- The Washington Times - Wednesday, July 14, 2021

The audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County by the Arizona Senate has turned up a discrepancy with the numbers provided by the county officials.

Senate President Karen Fann said in an interview with radio host Mike Broomhead that the discrepancy was sufficient grounds for the legislature to acquire new ballot-counting machines.

Ms. Fann said the size of the discrepancy in the ballot count was unknown.

“They haven’t released a number yet,” Ms. Fann said in the interview on radio station KTAR. “However, we do know that those numbers do not match with Maricopa County at this point.”

Ms. Fann said the Senate’s auditors “want to make sure that every one of those check-and-balances match before they start doing the analysis of all the data they received.”

Recounts almost always produce some discrepancies with election-night returns. Usually, it’s just a few votes per precinct or a larger error in one jurisdiction for a known technical reason.

Discrepancies in favor of one candidate or the other tend to balance out over large jurisdictions such as states or congressional districts.
Approximately 2.1 million ballots are being recounted.

“We are finishing up — the vendor is finishing up what we call the aggregation: double-checking the spreadsheets against the blue tally sheets, against the scans they did on the ballots,” Ms. Fann told KTAR.

President Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in Arizona by more than 10,000 votes of the more than 3.3 million cast. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, provided the Democratic candidate with the decisive margin, favoring Mr. Biden by about 45,000 votes.

Mr. Trump claims widespread voter fraud cost him the election. While many problems and irregularities have been found, there is no evidence of skullduggery on the scale that would be necessary to switch the several Biden states that would have to have gone for Mr. Trump to affect the outcome.

• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.

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