Ballots counted despite being late.
QUICK FACTS:
- Details surrounding the 2020 election results are being reviewed as the 2022 midterms approach and records in Maricopa County, Arizona indicate thousands of ballots were erroneously counted.
- Newly discovered records from the last general election show that more than 20,000 ballots were transported from the U.S. Postal Service after Election Day, but Maricopa County only rejected 934 of them, according to The Epoch Times.
- The rejections were found in the “Early Voting Rejections Summary” document, which indicated that more than 19,000 late, invalid ballots should have been rejected but were allowed in the final count.
- Documentation obtained by a group of citizen volunteers with a background in data research and investigation, Verity Vote, released a report indicating that while it’s impossible to know if the results would have been different, it seems clear the ballots were invalid.
INVESTIGATION INTO HOW THE BALLOTS WERE MOVED:
- The report detailed how ballots were moved through Maricopa County, including the use of mail trucks’ receipts of deliveries.
- Verity Vote noted in their document collection that the receipts from Nov. 4, 2020, which were the day after the election, were missing and requested that Maricopa County provide the Receipt of Delivery for that day. “After numerous delays, multiple follow-up emails, and phone calls, county employees informed Verity Vote that the records were with legal counsel pending review,” the report says. “It took nearly seven months to get the documents.”
- Eventually, information was received by the organization, which discovered that the ballots arrived at “9:30” on “11-4-20″ but were not listed in the “lates” row as they should have been.
- County Recorder Stephen Richer responded to Verity Vote’s findings, saying, “This document does not represent the complete universe of Maricopa County inbound receipt delivery forms from Nov. 4, 2020. We cannot be certain, but we believe that the remainder of these forms were transferred to the treasurer’s office to be stored and sealed with ballots. If so, it indicates there are more mailed ballots that were not counted in the Early Voting Rejections Summary, and presumably would have been counted in the results.”
BACKGROUND:
- The Arizona GOP are showing concern about potential election fraud, as State Senate Republicans are conducting hearings into the potentially illegal use of drop boxes during the last election.
- While Republicans such as Sen. Kelly Townsend (R-Apache) have castigated the state legislature’s failure to deal with the issue of potentially illegal ballots in the swing state as “unacceptable,” liberals in the news media have called claims of election fraud “conspiracy theories.”
