The Arizona Senate will hold a hearing on July 15 on the progress of the election audit in Maricopa county, according to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann.
The hearing, announced on short notice, will feature updates from Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and CyFIR CEO Ben Cotton, the heads of the companies conducting the audit.
“It’s an update and briefing not the appropriate time for any testifying,” Fann wrote on Twitter in response to a message from a reporter who pointed out that the public will not be given an opportunity to testify.
Fann said on July 13 that the number of ballots counted in the audit of the 2020 general election differs from the tally by Maricopa County officials, and that the discrepancy has prompted the election review team to acquire new machines to recount the ballots.
“They haven’t released a number yet,” Fann, a Republican, told KTAR Radio. “However, we do know that those numbers do not match with Maricopa County at this point.”
Jack Sellers, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that he wasn’t surprised by the claim.
“While experienced professionals at the County used the latest certified tabulation technology and established processes to count almost 2.1 million ballots in accordance with Arizona law, the Senate contractors have taken a different approach,” he said. “They’ve cycled through processes and procedures, chasing conspiracy theories while volunteers with no elections experience tried to accurately count votes as they spun by on turntables.
“Elections experts from across the country have said this method is flawed and will produce incorrect results.”
According to Maricopa County’s official canvass, there were 2,089,563 ballots cast in its 2020 general election.
Fann’s remarks come as the ballots cast in Arizona’s largest county in the 2020 election were set to be counted for a third time on orders from the state’s Senate.
The ballots submitted in Maricopa County for the presidential contest were tabulated, as normal, by election officials. They were recounted by hand by audit teams hired by the state Senate in a process that was completed late last month.
The Senate was set to conduct its own recount, which will provide a number to compare with those from the county and from the auditors, and focuses on the number of ballots and not the actual votes, unlike the first two tabulations.
The Senate is using two counting machines that it purchased to complete the count.
Isabel van Brugen contributed to this report.
