Mere days away from the completion of the historic Arizona Maricopa Election Audit, which is set to conclude by the end of June, now seems like a good time to acknowledge the vast and laudable efforts of so many patriotic Americans determined not only to expose election fraud but to correct it.
“[The Arizona audit] aims to confirm in the minds of Arizonians and all those here in Maricopa County that their elections have integrity, and that if we don’t have that we will lose our country,” said Ken Bennett, former Arizona secretary of state and audit spokesman and liaison to the state Senate, in a phone interview with The New American. “We cannot lurch every four years from one party to the next party, as each one says the election is stolen. The point of the audit is to save our country.”
While election fraud has long been a blight on American politics, perhaps reaching its height in 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s mob-enabled defeat of Richard Nixon, finally Americans are not just taking notice, they are taking action. And though the Maricopa audit results cannot constitutionally change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, those determined to probe what really happened on that historic night of November 3, possess a spirit of dedication and persistence for which all Americans should be thankful.
From the Audit Floor
One couple with whom I spoke is offering significant time and energy to the election-integrity cause. For the past several weeks, Bill and Barbara Blewster have traveled to the audit’s venue, the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where they have joined thousands of other volunteers hand-counting and observing roughly 2.1 million ballots cast in the state’s largest county during the 2020 presidential and U.S. Senate elections.
Residents of Mesa, Arizona, the Blewsters told The New American that from their experience the audit has been run remarkably well and that the counting process was extremely efficient and highly secure. They noted how volunteer counters were required to be registered voters of Maricopa County and were prohibited from bringing any personal items on to the counting floor — that includes no cell phones or other electronic devices. They said that at any given time, if any one of the three counters at their table were to leave, they were required to “sign out” and would be replaced by another counter until they returned.
The Blewsters’ picture starkly contrasts the accusations of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat running for governor in 2022, as well as descriptions by the legacy media decrying the Republican-led audit as mismanaged and fraught with security concerns.
The Battle Is On
In a scathing Washington Post op-ed, Hobbs wrote that “Democracy is under siege in Arizona. As part of the ‘big lie’ that Republicans have been pushing about electoral fraud, they’re conducting an ‘audit’ in our largest county, Maricopa, to dig up nonexistent evidence.” Continued Hobbs, “It’s an absurd spectacle. The proliferation of conspiracy theories is staggering: ballots are being disqualified because of Sharpies; ballots were shipped in from China; ballots were burned in a chicken-farm fire.”
Conversely, in a Tuesday interview with the Gateway Pundit’s Jim and Joe Hoft, Dr. Peter Navarro, former assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy during the Trump administration and author of the detailed three-part Navarro Report, documenting the irregularities found in the 2020 election, asserted:
Democrats threw 1,000 lawyers into Arizona…. They are doing everything they can to disrupt the process…. This is the battle of our lives, gentlemen. This is the battle of our lives. If this election result stands and we don’t get to the bottom of what actually happened, this will be the end of American democracy as we know it.
Just last week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland suggested more oversight of the audit was needed, claiming the review was “based on disinformation.” Garland further promised that the Department of Justice would “apply scrutiny to post-election audits to ensure they abide by federal statutory rights and requirements to protect election records and avoid intimidation of voters.”
Garland was slammed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who wrote a caustic letter to the U.S. attorney general, effectively telling him to stay out of the state’s way. In the letter, Brnovich accused Garland of “display[ing] an alarming disdain for state sovereignty as defined under the 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution and the election provisions in Articles I and II.” He sharply concluded by stating that “Arizona will not sit back and let the Biden administration abuse its authority, refuse to uphold laws, or attempt to commandeer state’s sovereignty.”
Audit spokesman Bennett affirmed that “the allegations of those opposing the audit, in my opinion, are completely unfounded…. Ever since the ballots were delivered on April 22, they have been under 24-hour locked security, in cages, and the only people who have access to those cages are those who have to go in there to do their job. There is very tight security. You don’t get in the building unless you’re on a list — there’s no risk to the ballots.” He further stated that “all counters are required to pass a background check and all volunteers are vetted.”
The Blewsters, who signed a confidentiality agreement that prohibits them from discussing the audit results, described an “exciting” atmosphere on the audit floor. Barbara Blewster commented that “there’s a spirit there of people who love this country. They are overall friendly and good people.”
Barbara’s statement appears aligned with comments from Bennett, who reported that while the audit team led by the Florida-based firm Cyber Ninjas, “is not releasing any interim or partial findings at this time. We have noted some minor things that were cited at the Senate hearing a month ago, such as certain batches of ballots having a variance, in comparison to the batch of ballots the county was using. But discrepancies between ballot counts within each batch we will not know until we have added up all of the ballot batches.”
Reportedly, all the regular ballots cast in the county have been recorded, with only Braille, overseas military, and duplicated ballots left to tally.
To date, Republican lawmakers from 13 states — among them Washington, Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan — have toured Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum to get a sense of how they might conduct similar audits in their own jurisdictions.
Responding to the news, Arizona GOP chairwoman Dr. Kelli Ward tweeted that “#AmericasAudit is soon to be #AmericasAudits! Arizona is leading the way to #ElectionIntegrity in America.”
America Is Watching
Reinforcing the idea that the audit is strictly regulated and tightly monitored, Bennett outlined to The New American the various pieces of the forensic audit, which include:
• Paper evaluation: Verifying the authenticity of the paper ballots. Auditors consider the thickness and folds of the paper. Pictures are taken of the front and back of the ballots. They confirm whether the oval has been filled in with a hand-held device, checking for alignment marks that should align on both sides of the ballot.
• Machine evaluation: Auditors inspect all the data generated in the election by the county and the contractor Dominion, including hard drives and servers. “We also intend to check Internet logs and activities, but the county hasn’t allowed us access to do that, which is unfortunate,” said Bennett.
• Registration anomalies: E.g., did 52 people vote from a vacant lot, or from an unregistered address.
• Signature verification: an examination of envelope signatures of mail-in ballots, as required by state law.
• Independent tabulation of ballot images: this includes the analysis of images Dominion used during the election to verify that there was nothing amiss in their ballot tabulation process.
The process of the audit findings, from the verification of signatures and the checking of the equipment, will continue for several weeks in July, said Bennett. “And then it will take another several weeks to get those final reports, which will go to the Senate sometime in August.”
For millions of Americans, the 2020 presidential election cannot be accepted as legitimate. And while Nixon’s controversy was graciously set aside, Donald Trump has refused to accept that the election was “free and fair.” Today, it is apparent that the MAGA spirit has created an intense desire in Americans for legitimacy to be applied to all future elections, and in this, they are determined to prevail.
