No end in sight for Maricopa election audit, or for feuding over it
The private firms auditing Maricopa County elections told senators Thursday they have finished reviewing the more than 2 million ballots, but will not be able to deliver a complete report without cooperation from county officials.
That led Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to threaten to take the county “back to court” to force compliance – one day after a judge said Fann and the auditors need to comply with county requests for public records in what critics call a “sham audit.”
“At the end of the day, this is Sen. Fann and one other Republican bringing in essentially their clients, their paid clients, to have this back-and-forth conversation, and quite honestly, perpetuate a lot of the conspiracy theories that they’ve been throwing out,” said Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios.
Rios said Democrats only learned of the meeting 17 hours before it started. “This is not a hearing,” Rios said. “If it were a true hearing, we would have had to have been noticed 24 hours in advance, and it would have had to have been held in front of a committee which would include Democrats and Republicans.”
Petersen said if the county does not supply the information requested – on router information, two supposedly missing hard drives, voter roll data and more – the GOP-controlled Senate will seek new subpoenas for the information or be forced to release an “incomplete” audit report.
But Ryan Snow, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called it “a little bit misleading for the folks conducting this sham … to say they’re (Maricopa County) not cooperating. They’ve done everything that’s been required of them by a court order.”
“They’re very clearly shifting the goal post. They have done the whole sham audit and they don’t have enough information after all of this,” Snow said. “It’s further evidence it’s a scam.”
“I don’t see a lack of cooperation,” Snow said. “I see a group of election review sham auditors having done some work and they realize there’s nothing there … to substantiate baseless claims about the election.”
American Oversight Committee, a government watchdog group, sought those documents under the state’s public records law, but the Senate refused to comply, arguing that the law does not apply to private vendors, like Cyber Ninjas, which have the documents.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Kemp said in an order filed Thursday that he “completely rejects” that argument, writing that “any and all documents with a substantial nexus to the audit activities are public records.”
“It is difficult to conceive of a case with a more compelling public interest demanding public disclosure and public scrutiny,”
Kemp wrote.
Critics noted that organizers of Thursday’s meeting did not mention Kemp’s ruling – proof, they said that the senators and auditors were picking and choosing what information to discuss to create “a basis for further voting restrictions and voter intimidation.”
The private firms auditing Maricopa County elections said they have reviewed the more than 2 million ballots but will be unable to deliver a complete report without cooperation from county officials, during what critics called a sham hearing on a sham audit.
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