A new poll finds that 62 percent of Arizona Republicans believe the Maricopa County election audit results will show that former President Donald Trump defeated President Joe Biden in the Grand Canyon State.
That result is not surprising, particularly given some of the initial findings of the audit reported last week.
The OH Predictive Insights poll conducted from July 6 to 11 with 863 registered voters also determined another 21 percent of Republicans say Biden’s victory will stand, while an additional 16 percent are unsure.
So that’s a combined 78 percent that have at least some doubt about Biden’s win.
Last week, auditors informed Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann and state Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen that as many as 74,000 absentee ballot mail-in records are missing.
In other words, there is no record of ballots being mailed out, but they were counted. That’s a problem.
In addition, auditors said that 11,326 people that did not show up in Nov. 7 voter rolls appeared on Dec. 4 voter rolls. Another 3,981 showed to have voted only registered after Oct. 15, according to statements provided during the hearing.
Biden won Arizona overall by 10,457 votes (0.3 percent), the closest margin of any of the swing states that went for him.
The president flipped Maricopa County, which encompasses the Phoenix metropolitan area, from red to blue in November, which of course in and of itself is no indicator that fraud occurred.
In 2016, Trump won the county over Democrat Hillary Clinton by approximately 44,500 votes, or 2.8 percent.
Biden won Maricopa by 45,100 votes, or 2.2 percent of the vote in November.
That the candidates won the county by almost the exact same margin is a little odd, but again not necessarily a red flag for fraud.
Despite Biden’s victory, Republicans carried every countywide office in Maricopa, save for the sheriff (which an incumbent Democrat held), including flipping the county recorder and winning the open treasurer seat.
That is very odd because it means a lot of split tickets or under-voting among the 2.1 million ballots cast.
Add to this fact that very vocal Trump-supporting members of Congress, like GOP Reps. Andy Biggs and Debbie Lesko, won their re-election contests in Maricopa County districts by massive margins, and now the red flag is starting to go up.
Finally, the county did use the notorious Dominion Voting Systems, which proved to be problematic (whether human error or otherwise) in terms of accuracy, by thousands of votes, when hand recounts were conducted in Michigan and Georgia.
Petersen highlighted some other troubling issues raised at last week’s update from the auditors in a pair of Sunday tweets.
“1. Why were 37,000 queries made on the Election server on a single day in March which churned the logs so the logs from election day could not be seen?” he asked.
“2. Why won’t the County provide images of the envelopes for the mail in ballots? 3. Why won’t the County provide the splunk logs? 4. Why were duplicate ballots missing the serial numbers as required by ARS 16-621 and why were there multiples with the same number?” the senator further queried.
2. Why won’t the County provide images of the envelopes for the mail in ballots?
3. Why won’t the County provide the splunk logs?
4. Why were duplicate ballots missing the serial numbers as required by ARS 16-621 and why were there multiples with the same number?
— Warren Petersen (@votewarren) July 18, 2021
The splunk logs show the activity through the routers and would be a means to determine if anything abnormal happened regarding the vote tabulators and other equipment in or around Election Day.
Why county officials won’t turn either the logs or the routers over is puzzling and lends to the public perception everything is not on the up and up.
Arizona Republicans and Republicans nationwide are right to have doubts that Biden won the state.
More information including the results of the hand recount and ballot paper analysis will be coming out in the days and weeks ahead.
Thank goodness the AZ GOP has undertaken its full forensic audit. These lawmakers and others who follow their example have the ability to restore confidence in a system that was badly abused during the 2020 election cycle.