Arizona Attorney General Debunks Trump Supporters’ Election Fraud Claims

Accusations that hundreds of ballots were forged in Arizona in 2020 in the name of dead voters are unfounded, the state’s Republican attorney typical stated on Monday in a sharply worded letter to the president of the Arizona Senate, who has superior false promises of voter fraud.

The legal professional normal, 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 more than 6,000 allegations from four other studies. Some of them “were so absurd,” he wrote, that “the names and beginning dates did not even match the deceased, and other people included dates of death just after the election.”

The claims in Ms. Fann’s grievance stemmed from a seriously criticized audit of the 2020 election that the organization Cyber Ninjas carried out final yr in Arizona’s major county, Maricopa. That audit uncovered no evidence for former President Donald J. Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen from him in truth, it counted a bit much less votes for Mr. Trump and additional for Joseph R. Biden Jr. than in the official tally. A subsequent report from election authorities accused Cyber Ninjas of building up its figures entirely.

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

“Our brokers investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas noted as useless, and a lot of were quite astonished to study they ended up allegedly deceased,” Mr. Brnovich wrote in his letter. His business office concluded, he wrote, that “only a single of the 282 folks on the record was deceased at the time of the election.”

Mr. Biden gained Arizona by a tiny more than 10,000 votes.

In a statement on Monday evening, Ms. Fann thanked Mr. Brnovich for his “tireless work” in “answering some difficult inquiries from voters and lawmakers who experienced grave issues over how the 2020 normal election was executed in Arizona.”

“They questioned us to do the challenging operate of simple fact obtaining, and we are delivering the points,” she stated, contacting the investigation “critical to restoring the diminished self-confidence our constituents expressed subsequent the past election” and praising “the increased voter integrity measures put in position just after the audit uncovered weaknesses in our election procedures,” although the audit did not expose weaknesses in Arizona’s election processes.

Spencer Scharff, an election law firm in Arizona and a previous voter defense director for the Arizona Democratic Get together, stated that even though there was value to a public statement from a Republican official that the allegations were being unfounded, it would not undo the harm carried out by the primary lies, and by the willingness of so a lot of elected Republicans to entertain and encourage them.

“The factor that I consider is most unfortunate is that it comes very long after these allegations were created, and they weren’t clearly refuted by persons who experienced the capacity to refute them immediately,” Mr. Scharff explained, noting that, by distinction, officials in Maricopa County debunked a lot of of Cyber Ninjas’ claims months in the past.

Mr. Brnovich sent the letter a person working day right before Arizonans go to the polls for another election — one particular in which he himself is managing. He is a prospect in the Republican Senate main, the winner of which will obstacle Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, in November. The entrance-runner in community polling is Blake Masters, a undertaking capitalist who has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and has promoted the former president’s false promises of election fraud.

Mr. Brnovich has sought to walk a good line on Mr. Trump’s lies — refusing to connect with for overturning the 2020 election benefits, but rarely explicitly rejecting the promises. He publicly defended Arizona’s vote count shortly soon after the election, and Mr. Trump blasted him in June and endorsed Mr. Masters in its place. But he has also suggested that 2020 discovered “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system, and reported cryptically on the previous Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in April, “I feel we all know what took place in 2020.”