AZ Senate Moves Forward to Enforce Subpoena to Audit Dominion Voting Machines
The GOP president of the Arizona Senate and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee moved forward to enforce a subpoena issued last month concerning auditing Maricopa County’s voting machines and ballots.
Subpoenas brought by then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Eddie Farnsworth on Dec. 15 called for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to turn over the metadata of the original ballot images from the Dominion Voting Systems equipment, 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 an interview at the time.
The board of supervisors did not comply with the subpoenas and instead went to court to seek to block them.
In late December, a state superior court judge affirmed the Judiciary Committee’s right to enforce its subpoenas; however, the Senate was not in session.
On Tuesday, a day after the 2021 legislative session began, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen issued a new subpoena to the board of supervisors threatening legislative contempt charges if they failed to comply.
The document was also signed by Senate President Karen Fann.
— Arizona Republican Party (@AZGOP) January 13, 2021
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A hearing was set for Wednesday morning.
The Arizona Secretary of State’s official tally has Democrat Joe Biden defeating President Donald Trump by 10,457 votes.
In Maricopa County — which is the Grand Canyon State’s most populous, encompassing the Phoenix metropolitan area — Biden defeated Trump by 2.2 percentage points or about 45,100 votes.
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.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors president Jack Sellers, who is a Republican, released a statement saying he responded to the subpoena by showing up to testify Wednesday, along with the county treasurer and county recorder.
“We came in good faith, as we have in the past, to work with the Senate and move forward on an independent audit of the County’s election machines and processes,” Sellers said. “We were ready to have serious discussions, we did not see the same from the Senate.”
Maricopa County Supervisors chair Jack Sellers says he showed up at the Senate today with treasurer and recorder to respond in good faith to a late Senate subpoena, but the Senate wasn’t interested in working together. Last night’s story: https://t.co/4dIwbFOVEO pic.twitter.com/aCSCUbsMdK
— Julia Shumway (@JMShumway) January 13, 2021
“The Board has found no fraud or manipulation of votes during the November 3rd General Election,” he added.
Sellers concluded by saying he supports a full forensic audit after all election-related litigation is over.
Last month, Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward accused the board of supervisors of stalling.
“They don’t want an expedited exposure of what happened in Maricopa County in this election for some strange reason,” Ward said. “Because all four of the Republicans say, ‘We want integrity. We want an audit. We want to open it up. We want people to feel confident,’ but they do nothing about it.”
