The audit results come as Maricopa County continues its legal battle with the Arizona Senate over Republican lawmakers’ attempt to conduct their own audit of the election. Senate President Karen Fann and Sen. Warren Petersen, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, have issued subpoenas demanding the county’s tabulation machines, the nearly 2.1 million ballots cast, and a trove of other materials and data.
The Board of Supervisors argue that the Senate lacks legal authority to demand the ballots and the machines, and are fighting the subpoenas in court. A judge will hear arguments in the case on Thursday.
Fann and Petersen had preemptively declared the county’s audits as insufficient because they wouldn’t examine any of the ballots, and Fann took issue with the hiring of SLI Compliance and Pro V&V, insisting that the audit should be conducted by companies that hadn’t already certified Dominion’s machines and software.
The two senators were unavailable for comment when the audit results were released.
Fann sought to hire Allied Security Operations Group, a company with a well-documented history of spreading falsehoods and misinformation about the election, at times during legislative hearings in which its employees served as witnesses for the Trump campaign.
One ASOG employee, Phil Waldron, falsely claimed during an unofficial hearing in Phoenix that election workers don’t verify the signatures on early ballot envelopes, and alleged without evidence the Maricopa County’s tabulation machines were connected to the internet. During a recent report by the far-right media outlet One America News Network, Waldron claimed, again without evidence, that hundreds of thousands of Maricopa County votes were added for President Joe Biden.
The audits did find one potential issue, though it did not affect any of the elections Maricopa County held in 2020. SLI Compliance noted that, though there was no indication of USB devices being connected to the machines, there were no physical or digital barriers that would prevent people from using unauthorized devices with them.
