Arizona Attorney General Debunks Trump Supporters’ Election Fraud Claims

Accusations that hundreds of ballots were solid in Arizona in 2020 in the name of lifeless voters are unfounded, the state’s Republican lawyer general reported on Monday in a sharply worded letter to the president of the Arizona Senate, who has state-of-the-art untrue statements of voter fraud.

The lawyer typical, Mark Brnovich, wrote in his letter to Senator Karen Fann that his office’s Election Integrity Device had expended “hundreds of hours” investigating 282 allegations submitted by Ms. Fann, as effectively as extra than 6,000 allegations from 4 other reviews. Some of them “were so absurd,” he wrote, that “the names and birth dates didn’t even match the deceased, and some others bundled dates of demise soon after the election.”

The promises in Ms. Fann’s complaint stemmed from a seriously criticized audit of the 2020 election that the firm Cyber Ninjas carried out very last 12 months in Arizona’s greatest county, Maricopa. That audit identified no evidence for former President Donald J. Trump’s promises that the election experienced been stolen from him in reality, it counted marginally less votes for Mr. Trump and far more for Joseph R. Biden Jr. than in the formal tally. A subsequent report from election authorities accused Cyber Ninjas of making up its figures altogether.

Nonetheless, Ms. Fann despatched the accusations of useless voters to Mr. Brnovich’s workplace in a September 2021 criticism.

“Our agents investigated all persons that Cyber Ninjas documented as lifeless, and quite a few have been extremely surprised to discover they ended up allegedly deceased,” Mr. Brnovich wrote in his letter. His business concluded, he wrote, that “only one particular of the 282 persons on the checklist was deceased at the time of the election.”

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

In a assertion on Monday night, Ms. Fann thanked Mr. Brnovich for his “tireless work” in “answering some tough inquiries from voters and lawmakers who had grave considerations more than how the 2020 normal election was carried out in Arizona.”

“They requested us to do the challenging operate of simple fact finding, and we are providing the info,” she explained, contacting the investigation “critical to restoring the diminished self-assurance our constituents expressed subsequent the last election” and praising “the amplified voter integrity actions place in spot immediately after the audit uncovered weaknesses in our election procedures,” nevertheless the audit did not expose weaknesses in Arizona’s election procedures.

Spencer Scharff, an election attorney in Arizona and a previous voter protection director for the Arizona Democratic Bash, mentioned that although there was price to a community assertion from a Republican official that the allegations were unfounded, it would not undo the harm carried out by the unique lies, and by the willingness of so numerous elected Republicans to entertain and boost them.

“The detail that I believe is most unlucky is that it comes very long immediately after these allegations ended up produced, and they weren’t evidently refuted by persons who experienced the skill to refute them straight away,” Mr. Scharff claimed, noting that, by distinction, officers in Maricopa County debunked quite a few of Cyber Ninjas’ promises months ago.

Mr. Brnovich sent the letter 1 working day just before Arizonans go to the polls for another election — one particular in which he himself is managing. He is a candidate in the Republican Senate primary, the winner of which will problem Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, in November. The front-runner in general public polling is Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and has promoted the former president’s wrong promises of election fraud.

Mr. Brnovich has sought to wander a wonderful line on Mr. Trump’s lies — refusing to contact for overturning the 2020 election final results, but not often explicitly rejecting the statements. He publicly defended Arizona’s vote rely shortly just after the election, and Mr. Trump blasted him in June and endorsed Mr. Masters as an alternative. But he has also suggested that 2020 unveiled “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral technique, and claimed cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in April, “I imagine we all know what transpired in 2020.”