoenix-based KNXV-TV, ABC Channel 15, reported that Hobbs, the secretary of state, expressed pleasure when observers from these groups were among three “experts” she wanted at the audit.
KNXV said they were Jennifer Morell, a consultant with the Democracy project, and Liz Howard, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice.
In his May 11 video with KFYI’s Harris, Bennett touched on a number of areas, including the fact that of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots, 1.9 million were mail-in votes, whose envelopes include a box for the voter’s signature.
However, because of the pressure to get them counted, Bennett said, the signature verification process became increasingly lax — up to the point that ballots were accepted with no signature at all in the envelope’s box.
Bennett asked if ballots individually were filled out by hand by voters, or were multiple ballots unacceptably produced by photocopying?
Dominion Voting Systems said that 33,000 of the Maricopa County ballots showed no vote for a presidential candidate, Bennett said. Although he didn’t explain the implication, it’s often thought that in a presidential election year, the most important choice on a ballot for a voter is a presidential candidate.
Also, Bennett mentioned determining if mail-in ballots had been folded, which would be a necessity to get one into the envelope, or did some supposed mail-in ballots lack creases and had been put into the system without coming through the mail?
In a May 12 video update, GOP chairman Ward said that aside from the current audit of every ballot, new information is coming to light almost every day about how poorly the 2020 count was supervised.
Nationwide, the feeble, confused Biden supposedly received more than 81 million votes, the most ever cast for a U.S. presidential candidate, supposedly edging Trump by 7 million votes — even though Trump’s 74 million votes were more than 11 million votes over his winning total for president in November 2016.
Democrats made sure that mail-in ballots flooded states in 2020 as never before.
During the 2020 presidential general-election campaign, Trump easily attracted huge, cheering crowds on the trail, while Biden, who usually stayed home in Delaware, had trouble drawing turnout.

A Degraded Election System

Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson told The Wanderer on May 12 that irregularities emerging here undermine voters’ confidence.
“The whole situation with the Arizona election audit is shocking — not only because of the seeming impossibility of arriving at some semblance of truth but because it reflects how degraded our election system has become,” Simpson said.
“Whether the candidate is Trump or anyone else, the residual in the minds of voters is that the whole system is botched,” she said. “What we are left with is that it’s likely that in the future fewer people will vote because they’ll believe the system is fixed. When that happens, the bad guys will always win.”