Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photos: Getty Images Former President Donald Trump railed against the news media earlier this month for dismissing the “massive number of voter irregularities and fraud” that ostensibly took place during the 2020 election in Arizona. He was responding to an AP report that found fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud out of 3 million ballots cast in the state. As the outlet notes, this “align[s] with previous studies showing voter fraud is rare.
Arizona was famously called for Biden by Fox News, shortly before midnight on November 3, and then by the Associated Press the next day. The New York Times, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC followed suit on November 12. One subpoena calls for a scanned ballot audit, to collect an electronic ballot image cast for all mail-in ballots counted in the November 2020 general election in Maricopa County, Arizona. The second subpoena calls for a full forensic audit of ballot tabulation equipment, the software for that equipment and the election management system used in the 2020 general election.
What is the rationale for the audit? Republicans’ complaints about Arizona’s election results varied over time, and many random election conspiracy theories were at some point cited as grounds for further investigation. But the main issues seemed to be:First, there’s no evidence to back up Trump’s suggestion that mail ballots are inherently fraudulent. This is particularly true in Arizona, where heavy levels of voting by mail had been customary for years.
Given Biden’s 4.4 percent popular vote margin nationally, his 0.3 margin in Arizona is highly plausible; it means Arizona was over 4 percent more Republican than the country as a whole. At the ground level, the audit has been heavily staffed with volunteers who were required to sign nondisclosure agreements. While allegedly nonpartisan, you’d guess passionate Trump supporters would be especially attracted to the chore.
How is the audit being conducted? Maricopa County declined to provide facilities for an audit that it considered unnecessary, so the auditors set up shop in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the state fairgrounds with the ballots and voting machinery that had been secured by subpoena. Most of the initial audit activity involved volunteers hand counting the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa, though the secrecy surrounding these activities made examination of their exact nature difficult.
Logan claimed, for instance, that “we have 74,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent” to people in the mail. As local ABC News politics and data analyst Garrett Archer almost immediately reported, the number Logan cited to make this allegation was actually a combination of mail ballots and in-person early ballots, which of course would not have been sent to anyone in the mail.
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