Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to vote on new election audit

PHOENIX — The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will vote Wednesday on whether to allow two independent firms to conduct an audit on the certified 2020 election results.

The board will decide in the 9:30 a.m. meeting whether to allow the firms to audit tabulation hardware and software “in a way that protects private voter information and our investment in the machines,” Chairman Jack Sellers said in a statement.

Sellers said he doesn’t believe there were any vulnerabilities in the county’s voting process but hopes an independent audit can put fraud claims to rest.

“While I am confident in our staff and our equipment, not all our residents are. This is a problem,” Sellers said. “A democracy cannot survive if enough of its people doubt elections are free and fair. Some will never be satisfied, but this vote is not about them.”

Maricopa County released a fact sheet Tuesday detailing its election integrity since October 2020.

That included a hand count audit of election results performed by Maricopa County political parties the day after the election, which yielded a 100% match to the vote tabulation machines.

Two weeks later, the Maricopa County Elections Department and the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office performed a post-election logic and accuracy test on equipment to make sure it wasn’t compromised during the election.

Members of all three political parties and a representative from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office observed the test.

The board certified the county’s election results two days after the logic and accuracy test.

Despite the certification, some Arizona lawmakers have pressed on asking for more election oversight.

Maricopa County officials and the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate last Wednesday agreed to avoid further court hearings while they work on a deal to get the Senate a raft of data from November’s election.

The two sides fought for almost a month in which the Republican-majority county board said the Senate’s requests were far out of bounds and likely to expose private voter information for political reasons.

“The best we can do, in my opinion, is to err on the side of transparency, to embrace the opportunity to once again show our work, and to put facts in their proper place at the center of public discourse instead of the periphery,” Sellers said.

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