Maricopa County Officials Refuse to Meet with Arizona State Senate to Resolve Election Audit Issues

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors refused an invitation to meet with the Arizona State Senate to discuss how to resolve issues surrounding a State Senate authorized audit of the November 3, 2020 election results in Maricopa County in a sharply worded letter sent on Monday.

“We will not attend your meeting on May 18, 2021,” the supervisors wrote.

“In your letter, you invite us to attend a meeting at the Arizona State Capitol on Tuesday, May 18, 2021, at 1:00 p.m., and you request that we bring Election Department officials who would have knowledge of our elections procedures,” they continued.

“We will not be attending. We will not be responding to any additional inquiries from your ‘auditors.’ Their failure to understand basic election processes is an indication you didn’t get the best people to perform in your political theatre.”

“We have wasted enough County resources. People’s tax dollars are real, your ‘auditors’ are not,” the supervisors asserted in the letter.

As Breitbart News reported last week:

The president of the Arizona State Senate asked the chairman of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors in a letter on Tuesday to address “three serious issues that have arisen in the course of the Senate’s ongoing audit of the returns of the November 3, 2020 general election in Maricopa County.”

Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann identified those three issues in her letter to Maricopa County Supervisors Board Chairman Jack Sellers as: (1) ongoing non-compliance with legislative subpoenas, (2) chain of custody and ballot organization anomalies, and (3) deleted data bases …

Fann closed by inviting Board Chair Sellers and appropriate Maricopa County employees to meet with her personally at a hearing room in the Arizona State Capital on Tuesday, May 18 to address these three serious issues.

Four of the five members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors were elected as Republicans. One was elected as a Democrat. Republicans also have a narrow 16 to 14 majority over Democrats in the Arizona State Senate.

In Monday’s letter to Fann, the five board members began:

We write in response to your May 12, 2021 letter. We also write in response to the May 12th social media post from the Twitter account, run by you or your designee/s, which accused Maricopa County of “deleting a directory full of databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit,” and went on to accuse the County of “spoliation of evidence.”

“These accusations are false, defamatory, and beneath the dignity of the Senate. They are an insult to the dedicated public servants in the Maricopa County Elections Department and Office of the Recorder, who work incredibly long hours conducting the County’s elections with integrity and honor,” they continued.

The supervisors then made four specific assertions:

1. Your accusation, that Maricopa County deleted data, is false.

2. Your various questions about our election procedures reveal a serious lack of understanding of election law, as well as the best practices utilized by Maricopa County and other jurisdictions for the conduct of elections.

3. We cannot produce what we do not possess; and, we do not possess additional passwords.

4. We will not provide your “auditors” access to the County’s routers because doing so would compromise the security of the County’s network, which in turn could compromise the security of sensitive, protected and critical data.

The supervisors closed by claiming “your [the Arizona State Senate] ‘audit’ is harming all of us, and we ask you to end it.”

Finally, we express our united view that your “audit”, no matter what your intentions were in the beginning, has become a spectacle that is harming all of us. Our state has become a laughingstock. Worse, this “audit” is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.

You are using purple lights and spinning tables. You are hunting for bamboo. These are not things that serious auditors of elections do.

You are photographing ballots contrary to the laws that the Senate helped enact, and you are sending those images to unidentified places and people. You have repeatedly lost control of your twitter account, which has tweeted things that appear to be the rantings of a petulant child—not the serious statements of a serious audit.

None of this is inspiring confidence. None of this will cause our citizens to trust elections. In fact, it is having the opposite result. You certainly must recognize that things are not going well at the Coliseum. You also must know that the County’s election was free and fair, and that our Elections Department did an outstanding job conducting it.

Unfortunately, this has become a partisan issue, and it should not be one. It is time to make a choice to defend the Constitution and the Republic. As County elected officials, we come from different political parties, but we stand united together to defend the Constitution and the Republic in our opposition
to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for the truth. The November 3, 2020 general election was free and fair and conducted by the Elections Department with integrity and honor.

Regardless of your intentions when you decided to subpoena our equipment and ballots, this cannot really be what you envisioned. You, Senate President Fann, are the only one with the power to immediately end it. We implore you to recognize the obvious truth: your “auditors” are in way over their heads. They do not have the experience necessary to conduct an audit of an election. They do not know the laws, nor the procedures, nor the best practices. It is inevitable that they will arrive at questionable conclusions.

“It is time to end this. For the good of the Senate, for the good of the Country and for the good of the Democratic institutions that define us as Americans,” the Maricopa Board of Supervisors concluded.

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