The Arizona Senate’s Election Committee continued the second part of a hearing on Monday that began last week, featuring testimony from election integrity proponents. Shelby Busch, the co-founder of We the People AZ, and Heather Honey of Verify Vote, went over five areas where their team found apparent law violations by Maricopa County in the 2022 election.
Busch said during her presentation, “We want safe elections, not convenient ones,” sparking applause from the audience. State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff), the committee chair, kept a tight rein over the proceedings, often calling out the Democratic senators on the committee when they were out of line. One used the phrase “election denier,” and Rogers told her it was inappropriate.
Busch explained that her team found many violations of the state’s Election Procedures Manual (EPM), which are class 2 misdemeanors. The statute that addresses the EPM, A.R.S. 16-452(C), states that “A person who violates any rule adopted pursuant to this section is guilty of a class 2 misdemeanor.”
Busch’s team submitted public records requests to Maricopa County to investigate the 2020 and 2022 elections. Although the county turned over some of the data, there was a significant amount that it refused to or heavily redacted, which Busch is now fighting legally. One of the county’s excuses was it had misplaced the data.
Busch said she found election law violations in five categories. They were:
- adjudication of ballots, cast ballots that didn’t match;
- over 8,000 people who were unable to vote on Election Day;
- a backdoor portal to voter registration records that nonprofits were able to access; and
- around 300,000 ballots submitted to drop boxes that lacked a chain of custody
For adjudication, Busch said her team found that the rate went up sharply in the 2020 election and then the 2022 election. Normally, she said no more than four percent of ballots require adjudication, which means there was something incorrect with the ballot, such as an overvote or missing some information, so they go to a bipartisan board that reviews them. But in 2020, that percentage jumped up to 11.9 percent. In 2022, it increased to 14.36 percent.
She expressed her concern that Maricopa County redacted the Cast Vote Record (CVR) before providing it to her team, impeding the transparency of the election. She said the CVR provides the final breakdown of the ballots cast, broken down by the candidates and individual ballots.
Next, Busch discussed discrepancies between the number of ballots listed in the system log files and the number of ballots in the CVR. The system log files track every ballot fed into the tabulator, and can provide one of six error codes when they aren’t accepted, she said. There were 15 batches of ballots, around 10,000 total, that were logged but did not make it into the final CVR, she reported.
“We cannot confirm that 10,000 votes were even counted,” she said.
Busch then relayed that 64 percent of the 4,021 people waiting in lines of 85 or more people at the time the polls closed at 7 p.m. never got to vote. She discovered this discrepancy by speaking with the marshalls at the polling locations, who remembered the numbers in line at closing, and comparing it to information from the Arizona Attorney General’s investigation and the poll books. She said Maricopa County didn’t track that information since they only count voters after checking in.
Busch discussed how voter records were changed electronically by someone other than the voter, and she believes it was done by progressive nonprofit groups. She discovered that in August 2020, then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs implemented a new program that allowed nonprofits to access and change voter registration information online. She examined activity modifying voter registrations, and saw that it would spike massively in the middle of the night and on holidays — she said she believes it wasn’t county staff making the changes, but likely nonprofits.
One voter had 13 changes made to their file within a 60-day period. Busch said it was easy for the nonprofits to go in and modify the voter registrations; all they needed was the voter’s driver’s license number. She observed that the most incomplete voter registrations she found came from nonprofits. All of the nonprofits given access by the Secretary of State was far left and backed radical election initiatives, she said.
Some more issues Busch addressed included a Maricopa County whistleblower named Celia Nabor, who said she was pressured to approve ballots with bad signatures. When Busch tried to depose her, she was informed that Nabor was no longer an employee of the county.
Busch brought up testimony given by Maricopa County Elections co-Elections Director Rey Valenzuela at Kari Lake’s election contest trial. He said the last signature received with a ballot becomes the primary one associated with a voter’s registration. She compared the practice to fraudulent checks — where the bank accepts a check with a forged signature, and from then on, that signature becomes the customer’s signature of record to compare new check signatures to.
In her testimony, Honey discussed Maricopa County’s lack of chain of custody with around 300,000 ballots. She said the county “repeatedly misidentified the forms” for the chain of custody and wouldn’t produce some of them when their group submitted public records requests. She said they didn’t even use one of the first documents they are required to by the EPM nor delivery receipts. The ballots from drop boxes that were dropped off on Election Day only had estimates of their numbers, she said, another violation of the EPM.
The law was also violated by workers who opened the seals on boxes of ballots and failed to count them, Honey said. A whistleblower from Runbeck, the third-party ballot processing company used by the county, stated that there was no chain of custody procedures followed on election night. Honey said Maricopa County claimed they used another process to track ballots instead, but it was not authorized by law. There was no place on the chain of custody form they used to list the number of ballots, so it was omitted from those forms.
Finally, Honey told how Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer announced after Election Day that 275,000 early ballots were dropped off that day, but two days later he revised that number up to 292,000 with no explanation. She said he claimed later that he was just providing estimates, but she pointed out that the law requires him to provide the actual count.
Honey concluded her presentation by emphasizing the importance of the seriousness of not complying with the EPM, ironically citing a letter Hobbs sent to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich demanding a criminal investigation into Cochise County Supervisors who delayed the certification of the 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].
