AP: Fraud claims aimed in part at keeping Trump base loyal.

DETROIT (AP) — A federal judge is considering whether to order financial penalties or other sanctions against some of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers who signed onto a lawsuit last year challenging Michigan’s election results.

The lawsuit alleging widespread fraud was voluntarily dropped after a judge in December found nothing but “speculation and conjecture” that votes for Trump somehow were destroyed or switched to votes for Joe Biden, who won Michigan by 2.8 percentage points.

Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the city of Detroit now want the plaintiffs and a raft of attorneys, including Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, to face the consequences of pursuing what they call frivolous claims.

“It was never about winning on the merits of the claims, but rather (the) purpose was to undermine the integrity of the election results and the people’s trust in the electoral process and in government,” the attorney general’s office said in a court filing.

U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Detroit is holding a hearing by video conference Monday.

There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Indeed, election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well, and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six Republican voters who wanted Parker to decertify Michigan’s election results and impound voting machines. The judge declined, calling the request “stunning in its scope and breathtaking in its reach.”

The case appeared to be mostly handled by Detroit-area attorneys. But the lawsuit also carried the names of Powell, Wood and four more lawyers from outside Michigan.

The roles of Powell and Wood are unclear; they never filed a formal appearance in the case, according to the docket. But they’ve been targeted in the request for penalties.

Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, also a Democrat, want the state to receive at least $11,000 in legal fees. Detroit is asking the judge to disgorge any money that lawyers have collected through a post-election fundraising campaign. The city also wants the lawyers to face disciplinary hearings in their respective states.

In response, attorney Stefanie Lambert Junttila insisted there was plenty of evidence to support the lawsuit.

“They are a new form of political retribution,” she said of possible sanctions. “Such abuse of the law has no place in this court and is contrary to the law it hypocritically invokes.”

In New York, Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from practicing law because he made false statements while trying to get courts to overturn Trump’s election loss.

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PHOENIX (AP) — Former President Donald Trump issued three statements in two days falsely claiming that voting fraud and irregularities cost him Arizona’s electoral votes.

Trump relied on comments made Thursday by contractors hired by state Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 vote count in Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix.

The “forensic audit,” as Senate GOP leaders are calling their review, is overseen by Cyber Ninjas, a small computer security firm with no election experience before Trump began questioning the 2020 results. Its CEO, Doug Logan, spread false conspiracy theories about the election before he was hired to lead the Arizona review.

Logan and Ben Cotton, a digital forensics analyst working on the audit, described issues they say need further review. Trump has parroted them as evidence the election results are tainted.

County officials and elections experts say the claims are false and based on a misunderstanding of election materials, which they say creates an appearance of irregularities where none exists.

Trump laid out his claims most specifically in a statement Friday night. A look at the irregularities he alleges in that statement:

TRUMP: “168,000 fraudulent ballots printed on illegal paper (unofficial ballots)”

THE FACTS: All of that is false. The ballots were not unofficial or printed on illegal paper, and even Logan never alleged they were fraudulent.

Logan pointed to ballots with the printing slightly offset between the front and back. He claimed this could cause votes to be counted for the wrong candidate if ink from one side bleeds through to another. He said the alignment issues were mostly from polling-place ballots, which are printed onsite, and said about 168,000 ballots were cast that way. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail.

“We are seeing a lot of very thin paper stock being used especially on Election Day,” Logan added.

The allegation harkens back to the debunked “Sharpiegate” conspiracy theory that arose in the days after the election. Election experts say bleed-through doesn’t affect the vote count because bubbles on one side of a ballot don’t align with those on the other. Ballots that can’t be read are flagged and duplicated by a bipartisan team.

Arizona’s election procedures manual says only that ballots “must be printed with black ink on white paper of sufficient thickness to prevent the printing from being discernible on the reverse side the ballot.” Maricopa County uses 80 pound Votesecur paper from Rolland, which is among the papers approved by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the county’s tabulation equipment, said Fields Moseley, a county spokesman.

Logan did not provide any evidence that alignment problems affected the vote count and said the issue needs more analysis.

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TRUMP, citing “74,000 mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing ballots).”

THE FACTS: No, there were no magically appearing ballots. He is alleging that the number of filled-out ballots received in the mail by election officials exceeded the number of people who had asked earlier for mail-in ballots, by 74,000. But that’s not at all what happened.

The claim mischaracterizes reports created for political parties to track who has voted early so they can target their get-out-the-vote efforts.

One report tracks all requests that voters make for early ballots, either by mail or in person, up to 11 days before the election. The other report tracks all ballots received through the day before the election. That leaves a 10-day window during which people who vote in-person but don’t request a mail ballot would appear on one report but not the other.

