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Sellers: Senate audit should preserve evidence

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It is clear the Arizona Senate and its contractors do not intend to retract false allegations defaming Maricopa County and its employees.

For that reason, Maricopa County is formally requesting Senate President Fann, Sen. Petersen, Senate liaison Ken Bennett, and contractors involved in the “audit” preserve documents and evidence as they may be subject to future legal claims.

It is unfortunate we have reached this point, especially considering the “audit” was never authorized by a full Senate vote. Instead, two Senators out of a total of 30 used subpoenas to obtain private ballots, voter information, and taxpayer-funded tabulation machines, then turned all that material over to biased, out-of-state groups with little to no election auditing experience.

The conclusions already drawn by these contractors and shared prior to the completion of the audit clearly intend to disparage the county and call into question the integrity of the 2020 elections.

Last week, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, County Recorder, and other county elected leaders sent a 13-page letter to the Arizona Senate President providing answers to what she characterized as “three serious issues” her contractors allegedly uncovered about our vote tabulation machines and election processes.

As the letter states, their “issues” demonstrate a lack of understanding of Arizona election law and best practices for running elections.

The most serious claim is that elections officials deleted a database folder before providing it to the Cyber Ninjas. This is not true. We demanded a retraction. But Senate President Fann’s letter and tweet from the official Senate audit Twitter account continues to spread the false allegation even after her own contractor admitted he found the files on the copy he made of the server.

The claim that our employees deleted election files and destroyed evidence is outrageous and baseless. I again demand an immediate retraction of any public statements made to the news media and or posted to Twitter.

Since this seems unlikely to happen, I will repeat what I said at the press conference on Monday: finish your report and be prepared to defend it and your actions related to this “audit” in court.

Jack Sellers is chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and represents county District 1.

election, audit