The relatively high number of Republican voters who opted to support Democrat Joe Biden for president helped lead to Biden’s win in the crucial swing state of Arizona in 2020, according to a new voting analysis.
“Republicans didn’t vote for Donald Trump,” Benny White, a Republican with audit experience who was involved with the analysis, told The Epoch Times.
White, a former candidate for Pima County recorder, pored over publicly available materials such as the cast vote records for Maricopa and Pima counties. He was joined by two retired executives from The Clear Ballot Group, Larry Moore, a Democrat, and Tim Halvorsen, an independent.
On the other side, 38,851 Democrat voters supported eight or more Democrat candidates but chose not to vote for Biden. Approximately 21,673 of these voters supported Trump.
The results in Pima County were similar, with some 15,000 opting not to support Trump despite voting for many other Republicans in other races.
“The same phenomena of disaffected voters not voting for their party presidential candidate occurred on both the Republican side and the Democrat side but it was more of a problem for Trump on the Republican side, less of a problem for Biden on the Democrat side,” White told The Epoch Times.
“And it’s widespread through the two counties that I looked at the records for, Pima County and Maricopa County, so it’s not concentrated in any particular group of precincts or a legislative district or congressional district,” he added.
The Trump and Biden campaigns did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the Arizona Republican or Democratic parties.
“Just working with the cast vote record isn’t a problem but that’s not the end all be all of verifying an election. You want to verify the cast vote record eventually back to the actual ballots and that’s one of the things that we’re doing here, is we’re looking at the actual ballots,” said Bennett, a Republican who used to serve as Arizona’s secretary of state.
“And so we’re wanting to verify the cast vote record, just like they do. But we’re doing the complete forensic audit of actually getting back to the actual ballots.”
Biden beat Trump by under 11,000 votes out of over 3.4 million cast in Arizona, according to the certified results. In Maricopa County alone, Biden’s margin of victory was over 45,000.
Biden received Arizona’s 11 electoral votes. He also narrowly won other swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, helping him unseat Trump despite the president securing about 10 million more votes than in 2016.
White says he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, even though he called him “mentally unstable” on Facebook in 2016. White does not plan on voting for him again if he launches a third bid because he believes the former president bears responsibility for the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol after asking then-Vice President Mike Pence not to accept electoral votes from some states because of alleged constitutional violations.
White, who has been involved in recounts and audits in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Maryland, has repeatedly denigrated the auditors in Maricopa County, claiming what is taking place did not start at the right place.
“Elections need to be final when the official results are announced. If you have evidence of wrongdoing there is a legal process to follow to contest the election results. What is happening in Maricopa County is not following that course of action,” he wrote on Facebook.
His criticism has attracted pushback from Bryan Blehm, a lawyer for Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired by the Arizona Senate to lead the audit. Blehm initially posted a cordial invitation to visit the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where auditors are working, but after White declined and kept attacking the audit and the auditors, Blehm became increasingly frustrated.
“Benny has never even bothered to visit the audit. Benny thinks it is more important to rely on the information provided to him by the people we are auditing. Benny is a follower who accepts what is fed to him,” Blehm wrote last week on White’s Facebook page.
“You are famous Benny White. Fawned over by mainstream media for regurgitating the county’s numbers. Look behind the curtain Benny rather than making the curtain your focus,” he added in another post.
Blehm, who White says he has known since 1995, did not respond to a request for comment submitted to Cyber Ninjas. Cyber Ninjas also did not return an inquiry about Blehm’s remarks.
“That type of a comment is an assumption, at best,” Bennett said.
