A team of Republican legislators from Pennsylvania is planning to visit the 2020 Maricopa county election audit site in Arizona to show their support for the “fact-finding mission.” The delegation includes State Representative Rob Kauffman and Senators Cris Dush and Doug Mastriano.
The Arizona audit, which is investigating the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, started on April 23 and has counted more than 1 million ballots. The operation also involves analyzing the machines used in counting the ballots.
Democrats attempted to block the audit through a court order. However, a judge ruled against the order for not presenting sufficient proof to substantiate their voter privacy breach allegations.
“It’s my belief that Arizona will be the launchpad for elections audits and election integrity efforts all over this great country,” Republican Representative Matt Gaetz said to AP. He attended a rally last month just outside Phoenix to cheer on the recount.
The Pennsylvania Representatives will meet up with Arizona legislators before heading to the audit site at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix to receive a briefing from the forensic audit team.
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“I kind of see this as a fact-finding mission to see what’s happening on the ground in Arizona,” Kauffman said to The Epoch Times. Karen Fann, Arizona Senate President, has stated that the audit is not aimed at changing election results, but to identify errors in the election system and related processes.
Pennsylvania election concerns
In November 2020, Kauffman and Dush called for a statewide election audit following reports of potential fraud in Pennsylvania.
The next month, Kauffman and other Republicans issued a joint statement saying that the numbers in the election just “don’t add up” and that certification of presidential results is “premature and in error.” After conducting “extensive analysis of election data,” the lawmakers found “troubling discrepancies.”
“The difference of 202,377 more votes cast than voters voting, together with the 31,547 over- and under-votes in the presidential race, adds up to an alarming discrepancy of 170,830 votes, which is more than twice the reported statewide difference between the two major candidates for President of the United States,” said the joint statement.
In February 2021, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Democrat Kathy Boockvar dismissed concerns of election irregularities, citing the conclusions of a risk-limiting audit of 45,000 randomly selected ballots with “strong evidence of the accuracy of the count of votes cast in the November 2020 presidential election.”
Mastriano asked for an audit in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, which was conducted by Wake Technology Services, a company that took part in the Arizona audit until its contract ended on May 14, the day the audit was initially scheduled to end. However, the results of the Fulton County audit have yet to be published.
All three visiting Pennsylvanian lawmakers, Mastriano, Dush, and Kauffman, were among the Republican leaders who expressed opposition to their state’s electoral votes being cast for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.
According to HereIsTheEvidence, a website that compiles information regarding anomalies in the Nov. 3 presidential election, the following irregularities have been found in Pennsylvania:
- 161,774 mail-in ballot records were changed between the Nov. 10 version and the Dec. 16 version of Pennsylvania’s mail ballot request database, 116,840 of which received new return dates.
- 69,004 ballots were marked as “Returned” after Nov. 3 Election Day, while 19,660 ballots were marked “Returned” after Nov. 6.
- Pennsylvania’s deadline for mail-in applications was Oct. 27. However, Berks County was filling and submitting new ballots on Nov. 16.
One Pennsylvanian county was recently mired in controversy. In the May 18 primary election in Luzerne County, Republican ballots were displayed incorrectly as Democratic ballots on the electronic screens of ballot machines. The devices were supplied by Dominion Voting Systems, which later admitted to “human errors.”
“The issue was confined to the header on the viewing screen of the ballot marking device, and the County’s election director confirmed that all ballots printed correctly with the Republican header and the Republican primary election races,” the company said in a statement.
However, Election Board member Missy Thomas told Times Leader that the ballot mislabeling has led many citizens to lose confidence in elections. “These machines — their credibility is lost… The system is compromised,” she stated.
With reporting by Prakash Gogoi.
