A review of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s most populous county confirmed that Democrat Joe Biden won the Grand Canyon State’s 11 electoral votes legitimately and without the aid of fraud, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm that ran the audit indicated Friday.
Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan told state senators that his company’s review of the results in Maricopa County showed that Biden gained 99 votes over the official results. Trump lost 261 votes from the official total — which showed him losing the county to Biden by more than 45,000 votes.
“These are all very small numbers when we’re talking about 2.1 million ballots [cast],” Logan said. “These are very small discrepancies. We can say that the ballots that were provided to us to count … very accurately correlate with the official canvas numbers.”
Former President Donald Trump has implied to his supporters for months that the audit would turn up malfeasance that would prove he was removed from office through widespread election fraud. Though witnesses at the hearing where the audit report was presented raised questions about Maricopa County’s ballot-collecting and security procedures, no proof of such fraud was forthcoming.
County officials pushed back particularly hard against claims made by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, a failed GOP Senate candidate from Massachusetts who claims to have invented email and was once married to the actress Fran Drescher.
In his remarks, Ayyadurai — who was referred to as “Dr. Shiva” throughout the hearing — charged that he had found thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes that were missing voter signatures or bore an illegible scribble.
Ayyadurai also alleged that thousands of duplicate ballots were received and may have been counted by the county, as well as that ballot envelopes with blank signature lines were marked as verified and approved by officials — and that the number of unsigned ballot envelopes submitted to officials increased in the days after Election Day.
Even then, Ayyadurai stopped short of accusing election officials outright fraud, saying at one point that “I don’t want to accuse that,” but called for a “full signature verification audit.”
The county said in a series of statements on Twitter that election officials contacted voters who mailed ballots in an unsigned envelope “to ensure their vote counts.”
In another tweet, the county noted that voters who are unable to sign their name to a ballot receive assistance from special election boards who “visually affirm the marks are the voter’s correct sig.”
Officials also defended their process for counting duplicated ballots, insisting that “only one ballot [from each voter] is counted.”
“Unfortunately, AZ Senators gave unvetted, unqualified, private companies with known biases a platform to share misguided theories and faulty assumptions about Maricopa County elections,” the county said in another Twitter message.
For his part, the 45th president insisted in a series of emailed statements that “[m]assive fraud was found in the Arizona Forensic Audit, sometimes referred to as ‘Fraudit.’ The numbers are Election Changing!”
In a subsequent message, Trump called on Arizona to “immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results” due to “incomprehensible Fraud at an Election Changing level, many times more votes than is needed.”
Trump closed with a promise to discuss the audit at his rally in Georgia Saturday night, which is expected to include remarks by Republican US Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
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