The Arizona Audit — Some Thoughts

As you may be aware, the Republican controlled State Senate in Arizona ordered — after much machinations and some very odd conflict with the Republican controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors — a “forensic” audit of the recent state election limited to Maricopa County (Phoenix).

Nobody knew exactly what was meant by a forensic audit, but now things are coming into focus.

Arizona Election Background Info

Some basic facts:

 1. Arizona has traditionally been a Republican stronghold with only Harry Truman in 1948 and Bill Clinton in 1996 winning the state as Democrats.

In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 91,234 votes which was a margin of victory of 3.5%.

 2. Joe Biden, a Democrat, won the state by a slim margin in the 2020 election.

Biden — 1,672,143 votes

Trump — 1,661,686 votes

 3. The Biden 2020 margin of victory in ‘Zona was 10,457 votes.

 4. A total of 3,333,829 voters cast ballots statewide.

 5. Of these votes, 2,089,563 were cast in Maricopa County the home of the city of Phoenix. This was an 85% turnout of eligible voters in the county, an extraordinary performance.

6. The entire state turnout — which includes the 85% in Maricopa County — was 79.9%.

If you do a little math wizardry you can determine that the turnout percentage in the balance of the state was 53% which seems oddly low.

 7. Total registered voters in Arizona increased by more than 500,000 during the time period of 2018 to 2020.

So, where’s the beef, Big Red Car

Ahh, dear reader, here is the beef.

 1. Arizona — facing the scourge of the Pandemic squarely in the face — made substantial modifications to its voting rules including a wholesale vote-by-mail campaign with gobs of unsupervised ballot drop off locations and mail-in voting.

 2. When they made these rules, they adhered to an administrative system wherein:

A ballot was sent to a voter by means of a document called an EV 32 which definitively identified the voter, the address, and conveyed the ballot.

The same ballot was returned to the county and logged in using a form called an EV 33.

Sounds like a reasonable system to track every ballot, right?

It stands to reason that if you send out the ballots thusly then the number sent out should exceed the number received, right? Someone forgets to send in their ballot?

In this process, it would be easy to ensure that all the ballots sent out were received or how many were not, right?

So, what happened, Big Red Car?

Well, here’s what happened:

Maricopa County seems to have 74,243 ballots for which there are no EV 32s and no EV 33s.

One more time — there are 74,243 ballots being counted and re-counted as valid votes in Maricopa County that were mailed in but have no record of having been sent out or received — no EV 32s (outbound log) and no EV 33a s (inbound receipt verification).

Apparently, they just magically appeared.

How can that be, Big Red Car?

It is particularly troubling since from Election Day the folks who run the elections in Maricopa County have been swearing that they have an EV 32 and an EV 33 for every ballot cast and counted, but that seems not to be the case.

So where did the ballots come from, Big Red Car?

Ahhh, dear reader, therein lies the problem. Where did these 74,243 mail-in ballots come from when there is no record of them being sent out or received?

This is going to get sporty, folks, and it is just starting.

One other thing of some importance, 74,323 ballots is a huge physical pile of ballots. Huge. it dwarfs the Biden margin of victory of 10,457 votes.

Hello, America!

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car.