Arizona Senate President Karen Fann wanted an audit to ascertain how Maricopa County handled the 2020 General Election, but she never expected the Senate would be doing it without the assistance of county officials. Nor did she expect the audit to continue through the summer.
Yet on Tuesday, Fann told Arizona Daily Independent she was interviewing a potential contractor to audit another aspect of Maricopa County’s election process – how employees verified voter signatures on the nearly 1.9 million early ballot affidavit envelopes turned in during the election.
Those signatures must be verified before the ballot inside can be sent for tabulation, but questions have been raised about the procedures utilized by then-County Recorder Adrian Fontes and his staff question while conducting those verifications.
Fann says whoever she hires to review the procedures and the signatures will start by looking for envelopes which do not contain the required voter signature. There will also be a review for unidentifiable signatures -what Fann’s calls “scribbles”- which can be matched up against Maricopa County’s voter database, which includes images of all prior signatures used by a voter during an election.
But for voters getting discouraged by the wait time for a final audit report, Fann points out her initial plan was for a bipartisan, joint election review with Maricopa County and Senate officials at the county’s election center. That idea was shot down by the Board of Supervisors, whose members have issued joint and individual dismissive commentary about the Senate’s audit for months.
“I think the important thing to remember, as I’ve said gazillions of times, is that all of this is about election integrity,” Fann said. “It has been so disappointing to see the Secretary of State [Katie Hobbs], the Recorder [Stephen Richer], and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors pushing back on this since even before we selected an auditor.”
Fann is also perplexed by the anti-audit position taken by Richer, who campaigned against Fontes last year on a platform that highlighted serious problems with how Fontes handled the 2018 elections. Richer now defends how Fontes performed in the 2020 General Election, even though Richer did not take office until two months later.
Despite the naysayers, Fann says the Senate’s purpose in undertaking the audit of Maricopa County’s election protocols has not changed.
“The priority then and now has been about ensuring our election systems are running as they should be,” Fann said, adding that negative commentary coming out of Maricopa County “is doing the exact opposite.”
And what will the Senate do if the final audit report suggests there is probable cause that criminal offenses occurred in connection to Maricopa County’s election? According to Fann, she will personally ensure the information is turned over to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office for investigation by the AG’s election integrity unit.
For now, Fann’s audit team is in the draft report phase of the hand count and ballot review process conducted earlier this year at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. A draft report was due earlier this week from Cyber Ninjas, the company Fann hired to look into whether irregularities occurred with how the county accepted, and then tabulated, nearly 2.1 million ballots.
But Cyber Ninjas’ CEO Doug Logan and two other key audit officials recently tested positive for COVID-19, Fann announced. That resulted in only a fraction of the draft being sent to Fann on Monday, although the rest of Cyber Ninjas’ draft report is expected in the coming days.
On Wednesday, Fann will oversee a nine-person confidential meeting to begin the review of what was received from Cyber Ninjas. The final audit report will not be released to the public until it is delivered to Sen. Warren Petersen, chair of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.
As to what information will be included in that final audit report, Fann is adamant information and data from sources unrelated to the Senate or the Cyber Ninjas’ audit team will not be considered.
Fann also clarified that the Senate Election Audit Committee will have a role to play once the final audit report is released but will not be involved in the review process. The committee was created this year in one of the budget bills to provide a forum to discuss possible election legislation needed moving forward.
According to Fann, the Senate Election Audit Committee could hold meetings to discuss some facets of the Maricopa County audit report or even consider third-party information about other election matters.