What if the Unorthodox Arizona Audit Declares Trump Won?
That outcome is looking more and more likely.
Sitting in the press booth at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, several rows above where some two dozen tables of counters were retallying the 2020 presidential votes of the citizens of Maricopa County, Bennie Smith acknowledged something that has become readily apparent to most outside observers of the process that has come to be known as the “Arizona audit.”
“They’re not trying to capture an accurate count,” said Smith, a Democratic Tennessee election official who had traveled to Phoenix to advise the auditors. In fact, Smith said he expects the end result to be “wildly different from the count.”
Smith said he was advising the audit—a process specially ordered by the Arizona Senate and which began last month outside the county’s ordinary recount system—because he hopes to see a standardization of independent machine ballot audits of most U.S. elections. What’s going on in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, former home to the Phoenix Suns and commonly used these days for gun shows and high school graduations, is not that. Nor is it a hand recount done in accordance with the Arizona election procedures.
Here’s how Arizona recounts are supposed to normally work: Two counters, under the eye of a supervisor, tally ballots in batches of 10 at a time. Their results must agree, and any discrepancies in each batch must be resolved by a bipartisan board before they are added to the count. Here’s what Smith had been watching inside the audit: batches of 50 ballots, swinging around on a Lazy Susan, as three people speed-read votes in the presidential race and the U.S. Senate race, which were won by Democrats Joe Biden and Mark Kelly.
“Everybody’s got about three and a half seconds to watch two races,” Smith said. For many tables, it appeared to be less time than that. If he were on the floor trying to count ballots himself, Smith said, he believed he would be making mistakes under those conditions. “That table is rolling,” Smith says pointing at a particularly fast-counting group. “Me standing there for five hours, I would not say that it would be ideal.”
To the uninitiated observer, this might seem alarming. But Smith assured me it was nothing to worry about—because, he said, “they’re not recounting the election.”
What were the people busily counting election ballots doing, then? Over the course of three days in Phoenix, talking to participants and critics and watching the event unfold, I couldn’t get a coherent answer. The Arizona audit is a new kind of political ritual, whose purpose exists beyond reason or consensus or fact. More than six months after Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election was certified by Republican officials in Maricopa, Arizona’s largest and one of the largest in the country, this audit is what the Arizona Senate has decided is necessary to resolve continued accusations by the former president and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen.
Acceptance of error—of alternative facts, as it were—is built into the process: If two counters have the same total, but the third counter disagrees by one or two votes, then the two matching counts become the official tally, overruling the discrepancy. According to observers of the audit, this happens often.
Around the audit site, the political fault lines are multiplying—not merely between Trump supporters and Biden supporters, but between the local Republican officials, who are responsible for election results being verifiable and making sense, and the state Republicans, who are chasing a myth. The irregularities in the numbers are the least of it.
“They destroyed the election,” former County Recorder Adrian Fontes said of the Senate auditors. “And I think that they did it on purpose.”
The statement might sound like partisan hyperbole from a former elected official with an ax to grind. But in the past week, similarly damning calls were issued by every major Republican elected official in Maricopa County. In a meeting on Tuesday, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers said plainly, “It’s time to be done with this craziness,” as he and the county’s other top elected officials, who had previously tried to work with the Republican state senators, signed a letter calling for an end of the audit. On Thursday, the Democratic secretary of state said that Maricopa County could no longer safely use the voting equipment that had been handed over to the audit.
