The sloppiness of the audit and lack of professionalism of the auditors goes straight back to the folks who hired them.Observers of Maricopa County recount report procedural problems
Ballots have been left unattended on counting tables.
Laptop computers sit abandoned, at times open, unlocked and unmonitored.
Procedures are constantly shifting, with untrained workers using different rules to count ballots.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, on Wednesday sent a letter outlining a string of problems that she said observers from her office have witnessed at a Republican-led recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona’s largest county.
In the six-page letter, Hobbs wrote that elections are “governed by a complex framework of laws and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security, and transparency” but that the procedures governing the ongoing recount in Phoenix “ensure none of those things.”
Former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, a Republican who is acting as a spokesman for the audit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the audit’s Twitter account, @ArizonaAudit, tweeted that Hobbs’s allegations were “baseless claimes [sic].”
“The audit continues!” read the tweet.
The recount of Maricopa County’s nearly 2.1 million ballots was ordered by the GOP-led state Senate, despite the fact that county officials, as well as state and federal judges, found no merit to claims that the vote was tainted by fraud or other problems.
Republicans hired a Florida-based private contractor called Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive has echoed former president Donald Trump’s false allegations of fraud, to handle the recount.
The company has been criticized for running an opaque process and not following state rules for elections and recounts. Its audit has been embraced by Trump and his allies as the key to overturning his election loss, and it has spawned a wave of unfounded theories about how the Maricopa vote could have been rigged.
Fueling the speculation has been the unorthodox practices of the contractors, who have been conducting physical examinations of the ballots, including inspecting their weight and thickness and examining folds on ballots under microscopes. At one point, workers were holding ballots up to ultraviolet lights.
The purpose of such inspections has not been clear. Bennett at one point said the workers were hunting for watermarks - though county officials have said the Maricopa County ballots do not bear watermarks.
In her letter, Hobbs wrote that the paper analysis is “completely unnecessary” and does “little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit.’ ”
In an interview Wednesday with a local CBS affiliate, John Brakey - an assistant to Bennett who has described himself as a Democrat who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2020 - said workers were looking for traces of bamboo.
Brakey cited unfounded accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown from Asia into Arizona. He added that he does not believe that theory.
“What they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper,” he said, adding: “They’re doing all sorts of testing to prove if it was or wasn’t, and that’s very important, because the only way you’re going to persuade people on changing is having facts, and we’re on a mission for facts.”
Bennett did not immediately respond to a question about whether workers are searching for traces of bamboo.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...dural-problems