The handlers of the audit of the Maricopa County, Arizona, election results said they’ve finished counting and photographing nearly 2.1 million ballots.
“Audit Update: Paper examination and counting are finished today,” the audit team wrote in a post on its Twitter account on June 25. “Thank you to all the amazing Arizona volunteers who made this audit possible!”
The GOP-led state Senate authorized the audit, which started in late April, after months of wrangling with Maricopa County’s executives in a back-and-forth legal battle. Republicans hired Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity firm, to lead some of the efforts.
Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state who was tapped to work on the audit, told The Associated Press that the final report stemming from the audit would take several weeks or months to complete. Previously, authorities said that it would be due in August.
Following the completion of the counting and paper examination process, other audit work is being done, he said. That includes evaluating data from voting machines and election servers.
“I think too much emphasis has been put on the tasks that are happening here at the Coliseum, but these are not the only two tasks of the audit,” Bennett told AP. He was referring to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the effort was being carried out.
While former President Donald Trump and Arizona Republican lawmakers have said the audit is necessary to safeguard and restore faith in elections, state Democrats, corporate media outlets, and Democrat Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said the audit was carried out in an irregular manner and there were claimed lapses in security.
Hobbs, in an interview with Bloomberg News published on Sunday, again panned the audit and claimed Republicans “have a highly partisan agenda” and said that “nothing that we’re seeing here inspires confidence that any results that they put out will be valid or credible.” She also faulted Cyber Ninjas’ CEO, Doug Logan, for being a supporter of Trump.
Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Karen Fann, have said the audit wasn’t designed to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election but rather to restore trust in the election system.
Following the Maricopa County audit, Republicans in several other battleground states have suggested they do the same.
Earlier this month, Pennsylvania Senate State Government Committee Chairman Dave Argall, a Republican, said there is a “very real possibility” an audit could be done in Pennsylvania. “It’s a very careful recount, forensic audit, so yeah, I don’t see the danger in it,” Argall also told reporters last week. “I just think that it would not be a bad idea at all to proceed with an audit similar to what they’re doing in Arizona.”
The Epoch Times has contacted Bennet and Fann’s office for comment.
From The Epoch Times
