Two days after Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors (BOS) voted to contract three companies -including a CPA firm- to examine the tabulation operation of its Dominion Voting System, the State Senate announced Friday it has contracted a different company to conduct a full-scale audit of all aspects of the county’s 2020 General Election process.
“We need to do more than make basic checks on the machines to make sure they were working,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen said Jan. 29. “We need to check the ballots and ballot scans for abnormalities. We need to look at the machines to see if there was any manipulation. We need to make sure there was no remote or local access that made changes to the results.”
Since Nov. 3, there have been a wide-range of concerns about the election protocols followed by Maricopa County. When county officials refused to heed calls for a full-scale audit, the Senate’s Judiciary Committee announced its plans to conduct a systematic audit.
The senate’s efforts include legislative subpoenas served on Maricopa County demanding everything from the original 2.1 million ballots that were cast, the scanned ballot images, voter rolls, software programs, and voting system equipment used by the county. The subpoenas also demand the usernames and passwords for accessing the various programs and devices.
County officials have rebuffed the subpoenas since mid-December, leading to two lawsuits filed in state court. Then on Jan. 20, State Senate President Karen Fann announced “a favorable agreement” had been reached with the Maricopa County BOS.
At the time, Fann credited newly named BOS Chairman Jack Sellers as being instrumental in facilitating the deal.
“Not only has the Board agreed to turn over all the relevant information we sought in our subpoenas so that we may perform an audit, but they also acknowledge that the Legislature is a sovereign power of the state and that the county is a political subdivision, and as such, the Legislature has the constitutional and statutory authority to issue subpoenas,” Fann’s statement read.
However, the announcement contained no timetable, and county officials pushed back on the suggestion of any agreement.
Then on Jan. 27 the BOS approved the limited audit of its tabulation system, noting the purpose was for “gathering information to prepare for future elections in Maricopa County.”
That scope is nowhere near the full-scale audit many legislators and voters have called for. In addition, a number of questions were raised about the qualifications of the two auditing firms Maricopa County engaged, particularly whether the companies have expertise to conduct a cybersecurity examination to ascertain whether any software or hardware was hacked.
On Jan. 29 Fann and Petersen upped the ante when they announced the legislature’s intent to move forward with a wide-ranging audit by selecting an unidentified firm. The senators made it clear the scope of the audit will also include a number of the county’s election processes before ballots ever made it to the tabulation center.
“Our firm will perform everything we have required in the subpoenas,” Fann noted. “The Senate’s forensic audit will bring accuracy and detail to the process, and with that restore integrity to the election process.”