The Arizona GOP’s Maricopa County audit: What to know about it

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More than six months after his defeat in the November election, former President Trump is still claiming victory, calling the election “the big lie,” despite several recounts and dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits that say otherwise.

Election officials and experts fear the action taken by Arizona Republicans to flout the certified results might set an example for partisans in other states and could end up undermining Americans’ confidence in elections. Right-wing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, is calling for an audit in her state, too, which also backed Joe Biden. Georgia already recounted its ballots twice, including once by hand.

Concerns about the audit have reached the U.S. Justice Department, which sent a letter to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to warn about “potential non-compliance with federal laws,” including, among other issues, whether ballots are being “adequately safeguarded.”

“It’s designed to confuse people, it’s designed to create further doubt in the mind of the loser’s supporters,” said election attorney David Becker of the efforts in Arizona. “It’s about as bad as it gets, and the real loser here is American democracy.”

Before and after every election, it’s standard procedure in the county to conduct a “logic and accuracy” test on election equipment. In 2020, those tests turned up no issues. State law also mandates a hand-count audit of a statistically significant sample of ballots after each election to be compared to the machine count. That, too, came up with 100% accuracy, according to county election officials.

In January, after waves of protests, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved two additional audits of election equipment. The board hired two independent firms, Pro V&V and SLI Compliance, which are certified by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission. The firms conducted their separate audits in February and found no issues.

The CEO of Cyber Ninjas, Doug Logan, has previously promoted the unsupported theory that there was fraud in the 2020 election, according to a review by the Arizona Mirror of his now deleted Twitter account. The Mirror also reported that Logan authored a document on former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell’s website with untruthful allegations of fraud concerning Dominion Voting Systems. In a statement given to the Arizona Mirror, Logan stood by the document and the assertions in it, among them, the false claim that Dominion Voting Systems has links to the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

 

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Article URL : https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arizona-audit-2020-election-recount-gop-maricopa-county/