Maricopa County Republican Party chair Rae Chornenky has resigned following reports she failed to attend a pre-election accuracy check of election equipment.
“JUST IN #12News has learned that Maricopa County Republican Party chair Rae Chornenky has stepped down, apparently after GOP lawmaker learned that county party rep didn’t attend pre-election accuracy check of election equipment last month,” 12 News/KPNX TV’s Brahm Resnik reported this week:
On Monday, Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend (R) called for Chornenky’s resignation upon hearing the news.
“I just found our [sic] that Maricopa County GOP Chairman Rae Chornenky failed to show up to certify the Dominion / Machines. For this reason, I call for her resignation, along with her 1st Vice Chair,” she said:
Townsend has since thanked Chornenky for “doing the right thing” by stepping down:
The news comes as suspicions mount over the accuracy of Dominion Voting Systems, software used in several key battleground states. Last week, reports arose that a “glitch” in the system changed 6,000 ballots meant for Republicans to go to Democrats in one Michigan county, though the Michigan Secretary of State’s office later attributed the mistake to human error, “as the operator of the system did not update the software that’s needed to collect voting data and report results.” There were also reports of a “glitch” in Georgia’s Gwinnett County, which also uses Dominion Voting Systems.
Researchers have questioned the reliability of the new voting machines:
“Some of the most popular ballot-marking machines, made by Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye cannot decipher,” according to a February report by Associated Press.
But according to researchers, that’s a problem, as “voters could end up with printouts that accurately spell out the names of the candidates they picked, but, because of a hack, the bar codes do not reflect those choices.”
“Because the bar codes are what’s tabulated, voters would never know that their ballots benefited another candidate,” the report adds.
Trump trailed Biden in Arizona by 11,635 votes as of Wednesday afternoon. The president would need nearly three-fourths of remaining ballots to take the lead, according to the Arizona Republic. Trump has expressed confidence that he will “easily” win the state “if we can audit the total votes cast”:
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), who has a lengthy history of espousing anti-Trump sentiments, has rejected a request for an “independent analysis” of voting data in the state.
Maricopa County had 6,715 outstanding ballots as of Wednesday evening.
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