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FACT FOCUS: Arizona canvass report draws nonsensical conclusions
A report released this week in Arizona's largest county falsely claims to have uncovered some 173,000 “lost” votes and 96,000 “ghost votes” in a private door-to-door canvassing effort, supposedly rendering the 2020 election in Maricopa County “uncertifiable.”
But its conclusions aren't supported by any evidence, according to county election officials and outside election experts, who called the report's methods “quasi-science" and its findings inaccurate.
Still, the 11-page document — which is separate from an ongoing partisan audit in the county — has been shared widely in conservative media and by Republican politicians, including state Rep. Mark Finchem, who is campaigning to be Arizona's secretary of state — the state's top election official.
CLAIM: An estimated 173,104 “missing or lost” votes and an estimated 96,389 “ghost” votes cast by people who didn’t appear to live at their voter registration addresses indicate that the 2020 election in Maricopa County included irregularities and is “uncertifiable.”
The “Grassroots Canvass Report” that gained traction on social media on Wednesday weaves a narrative of hundreds of thousands of voting errors in Maricopa County, but it bases those allegations on interactions with a fraction of that number of votes, analyzing data on just 4,570 voters in a handful of voting precincts.
Harris claims in the report that these smaller-scale findings can be extrapolated out to the entire county “at a scientifically correlated confidence level of 95%,” but Stanford University political science professor Justin Grimmer said that's inaccurate.
“From the description in the report, it is clear that this was not a random sample,” Grimmer said. Even if it was random, he said, certain areas were oversampled, and the authors didn’t take into account that the people who responded to the canvassers were likely different than those who didn’t respond.
“Their sample simply cannot justify their inference to the entire county,” Grimmer said.
www.12news.com
A report released this week in Arizona's largest county falsely claims to have uncovered some 173,000 “lost” votes and 96,000 “ghost votes” in a private door-to-door canvassing effort, supposedly rendering the 2020 election in Maricopa County “uncertifiable.”
But its conclusions aren't supported by any evidence, according to county election officials and outside election experts, who called the report's methods “quasi-science" and its findings inaccurate.
Still, the 11-page document — which is separate from an ongoing partisan audit in the county — has been shared widely in conservative media and by Republican politicians, including state Rep. Mark Finchem, who is campaigning to be Arizona's secretary of state — the state's top election official.
CLAIM: An estimated 173,104 “missing or lost” votes and an estimated 96,389 “ghost” votes cast by people who didn’t appear to live at their voter registration addresses indicate that the 2020 election in Maricopa County included irregularities and is “uncertifiable.”
The “Grassroots Canvass Report” that gained traction on social media on Wednesday weaves a narrative of hundreds of thousands of voting errors in Maricopa County, but it bases those allegations on interactions with a fraction of that number of votes, analyzing data on just 4,570 voters in a handful of voting precincts.
Harris claims in the report that these smaller-scale findings can be extrapolated out to the entire county “at a scientifically correlated confidence level of 95%,” but Stanford University political science professor Justin Grimmer said that's inaccurate.
“From the description in the report, it is clear that this was not a random sample,” Grimmer said. Even if it was random, he said, certain areas were oversampled, and the authors didn’t take into account that the people who responded to the canvassers were likely different than those who didn’t respond.
“Their sample simply cannot justify their inference to the entire county,” Grimmer said.
FACT FOCUS: Arizona canvass report draws nonsensical conclusions
Maricopa County election officials and outside experts said Liz Harris used “quasi-science" in her canvas of the 2020 election and her findings were "inaccurate."
www.12news.com
