Arizona Attorney General Debunks Trump Supporters’ Election Fraud Claims

Accusations that hundreds of ballots ended up forged in Arizona in 2020 in the identify of useless voters are unfounded, the state’s Republican lawyer typical reported on Monday in a sharply worded letter to the president of the Arizona Senate, who has innovative bogus claims of voter fraud.

The lawyer standard, Mark Brnovich, wrote in his letter to Senator Karen Fann that his office’s Election Integrity Device had spent “hundreds of hours” investigating 282 allegations submitted by Ms. Fann, as effectively as additional than 6,000 allegations from 4 other stories. Some of them “were so absurd,” he wrote, that “the names and beginning dates did not even match the deceased, and others included dates of demise soon after the election.”

The promises in Ms. Fann’s grievance stemmed from a heavily criticized audit of the 2020 election that the company Cyber Ninjas conducted previous yr in Arizona’s most significant county, Maricopa. That audit uncovered no evidence for former President Donald J. Trump’s statements that the election experienced been stolen from him in reality, it counted somewhat much less votes for Mr. Trump and additional for Joseph R. Biden Jr. than in the official tally. A subsequent report from election gurus accused Cyber Ninjas of building up its figures completely.

However, Ms. Fann despatched the accusations of dead voters to Mr. Brnovich’s office in a September 2021 complaint.

“Our brokers investigated all persons that Cyber Ninjas reported as useless, and numerous had been very shocked to study they have been allegedly deceased,” Mr. Brnovich wrote in his letter. His business office concluded, he wrote, that “only a single of the 282 men and women on the list was deceased at the time of the election.”

Mr. Biden received Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes.

In a assertion on Monday night, Ms. Fann thanked Mr. Brnovich for his “tireless work” in “answering some rough questions from voters and lawmakers who had grave concerns in excess of how the 2020 basic election was performed in Arizona.”

“They questioned us to do the tricky get the job done of fact locating, and we are offering the details,” she stated, calling the investigation “critical to restoring the diminished self-confidence our constituents expressed pursuing the past election” and praising “the amplified voter integrity steps place in put just after the audit revealed weaknesses in our election procedures,” even though the audit did not reveal weaknesses in Arizona’s election procedures.

Spencer Scharff, an election law firm in Arizona and a former voter defense director for the Arizona Democratic Bash, said that while there was benefit to a general public assertion from a Republican formal that the allegations ended up unfounded, it would not undo the destruction finished by the initial lies, and by the willingness of so several elected Republicans to entertain and encourage them.

“The issue that I think is most regrettable is that it comes lengthy soon after these allegations were being built, and they weren’t clearly refuted by people who experienced the means to refute them instantly,” Mr. Scharff explained, noting that, by distinction, officials in Maricopa County debunked several of Cyber Ninjas’ promises months back.

Mr. Brnovich sent the letter just one day before Arizonans go to the polls for another election — one in which he himself is running. He is a applicant in the Republican Senate major, the winner of which will challenge Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, in November. The front-runner in general public polling is Blake Masters, a enterprise capitalist who has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and has promoted the former president’s untrue statements of election fraud.

Mr. Brnovich has sought to walk a high-quality line on Mr. Trump’s lies — refusing to get in touch with for overturning the 2020 election final results, but almost never explicitly rejecting the claims. He publicly defended Arizona’s vote rely soon after the election, and Mr. Trump blasted him in June and endorsed Mr. Masters rather. But he has also proposed that 2020 revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral procedure, and explained cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in April, “I think we all know what took place in 2020.”