Republican Review of Arizona Vote Fails to Show Stolen Election

During the last legislative session, Republicans in Arizona had been prolific in drafting bills that would affect elections in the state, introducing 57 total bills, 32 of which would have added new restrictions to voting or shifted the balance of power in election administration, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a liberal-leaning voting rights group. Seven of those bills became law.

The report makes further legislative suggestions that would add more restrictions to voting. They include multiple ways to further purge voters from registration rolls, including if entries are not a “direct match” with government-issued identification. Voting rights groups note that strict direct match provisions can lead to erroneously removing legal voters from the rolls.

Further undermining the findings in the report are repeated allusions to common election conspiracy theories that have percolated among right-wing news sites and social media since the election.

The report takes an extended look at marker bleed-through on ballots, which was the source of a conspiracy known as #Sharpiegate that claimed ballots marked with a felt-tipped pen could not be read by machines in Arizona, and was thoroughly debunked. It also raises the prospect of fraudulent ballots being created and mailed, similar to a false claim by Mr. Trump that foreign countries would flood the 2020 election with fake ballots.

Reputable election experts have said for months that the Senate review would be wrong if it concluded that Mr. Trump won the Maricopa County vote. In fact, the explanation for Mr. Trump’s loss was available in public records of individual ballots cast in November, Mr. White said.

Mr. White joined last month with two retired executives of Clear Ballot Group, an elections consulting firm, in a point-by-point report explaining what actually happened in November.

Their analysis of the choices on each ballot cast showed that Mr. Trump lost Arizona because 74,822 Republicans, including 59,800 in Maricopa County, were unhappy enough with the former president’s performance in office that they decided not to vote for him. Roughly two-thirds of those voters cast ballots for Mr. Biden, the analysis stated, and the remaining third either voted for another candidate, such as the Libertarian Party nominee, or did not vote for president.