COMMENTARY BY Hans von Spakovsky 

Critics of the forensic audit of Maricopa County, Arizona—including local election officials and many reporters—who are crowing that the audit confirms that President Joe Biden won the election in Arizona, either don’t understand the purpose of an audit or are trying to deliberately obscure the most worrying findings in the audit.

As a former county election official in two different states, I was involved in multiple recounts. Recounts almost always only show slight differences from the original ballot tabulation. The fact that the hand recount in Maricopa County matched the machine recount simply means that the computer scanners used to scan and tabulate paper ballots were working properly.

However, the key point all of the critics of the Arizona audit are missing is that a recount simply recounts the ballots that were cast—a recount does not investigate, examine, or review the legitimacy of those ballots.

A recount does not verify or check whether ballots were cast by registered voters who are actually deceased; who do not actually live where they claim to live; who cast multiple votes because they are registered more than once; or who are not entitled to vote even though they are registered because they are not U.S. citizens or are felons who have not yet had their right to vote restored.

A simple example illustrates this problem. If a homeowners’ association has an election and the new president wins with 51 out of 100 votes, a recount will no doubt confirm that she received 51 votes. But it will not reveal whether 10 of her 51 votes were cast by individuals who falsely claimed to live in the neighborhood when they actually live elsewhere.

Volume III of the Maricopa audit lists some disturbing findings. That includes 23,344 “mail-in ballots voted from a prior address”; 9,041 “more ballots returned by voter than received”; 5,295 “voters that potentially voted in multiple counties”; 2,592 “more duplicates than original ballots”; and 2,382 “in-person voters who had moved out of Maricopa County.”

Numerous other problems are listed, such as voters whose ballots were counted despite the fact that they registered to vote after the state deadline for registration had already passed.

These are serious potential problems that should be investigated by election officials with the involvement of law enforcement. For example, the individual voter files of the 5,295 “voters that potentially voted in multiple counties” should be pulled, and each voter should be investigated to determine if they have multiple registrations and, in fact, illegally cast more than one vote in the 2020 election.

Read rest of “What Arizona Audit Really Shows” https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/09/30/what-the-arizona-audit-really-shows-and-why-election-officials-should-be-embarrassed/