Allegations that hundreds of votes were cast in the name of dead voters in Arizona in 2020 are groundless, the state’s Republican attorney general said in a sharply worded letter to the Arizona Senate president, who has put forward false claims of voter fraud. brought.
Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote in his letter to Senator Karen Fann that his office’s electoral integrity unit had spent “hundreds of hours” investigating 282 allegations filed by Ms. Fann, as well as more than 6,000 allegations from four others. reports. Some of them “were so absurd,” he wrote, that “the names and dates of birth didn’t even match the deceased, and others contained death dates after the election.”
The allegations in Ms. Fann’s complaint stemmed from a heavily criticized audit of the 2020 election that the Cyber Ninja company conducted last year in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa. That audit found no evidence for former President Donald J. Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him; in fact, it counted slightly fewer votes for Mr. Trump and more for Joseph R. Biden Jr. than in the official count. A subsequent report from election experts accused Cyber Ninjas of making up its numbers altogether.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Fann sent the allegations of dead voters to Mr Brnovich’s office in a September 2021 complaint.
“Our agents investigated all individuals who reported Cyber Ninjas as dead, and many were very surprised to learn that they were reportedly dead,” Mr. Brnovich wrote in his letter. His office concluded, he wrote, that “only one of the 282 persons on the list had died at the time of the election.”
Mr. Biden won Arizona by just over 10,000 votes.
In a statement Monday night, Ms. Fann thanked Mr. Brnovich for his “tiring work” in “answering some difficult questions from voters and lawmakers who were deeply concerned about the way the 2020 Arizona general election was being held.”
“They asked us to do the hard work of fact-finding, and we’re delivering the facts,” she said, calling the investigation “critical of restoring the diminished confidence expressed by our voters after the last election” and praising “Introduced increased voter integrity measures after the audit revealed weaknesses in our electoral processes,” although the audit revealed no weaknesses in Arizona’s electoral processes.
Spencer Scharff, an Arizona election attorney and former executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party, said that while a public statement from a Republican official was valuable that the allegations were baseless, it would not undo the damage done by the original party. lies, and by the willingness of so many elected Republicans to entertain and promote them.
“What I find most unfortunate is that it comes long after these allegations were made and they were not clearly refuted by individuals who had the opportunity to rebut them immediately,” said Mr Scharff, noting that, by contrast, officials in Maricopa County debunked many of Cyber Ninja’s claims months ago.
mr. Brnovich sent the letter a day before the Arizonans go to the polls for another election — one in which he himself is running. He is a candidate in the Republican Senate primary, whose winner will face Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat in November. Leading the way in public polls is Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who has Mr Trump’s backing and has promoted the former president’s false claims of voter fraud.
Mr. Brnovich has sought to circumvent Mr. Trump’s lies — he declined to call for the 2020 election results to be reversed, but rarely explicitly rejected the claims. Shortly after the election, he publicly defended the vote count in Arizona, and Mr. Trump taunted him in June, supporting Mr. Masters instead. But he has also suggested that 2020 has revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system, cryptically saying on former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in April: “I think we all know what’s going to happen in 2020.” has happened.”