re: WSJ--"Trump Loses Arizona--Again"

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Cyber Ninjas says errors are normal when using commercial data. Most of these voters barely moved: 15,035 stayed in Maricopa County, and another 1,718 went somewhere else in Arizona. Only 40% were Democrats and 33% Republicans. The audit also admits there are “ways that a voter could receive their ballot which in some cases would not violate the law.”

College students move often, but they could easily pick up ballots that were inadvertently sent home or to old roommates. What about people serving in the military, taking extended vacations, or working remotely? Address changes were probably noisier than usual last year, given how the pandemic scrambled life. The report offers no evidence that any of these people voted illegally.

The audit takes aim at other alleged discrepancies, but without providing conclusive explanations, much less proof of wrongdoing. The state’s official results, the report claims, show 3,432 more ballots than can be accounted for using the voter files. Yet in the middle of his presentation Friday, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, Doug Logan, said Maricopa County recently gave a benign explanation: Arizona has a separate protected voter list, which is used to shield the locations of judges, battered women, and so forth.

Another set of 9,041 voters, 34% Democrats to 30% Republicans, show up in the data as having returned multiple ballots. This “could be explained in any of the possible ways,” Cyber Ninjas speculates, ranging from clerical error to fraud. Or not. “The majority of these,” says a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Elections Department, “are voters that had questionable signatures that were cured or blank signatures that were eventually signed.” In other words: “This shows our Early Voting team was doing their job.”

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