Arizona Audit Winding Down: Paper Examination Phase Expected to End Saturday

The Arizona state Senate audit of the 2020 Maricopa County election results that began on April 23 is winding down.

“At our current rate of examining over 100k ballots per day, we will complete the paper examination phase of the audit by Saturday, June 26,” the official Twitter account of the Arizona audit tweeted last week.

“The final report for the 2020 election audit taking place in Arizona’s largest county is not expected to be out until August, an official involved with the work says,” the Epoch Times reported on Friday.

Legislators from several other key 2020 battleground states who have visited the audit — Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan — have expressed an interest in conducting similar audits of the 2020 election results of their states. It is unclear if any of those expressions of interest will result in additional audits in those states.

Establishment media outlets as well as Democratic politicians around the country have continued their non-stop attacks on the audit, which began when the notion of such an audit was first floated in December.

Here is a sampling of stories about the Arizona state Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results published in establishment media outlets over the past 48 hours:

• MSNBC: How Arizona’s 2002 election ‘audit’ went from comedy to tragedy
• ABC: Arizona’s ‘audit’ becomes far right campaign stop, fuels conspiracy that election can be overturned
• CNN: Growing list of Arizona Republicans have had enough amid ‘audit’
• CBS: Maricopa County’s partisan audit in final stages

In a speech delivered this month, United States Attorney General Merrick Garland, “said the [D]epartment [of Justice] would scrutinize ‘post-election audits to ensure they abide by federal statutory requirements to protect election records and avoid the intimidation of voters,’ a clear reference to a Republican-backed audit in Arizona,” NBC News reported.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich punched back last week, AZCentral.com reported:

Brnovich, a Republican who is running for the U.S. Senate, announced Tuesday via his campaign that he had sent a letter to Garland on Monday. That letter accused Garland, the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, of showing “an alarming disdain for state sovereignty.”

Brnovich’s letter escalates a clash with the Democratic Biden administration. It also comes after former President Donald Trump has publicly taken Brnovich to task for not being more supportive of the review of 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots by a private company at the request of the Arizona Senate. . .

Brnovich previously has noted the Senate’s independent authority to conduct the review, but otherwise left the matter to the state Senate and those tasked with inspecting the ballots.

As Breitbart News reported last month, the Arizona state Senate audit has been subject to a number of charges and counter-charges. One set of attacks has come from the Republican majority Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, while another has come from Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who recently announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor.

About two-thirds of the three million votes cast in the 2020 November election in Arizona were cast in Maricopa County. Joe Biden was certified the winner of the state’s 11 Electoral College votes by a margin of less than 11,000. Biden’s margin in Maricopa County was about 45,000.

Audit officials have kept a tight lid on the process, and no one really knows what the findings of the final audit report will be when it is made public as is currently anticipated sometime in August.