Auditors are reportedly done counting ballots last July 28 for Arizona's Maricopa County despite efforts to derail the process.
The Epoch Times reported that the auditors have announced last Wednesday that they have finished a third count of the ballots held at Phoenix' Arizona State Fairgrounds Wesley Bolin Building and will now be coming up with a draft report on their findings. The auditors will now bring the data they have gathered for analysis. The counting was said to have been supervised by former Arizona Republican Party Chair Randy Pullen.
"The physical tabulation of the ballots are complete and are being returned to Maricopa County tomorrow," Arizona Senate President Karen Fann told The Epoch Times.
2.1 million ballots from the 2020 elections were hand tallied last month by Cyber Ninja's auditing team. The Epoch Times said Fann revealed early this month there was a need to do a third set of numbers, as advised by the attorney of the Arizona Senate Republicans, since there was a mismatch in the report from the Maricopa County and the initial recount done.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors have repeatedly denounced Chairman of the Board Jack Sellers for using "flawed" methods that led to "produce incorrect results." The third count then did not mark down "some or all of the votes" as done by previous auditors and only tabulated the number of ballots.
Accordingly, the completion of the third count came after "days of tension" between former Republican Secretary of State Ken Bennett that Fann tapped to serve as the Senate's liaison for the audit and the Florida-based Cyber Ninjas hired to do the audit. Bennett announced on Monday that he was going to leave the post since he was blocked from the audit as a result of sharing with outside analysts some of the findings of the auditor.
Fann called Bennett's actions as "irresponsible" since the said analysts the data was disclosed to were the same people "who have repeatedly disparaged the audit." Bennett's actions also resulted to Cyber Ninja being put in question on doing the third count independently. Bennett nonetheless remained the liaison after reaching a "deal with Fann."
Another hurdle the audit encountered was in April when Democrats tried to stop them from doing so but Maricopa County Judge Daniel Martin allowed the recount to continue. The Democrats a month after through the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pamela Karlan raised there were violations against federal laws being committed by the Republican-led election recount being done in Maricopa County, such as the audit's plan to interview voters, which was condemned by Bennett.
"This is a matter between the Arizona Senate and Maricopa County. We don't see any grounds for anyone else to intervene," Bennett said in an interview with Washington Post on the matter.
Then there were the missing documents, which Fann said, are necessary to complete the auditing's final report. In May, it was discovered that the entire database of the voting machine was deleted by Maricopa County officials that prompted Fann to demand from them an explanation along with other anomalies discovered during the auditing process.
Two days ago, the Arizona State Audit Twitter account was suspended along with other state's auditing accounts. The Big Tech platform said that "it suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules" but did not specify what rule the auditor account violated.
