A draft report on a much-ridiculed review of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s largest county has been delayed by a Covid-19 outbreak on the team preparing the analysis, the Republican president of the Arizona State Senate said on Monday.
The president, Senator Karen Fann, said in a statement that three people on the five-member team were “quite sick,” including Doug Logan, the chief executive of the Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, that is in charge of the review.
A portion of the draft was still set to be delivered to Ms. Fann on Monday, but the remainder will await the recovery of the three team members. Lawyers for the State Senate will begin reviewing the partial draft on Wednesday, Ms. Fann said, and more meetings will be required before the findings of the review are made public.
The statement offered no hint of the contents of the partial draft. Mr. Logan and others involved in the review have previously claimed to have found irregularities in the official results of the November balloting, only to see those allegations debunked by election officials.
Mr. Logan’s company began reviewing 2.1 million ballots and election equipment from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, in April on orders of the Republican majority in the State Senate. Ms. Fann has said that the review was conducted to address claims of voter fraud by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, though no evidence of widespread fraud exists. She has also said that President Biden’s narrow victories in both the county and the state would remain official regardless of the findings.
Ms. Fann and other supporters of the review have argued that it was thorough and nonpartisan. But a range of election experts and the Republican-led leadership of Maricopa County have denounced the exercise from the beginning, citing haphazard rules for handling and counting ballots as well as lax security.
Supporters’ claims of an impartial review have been broadly dismissed. Mr. Logan spread conspiracy theories of a rigged election in Arizona on Twitter last year; his firm recruited volunteer workers for the review through Republican organizations; and virtually the entire cost of the exercise has been shouldered by conservative groups supporting Mr. Trump.
On Monday, Ms. Fann said the draft report had been further delayed because images of mail-ballot envelopes that had been demanded from Maricopa County election officials were delivered only on Thursday. A final report will be released, she said, only after a final meeting “to continue checking for accuracy, clarity and proof of documentation of findings.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
