Top election officials in Arizona’s largest county said that no evidence has been found of voter fraud, misconduct, or equipment malfunction and gave assurances the voting system is accurate and the election reliable.
Clint Hickman, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said in a Nov. 17 letter that “proper steps have been taken to ensure a full and accurate count of all votes,” including functionality and accuracy testing of tabulation equipment and a hand count audit of a representative sampling of votes that “yielded a 100 percent match to the results” produced by vote counting machines.
More than 2 million votes were cast in Maricopa County, and out of more than 167,000 ballots cast on Election Day, fewer than 200 ballots were found to have an over vote in the presidential race, he said.
“There is no evidence of fraud or misconduct or malfunction,” Hickman said. He also noted a lack of evidence of inaccuracy or malfunction in the Dominion Voting Systems tabulation equipment, which has been claimed by Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell as rigged to switch votes from President Donald Trump to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.
He said the Dominion equipment was vetted by a bipartisan certification committee ahead of a decision on its use, and that functionality and accuracy tests were carried out before the election.
“The Dominion tabulation equipment met mandatory requirements during logic and accuracy testing before the Presidential Preference Election, the Primary Election, and the General Election,” Hickman wrote. “After each of these 2020 elections, the hand count audit showed the machines generated an accurate count.”
The mandatory hand count audit, which is required by Arizona law and in which all three political parties took part, was carried out on the basis of Election Day ballots from 2 percent of vote centers and 1 percent of early ballots.
“This is a statistically significant sample of thousands of votes, which would have caught irregularities,” he wrote.
Hickman also said that election officials considered “many theories” about the election results, adding that “none of these theories have proven true or raised the possibility the outcome of the election would be different.”
President Donald Trump and his campaign have claimed widespread election fraud, filing a raft of legal challenges that are in various stages of settlement.
The claim made by Trump campaign lawyer Powell centers on the notion that elections software switched “millions of votes” to Biden from Trump. She said the president’s legal team has been receiving a deluge of evidence concerning voter fraud and other irregularities, telling Fox Business that she has enough proof to launch a widespread criminal investigation and that “we’re getting ready to overturn election results in multiple states.”
Dominion Voting Systems has denied several times to media outlets that its software and devices aren’t secure or that they were used to switch votes.
A national coalition that includes the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Association of State Election Directors said there’s a lack of evidence supporting the claim that voting software deleted or switched votes in the election.
Hickman, in his letter, said that “the evidence overwhelmingly shows the system used in Maricopa County is accurate and provided voters with a reliable election,” adding, “no matter how you voted, this election was administered with integrity, transparency, and in accordance with state laws.”
In Arizona, an automatic recount is triggered if the margin is within 0.1 percent or 200 votes, whichever is less. State law doesn’t allow recounts to be requested. The difference between the two candidates is 0.3 percentage point, according to pre-certification tallies.
