Arizona Senate considers expanding audit of Maricopa County ballots to all races Robert Anglen Ryan Randazzo
The Arizona Senate is considering expanding its audit of Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 election to include all contests, not just for president and U.S. Senate.
Audit organizers now say they want to test county voting machines by examining results from all of the races.
“We are looking with other companies to do a machine tabulation of all the races on the ballot to compare with the Dominion tabulation back in November,” said Ken Bennett, who is serving as the Senate’s audit liaison.
“We will be looking at the images of all 2.1 million ballots.”
The examination would not involve a physical recount like the one underway at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Rather, it would be a separate audit using digital images of each ballot, Bennett said.
The effort would, however, require a reexamination of the nearly 500,000 ballots that auditors have gone through since the audit began April 23.
Bennett said the Senate is considering hiring a California company to conduct the digital tabulation, but he declined to name it. He said the imaging would be done “in the time of the rest of the counting.”
Auditors said in April the recount of ballots would be completed by May 14, when its lease on the coliseum expired. But with less than 24% of the ballots counted as the audit takes a week’s break for high school graduations, auditors have indicated the recount of the races for president and senator could last into July.
Republican state senators launched the audit after questioning the validity of the general election results in Maricopa County, where President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by 45,109 votes.
Senate President Karen Fann says the results will not be used to attempt to overturn the election results but instead will be used to ensure election integrity in future races
Comments are closed.
