The House Oversight Committee held a hearing Thursday on the results of the audit of the independent Maricopa County ballot audit ordered by the Arizona Senate. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) found the audit results troubling, leading him to question whether Joe Biden really won the election in Arizona.
At the beginning of the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD-08) asked Biggs who won the presidential election in Arizona. Biggs responded, “We don’t know. There are a lot of issues with this election that took place.” He said the only reason the hearing is being conducted is because the chair, Carolyn Maloney (D-NY-12), wants to see any election integrity legislation scuttled.
Biggs talked about how there were so many problems with voting administration in Maricopa County in 2018 that the Maricopa County Supervisors took back as much authority as they could from the Maricopa County Recorder who oversaw those elections, Democrat Adrian Fontes.
Biggs reminded the Democrats how many of them — including Raskin — questioned the results of the certification of the election in 2016 for Trump, pointing to their speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin had interfered. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH-04) observed that Democrats even contested Alabama, a heavily red state, going for Trump.
Biggs cited the obstruction from the Maricopa County Supervisors as a problem, noting that it only agreed to conduct two small partial audits costing $18,000, yet cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting to stop a full audit from being conducted.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ-04) talked about how the ballot dumps throughout the evening of the election didn’t make logical sense. A dump from Cochise County that went 61 percent for Biden should have been followed by ballot dumps of similar percentages, not drastically different ratios. He mentioned how the top two election officials in Pinal County resigned the day after the election. He said 270,000 ballots in Maricopa County had problems, which was certainly enough cause for an audit.
Ken Bennett, the liaison between the Senate and the ballot auditors, is a former Arizona secretary of state who testified that of 1,691 total boxes of ballots, there were 40-plus questionable boxes.
Biggs asked Jack Sellers, the chairman of the Maricopa County Supervisors, if he agreed that the law was violated when the county supervisors failed to maintain the chain of custody over the ballots. Sellers said no, he said he disagreed that there were problems.
Biggs asked Bill Gates, the other county supervisor present, if it was appropriate to delete files after an election, and Gates responded and said the deleted files were archived. Gates admitted that when the Arizona Senate subpoenaed the election information, the county did not turn over the archived files.
When Biggs asked Bennett for his opinion of that response, Bennett said, “I find it frankly laughable to suggest that a county in response to a subpoena could say we will delete files from the hard drives and the materials that we give to the auditors, because we have those files archived on data that we did not give to the auditors when the subpoena said turn over all the records related to the election.” Neither Gates nor Sellers could confirm whether this was standard practice.
Jordan asked Bennett about three discrepancies: “23,344 mail-in ballots from a different address, 9,044 more ballots returned by a voter than were sent to that voter, and 5,295 ballots with the same name and birth date from a different county than were sent to the voter.”
Bennett said 15,000 of the 23,344 were voters who moved within the county, so they were not ineligible to vote. Another 6,000 of those probably moved out of Arizona just prior to the election, so shouldn’t have been allowed to vote. However, the voter registration of those 6,000 appeared to be evenly divided between Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
But he had nothing to say about the other two numbers other than there was a discrepancy between the official records and commercial databases. He concluded, “And so, as I said in my testimony, we welcome answers and verification of that from the county.”
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA-03) used his time to denounce the Democratic-controlled committee.
“There were thousands of affidavits signed by American citizens about very suspicious election irregularities on the days and weeks leading up to the 2020 election and specific shocking observations of electoral sabotage on election day itself,” he said. “My colleagues summarily dismiss the sworn affidavits of American citizens as liars and conspiracy theorists, yet an illegal alien crossing our border with a scripted plea for asylum taped to his head — he’s seen as a paragon of virtue.”
He concluded by saying Trump will win the next presidential election.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
