As the Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 General Election is nearing an end, the man managing the audit pushed back Friday on what he called misleading comments made by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.
According to audit liaison Ken Bennett, a few days ago Hobbs suggested three people were “rifling” through some boxes of ballots at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. But during a Friday morning appearance on KFYI’s The Conservative Circus, Bennett told show host James T. Harris nothing improper was happening.
“I was one of those three people with two team executives from the auditor,” Bennett said exasperatedly. “We weren’t rifling through the ballots.”
Instead, Bennett told Harris, they were reviewing some batches of ballots in five boxes, four of which were not properly marked by county officials as containing ballots cast under the Uniformed & Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).
“Those are the kinds of lies that our own folks here in Arizona and across the country are trying to push out there,” Bennett said, who said he does not understand why people are so against auditing an election.
Bennett noted that even promotional material for the Dominion’s Democracy Suites voting system used by Maricopa County discusses four phases of an election: building for the election, voting and counting, reporting the results, and auditing those results.
“Auditing elections should be part of an election,” Bennett told Harris.
The Senate’s audit started in April with Maricopa County’s nearly 2.1 million ballots split across 45 pallets of 40 boxes each. Going into Friday, Bennett said there was only one pallet remaining to be hand counted.
But although the hand count part of the audit is nearly over, Bennett said the reconciliation of all count sheets will take some time. He also reported 385 Dominion machines turned over by Maricopa County under subpoena have not been completely reviewed because county officials refuse to provide the audit team a password.
“They say there’s nothing you need to see behind that partition,” said Bennett, an accountant by trade. “When you start telling the auditors ‘don’t look here’ that tells us where we ought to look first.”