As always, all you do is lie.
Leaders of the Senate’s election review made claims last week that have roiled right-wing media outlets and bolstered claims from Trump supporters that there is definitive evidence of election fraud in Arizona.
www.azmirror.com
The audit team also raised questions about the process for duplicating damaged or unreadable ballots.
When ballots cannot be read properly by a tabulation machine, they are duplicated onto a new ballot in a process overseen by a bipartisan group of people.
At last week’s hearing, Logan said that the way duplicated and original ballots were identified on sheets provided by the county was confusing. That claim was the basis for a tweet by the @AuditWarRoom account claiming that original and duplicate ballots were not given matching serial numbers and cannot be verified.
Elections officials said this is not the case.
“The Elections Department assigns a matching serial number to both the original and duplicated ballot,” said Marcus Milam, a communications officer for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. “This number can be used to compare the ballots. The accuracy of Maricopa County’s duplication process was confirmed in court where the plaintiffs randomly sampled 1,626 duplicated ballots.”
There were claims that Republican representatives were not present during this process. However, GOP observers were present throughout the counting, both the Arizona Republican Party and the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office previously said.
recorder.maricopa.gov
Myth: Maricopa County’s ballot duplication process allowed illegitimate ballots to be counted. FALSE
FACTS: At no point were illegitimate ballots duplicated or inserted into the duplication process. To ensure ballots can be counted for voters that are in the military, temporarily overseas, vote using a large print or braille ballots, or who return a ballot too damaged to be read by a tabulator, Maricopa County duplicates these ballots. During the duplication process, the Elections Department assigns a matching serial number to both the original and duplicated ballot. This number can be used to compare the original ballot with the duplicated ballot.
The accuracy and completeness of Maricopa County’s duplication process was confirmed in court (Ward v. Jackson) where the plaintiffs randomly sampled 1,626 of the 27,000 duplicated ballots. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the lower court ruling, “conclude[ing], unanimously, that . . . the challenge fails to present any evidence of ‘misconduct,’ ‘illegal votes’ or that the Biden Electors ‘did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office,’ let alone establish any degree of fraud or a sufficient error rate that would undermine the certainty of the election results.” (Ariz. S. Ct., December 9, 2020)
There may be some instances where the serial number was printed over the timing mark on the original damaged ballot. Since the duplicated ballot and not the original is tabulated, the added serial number overlapping a timing mark does not impact tabulation. When reviewing the randomly sampled duplicated ballots in Ward vs. Jackson, we were able to find and reconcile the serial numbers for all ballots reviewed.