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Trump supporters outside the Phoenix arena where the audit took place in May.Adriana Zehbrauskas
New blow to "the big lie"
,
the idea that Joe Biden won by electoral fraud.
The audit ordered by the Arizona Senate, with a Republican majority, has not yielded the conclusions that supporters of former President Donald Trump expected.
A draft of the document, to which
The New York Times
has had access
, confirms the results of the November 2020 elections in this state, which passed to the Democratic side for the first time since 1996. There is no trace of fraud after the review of the 2.1 million votes of Maricopa County.
The company in charge of the review, called Cyber Ninjas and without previous experience in electoral counting, found 99 new votes in favor of Biden and 261 less for Trump, who still does not recognize the victory of the current president of the United States.
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Jack Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors for Maricopa County, in which the city of Phoenix is located, has said via social media that a very deep look at the Cyber Ninjas findings is not necessary to confirm something that "It was already known." "Candidates certified by the board, the governor, the Secretary of State and the local attorney won," the official said in a statement posted on Twitter. "This means that [...] the result reflects the will of the voters," he continues. The report was sent to local Arizona politicians on Thursday. Its final version will be released this Friday.
The audit findings were both expected and feared. They arrived several months late. The calendar itself proposed by Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity company, reported that the vote count was expected by the end of June. The exercise was carried out behind closed doors, in a coliseum in honor of the war veterans, and it was carried out by forbidding almost all journalists to verify the process. Many were concerned about the transparency of the review at the hands of a company owned by Doug Logan, a deeply religious man from rural Florida and father of 11 children, who had posted messages on social media before beginning to review the votes. about the alleged electoral fraud.
Alerts soared as the press began tracking who was paying the bill. In August, journalist Jane Meyer revealed in
The New Yorker
a large network of groups linked to the radical right that were paying the expenses of Cyber Ninjas. The most important is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an organization valued at $ 850 million that has been financing litigation against electoral laws that disadvantage the Republican party for almost a decade. The cost of the audit in Arizona is estimated to be $ 6 million to $ 7 million, according to state media.
Biden won Arizona with 49.36% of the vote.
Trump got 49.06%.
The difference between the two was only 10,457 votes.
The Democrat's victory unleashed the ire of Trump, who called on conservative television networks on election night to retract the forecast.
Arizona had been a solid conservative stronghold for decades, the last Democrat to win it was Bill Clinton.
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Trump began a legal offensive through his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, which forced local authorities, emanating from the Republican party itself, to make several revisions to the elections. They all came to the same conclusion, which Cyber Ninjas has now reached. The former president, and therefore many of his followers, were convinced that the audit was going to agree with him. "I predict it will yield very surprising results!" Said the president in May. His voters flocked to the Phoenix Coliseum for months as if it were a pilgrimage site, convinced that a token would fall there causing a domino effect that would reverse the results in Michigan and Wisconsin and, with them, Trump's return to the White House.This theory of the great electoral fraud promoted by Trumpist sectors was described as "the great lie."
The chairman of the board of supervisors, Sellers, knows that the conclusions do not mean the end of the story. “I suspect that we will be charged again with not cooperating, with failing to give information to the Senate contractor [Cyber Ninjas]. How could we cooperate with an investigation by people who have no idea how an election is organized? Much less, one in the second largest electoral district in the United States, ”says the official. Local Republican senators, already targeting next year's midterm elections, still want to examine Maricopa County servers because they suspect they may have been tampered with. The authorities in charge of organizing the vote, however, have explained that they have no connection with the electoral machinery.
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