The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors may hold another election audit, their latest effort to dispel doubts about the 2020 election.
The board’s Wednesday agenda includes a proposal to hire an independent investigator to audit the Dominion Voting Systems equipment and software used to count votes in November.
Such an audit would fulfill a longstanding promise by the board. Supervisors have defended the election's integrity but said another audit — on top of a mandatory hand count audit of votes that occurred shortly after Nov. 3 — may help alleviate persistent concerns that the election was tainted.
Board Chairman Jack Sellers said that while he’s confident in the election, not everyone is.
“This is a problem,” Sellers said in a statement.
“Some will never be satisfied, but this vote is not about them,” he added. “The best we can do, in my opinion, is to err on the side of transparency, to embrace the opportunity to once again show our work, and to put facts in their proper place at the center of public discourse instead of the periphery.”
The board has put off such an audit until now, saying their hands were tied while Maricopa County was the subject of repeated, failed lawsuits challenging the election results.
Supervisors are also tied up in negotiations with the state Senate, which issued subpoenas of the county in December demanding access to a host of voting records and demanding a subpoena of leased Dominion Voting Systems equipment.
The county has turned over some, but not all records, demanded by Senate Republicans.
Supervisor Bill Gates acknowledged an audit ordered by the board may have no bearing on those continued negotiations, but he’s holding out hope.
“My hope is that once the Senate has taken a look at all the documents we've already turned over, and they see the results of these audits, that should be the end of it, I would think,” Gates said. “But if they have additional questions, we'd like to hear them.”
For those unhappy with the election results, Gates said the audit the board is considering won’t change the outcome. This would be an audit of the election system and process only.
“It's not a full recount. That is something that is provided for in a very specific way under Arizona law. And those numbers and those amounts were not triggered in this case,” Gates said. “But what we're doing is we're addressing the general concerns that might be out there with respect to the voting equipment that we've used, that we use for the November 2020 election.”
Maricopa County Supervisor Supervisor Steve Chucri joined The Show to talk more about the county's action.
