Board of AZ's Most Populous County Votes Unanimously to Conduct Audit of Dominion Voting Machines
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Wednesday for an independent audit of the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in November’s general election.
“There are a number of people now that have serious doubts about our election process,” Chairman of the Board Jack Sellers said during a meeting prior to the panel’s vote.
“I really want to alleviate their concerns and their issues with whatever it is we are doing and convince them that this was, in fact, truly an honest election with good integrity,” he added.
The proposed parameters of the audit will include: analyzing the tabulation equipment’s hacking vulnerability, verifying no malicious software was installed, testing whether the machines were connected to the internet, confirming no vote switching occurred (among other issues) and verifying state and county procurement regulations were followed when leasing the equipment from Dominion Voting Systems.
What is not included in the audit is a review of the ballots themselves, for which the Arizona Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the board of supervisors.
The subpoenas brought by then Senate Judiciary Chairman Eddie Farnsworth and Senate President Karen Fann on Dec. 15 called for the board of supervisors to turn over the metadata of the original ballot images from the Dominion voting machines, along with various reports and logs related to the election.
“There is technology that can look at those ballots to see if there are any anomalies, to see if there’s any dual voting and whether or not these were pre-printed,” Farnsworth said in a December interview.
Prior to the board’s Wednesday audit vote, Scott Jarrett, Maricopa County’s director of Election Day and Emergency Voting, recounted to the board members the efforts already undertaken to verify the accuracy of the November elections, which he said are required by state statutes.
Jarrett explained that over 47,000 ballots were verified as accurate from November’s general election through hand counts conducted with representatives of the political parties themselves present.
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“We know that there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there about this election — the election that was conducted by Maricopa County,” Jarrett said.
The purpose of the audit will be to dispel any misinformation and prove the voting machines are reliable.
Four of the five members of the board are Republican.
Clint Hickman, who was president of the board during the election cycle, explained his support for the audit by citing the old Ronald Reagan maxim, “Trust, but verify.”
“And we need to be willing and able to respond to whatever [the auditors] find,” Hickman said.
Fellow board member Steve Chucri said he wants to make sure the audit is not just “window dressing,” but rather that it be “thoroughly done.”
Steve Gallardo, the sole Democrat on the board, stated during the meeting that the audit “is a tough pill for me to swallow.”
However, the board member was willing to go along with it in the interest of transparency and to verify the machines were in no way hacked.
Gallardo added, “We are never going to convince” some voters who did not like the outcome that the election was accurate.
The Arizona Republic reported that the companies that will be performing the audit are Pro V&V and SLI Compliance.
“It was very important to us that we have totally independent qualified people do the audits for us,” Sellers told The Republic on Tuesday.
“It really is an interest on our part to be as transparent and open as we can be with this whole process and satisfy every one of the concerns that has been addressed to us as best we can.”
In Maricopa County — which is the Grand Canyon State’s most populous, encompassing the Phoenix metropolitan area — Democratic President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by 2.2 percentage points or about 45,100 votes of the over 2 million cast.
In doing so, the former vice president garnered about 337,900 more votes than Democrat Hillary Clinton did in 2016, when Trump won the county by 45,500 votes or 2.9 percentage points.
In other words, there was a 5.1 percentage point swing in favor of Biden.
The Arizona Secretary of State’s official tally has Biden defeating Trump in the state overall by 10,457 votes.
