Anyone surprised by this? Anyone?Speaking before several thousand supporters at a “Rally to Protect Our Elections” in downtown Phoenix, former President Donald Trump recited a litany of alleged findings from the Arizona Senate’s self-styled election audit, including a debunked claim that 74,000 mail-in ballots were counted despite no record of them being sent to voters.
“There’s no record of them being sent, but they were counted. So, nobody knows where the hell are they?” Trump told the crowd at Arizona Federal Theatre on July 24.
The former president didn’t realize it, but Trump personally found a voter who had cast one of those ballots. Later in his speech, he asked each of the Republican gubernatorial candidates who had spoken earlier in the day to stand up and be recognized. Among those candidates was state Treasurer Kimberly Yee, who was one of the 74,000 voters.
She was, in fact, very real, and had cast a perfectly legal ballot. According to Maricopa County’s files, Yee cast her ballot in-person at an early voting center on Oct. 28.
Logan, who noted that the county’s refusal to cooperate with the audit made his job more difficult, said during testimony in the Arizona Senate on July 15 that he didn’t know whether those ballots were legitimate. He recommended that the audit team resolve the issue by reviving a previously aborted plan to knock on voters’ doors to confirm that they actually cast ballots in the election, a plan that the U.S. Department of Justice said could violate voters’ constitutional rights.
What Logan didn’t mention during his public briefing to Senate President Karen Fann and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen was that he had records from Maricopa County election officials showing that almost every one of those voters had legally cast a legitimate ballot at an in-person early voting center.
And he’d had the records for months.
The county’s master file, known as the “voted list,” shows each person who cast a ballot in the election — and a letter code indicating whether they voted on Election Day, by mail or at an in-person early voting center. The reason there was no record of mail-in ballots being sent to them was because, like Yee, they voted early at an in-person voting center during the last 10 days before the election.
ABC15 and the Arizona Mirror examined the same records that Logan has, and found 74,241 people who are listed as voting by early ballot but aren’t on the EV32 reports. Of those voters, 74,238 appear in the master file of general election voters. More than 99.4% of those people — 73,819, to be exact — voted in-person at early voting centers.
That means Logan, who is in charge of a team tasked with determining whether there were problems with the 2020 general election in Maricopa County, either didn’t take the basic step of checking the names against the master list of voters or knowingly told Fann and Petersen — and, by extension, the world — something that was untrue.
Had Logan checked the voted file, he would have found that nearly every one of those 74,000 names was listed as having cast an in-person early ballot. Instead, he made a false claim that quickly gained traction among supporters of the “stop the steal” movement that believes the election was rigged against Trump. Several Republican lawmakers and political candidates in Arizona have used Logan’s testimony to claim that 74,000 ballots were problematic.
After Logan made his erroneous claim in the Senate, it quickly became apparent that it was based on in-person early voters who cast ballots during the 10 days before the election.
Though voters couldn’t request early ballots by mail after Oct. 23, they could still cast them at in-person early voting centers throughout the county. Each of those votes was recorded on an EV33 report that didn’t have a corresponding EV32 report. The reports are dated, meaning Logan could see clearly that there were 10 days’ worth of reports on early ballot returns that didn’t have a corresponding report on early ballot requests.
Fann and a spokesman for Logan did not respond to a request for comment. Maricopa County officials have repeatedly refused to cooperate with the audit team in any way, and Fann has blamed the county for not answering the team’s questions. Fann previously defended Logan’s claim about the 74,000 votes, saying, “Maricopa County had the records. No one else does.” She refused to comment on the revelation that Logan did, in fact, have the records he needed to verify the validity of those ballots.
So, CN had all the records. Logan either lied about not having the records, was too incompetent to see materials right in front of him, and/or was too incompetent to do a goggle search. His motivation? He wanted permission to canvass in MC.
so there will be no elections in the near future ?
x4
