see url:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/18/politics/fact-check-maricopa-audit-arizona-cyber-ninjas-74000/index.html
Quote<<<
Arizona's Senate held a Thursday briefing on the ongoing
Republican-initiated "audit" of the 2020 election in Maricopa County,
where Joe Biden outperformed Donald Trump by enough of a margin to win
the state.
The review is being conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity firm that
has no experience in election auditing. And the company's chief
executive officer, Doug Logan, made some Thursday claims that were
immediately called into question by the county and independent experts.
Here's a brief look at two of them.
The 74,000 ballots
Logan said that door-to-door questioning of Maricopa County voters is
the "one way" the auditors could determine whether what they are seeing
in the elections data are "real problems" or "clerical errors of some sort."
"For example, we have 74,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear
record of them being sent," he said.
Logan made clear that this wasn't necessarily a case of fraud, saying it
could be a "clerical issue." But his claim about an unexplained
74,000-plus ballot gap between the county's list of mail-in ballots
received and its list of mail-in ballots sent out was amplified on
Twitter by Liz Harrington, the spokeswoman for former President Donald
Trump, and by numerous other Trump supporters, such as Republican
Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert. Some of them, including Boebert, went
further than Logan did.
"In Arizona, 74,000 ballots were counted with no record of being sent
in. That's not normal. That's not right. That's not safe nor is it
secure," Boebert wrote.
On Friday, Trump himself went further than Logan. In a written
statement, he claimed that the Thursday Senate briefing showed "74,000
mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing
ballots)."
Facts First: There is no evidence of either fraud or any significant
error with these ballots, and certainly not "magically appearing
ballots." Both Maricopa County and outside experts say there is a simple
explanation for the gap Logan claimed had not been explained: the
existence of in-person early voting. Contrary to Logan's claims, the
ballot lists he was talking about include not only mail-in ballots but
also ballots cast early in person.
Here's why it's entirely normal for Maricopa County's submitted-ballots
list to include a significant number of votes that do not match up with
entries on the requested-ballots list. After the deadline to request a
mail-in ballot, which was October 23 in 2020, the requested-ballot list
doesn't get updated by the county. But the submitted-ballots list does
get updated after that October 23 deadline -- with the votes of
in-person early voters.
Logan's suggestion of some sort of unsolved mystery was definitively
debunked by Garrett Archer, an election analyst at ABC15 television in
Phoenix and a former official in the Arizona secretary of state's
office, who is known locally and on Twitter for his mastery of the
state's elections data.
Facts First: The office of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a
Republican elected in 2020, strongly denied this claim. "At no point
during the 2020 election cycle did Maricopa County modify the rigorous
signature verification requirements. Any suggestion to the contrary is
categorically false," the recorder's office said on Twitter.
Logan was not clear on who supposedly reduced the comparison standard
and how widespread the supposed change was. We can't, of course,
definitively fact check what happened or didn't happen at each and every
elections office in the county, especially without seeing the affidavit
Logan referred to
>>>End of Quote