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TRUMP, claiming “11,000 voters were added to the voter rolls AFTER the election and still voted.”

THE FACTS: There’s nothing untoward about voters rolls growing after Election Day. The rolls are simply updated to reflect people whose provisional ballots are added to the tally after election officials verify that they were eligible to vote.

The allegation that the updated tally was the result of electoral wrongdoing first came from Logan this past week, when he told state lawmakers of “11,326 people that did not show up on the Nov. 7 version of the voter rolls, after votes were cast, but then appeared on the Dec. 4 voter rolls.”

Maricopa County officials said Logan is probably referring to provisional ballots, which are cast by people who do not appear on the voter rolls or don’t have the proper identification on Election Day. They’re only counted if the voter later shows he or she was eligible to vote. To be eligible, such voters must have registered before the deadline.

“These go through a rigorous verification process to make sure that the provisional ballots cast are only counted if the voter is eligible to vote in the election,” Maricopa County officials wrote on Twitter. “This happens after Election Day. Only eligible voters are added to the voter rolls.”

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TRUMP, alleging “all the access logs to the machines were wiped, and the election server was hacked during the election.”

THE FACTS: That flies in the face of the evidence. Maricopa County’s election server is not connected to the internet and independent auditors found no evidence the election server was hacked.

Trump’s hacking allegation refers to the unauthorized download of public data from the county’s voter registration system. That system, which is connected to the internet and broadly accessible to political parties and election workers, is not linked to the election management system, the web of ballot counters, computers and servers that tallies votes.

The election management system is “air gapped,” or kept disconnected from the rest of the county’s computer network and the wider internet. Two firms certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to test voting systems found Maricopa County’s machines were not connected to the internet and did not have malicious hardware or software installed.

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TRUMP: “Arizona shows Fraud and Voting Irregularities many times more than would be needed to change the outcome of the Election.”

THE FACTS: Not so. The number of potential fraud cases is far smaller than President Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Arizona.

County election officials identified 182 cases where voting problems were clear enough that they referred them to investigators for further review, according to an Associated Press investigation. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice.

Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes out of 3.4 million cast. Of the four cases that have resulted in criminal charges, two involved Democratic voters and two involved Republicans.

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PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona county election officials have identified fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud out of more than 3 million ballots cast in last year’s presidential election, further discrediting former President Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election as his allies continue a disputed ballot review in the state’s most populous county.

An Associated Press investigation found 182 cases where problems were clear enough that officials referred them to investigators for further review. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice.

While it’s possible more cases could emerge, the numbers illustrate the implausibility of Trump’s claims that fraud and irregularities in Arizona cost him the state’s electorate votes. In final, certified and audited results, Biden won 10,400 more votes than Trump out of 3.4 million cast.

AP’s findings align with previous studies showing voter fraud is rare. Numerous safeguards are built into the system to not only prevent fraud from happening but to detect it when it does.

“The fact of the matter is that election officials across the state are highly invested in helping to ensure the integrity of our elections and the public’s confidence in them,” said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. “And part of that entails taking potential voter fraud seriously.”

Arizona’s potential cases also illustrate another reality: Voter fraud is often bipartisan. Of the four Arizona cases that have resulted in criminal charges, two involved Democratic voters and two involved Republicans.

AP’s review supports statements made by many state and local elections officials — and even some Republican county officials and GOP Gov. Doug Ducey — that Arizona’s presidential election was secure and its results valid.

And still, Arizona’s GOP-led state Senate has for months been conducting what it describes as a “forensic audit” of results in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. The effort has been discredited by election experts and faced bipartisan criticism, but some Republicans, including Trump, have suggested it will uncover evidence of widespread fraud.

“This is not a massive issue,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who oversaw the Maricopa County election office during the 2020 election and lost his re-election bid. “It is a lie that has developed over time. It’s been fed by conspiracy theorists.”

The AP tallied the potential cases after submitting public record requests to all Arizona counties. Most counties — 11 out of 15 — reported they had forwarded no potential cases to local prosecutors. The majority of cases identified so far involve people casting a ballot for a relative who had died or people who tried to cast two ballots.

In addition to the AP’s review of county election offices, an Election Integrity Unit of the state attorney general’s office that was created in 2019 to ferret out fraud has been reviewing potential cases of fraud.

A spokesman for Attorney General Mark Brnovich told the AP in April that the unit had 21 active investigations, although he did not specify if all were from last fall.

A month later, the office indicted a woman for casting a ballot on behalf of her dead mother in November. A spokeswoman declined to provide updated information this week.

Maricopa County, which is subject to the disputed ballot review ordered by state Senate Republicans, has identified just one case of potential fraud out of 2.1 million ballots cast. That was a voter who might have cast a ballot in another state. The case was sent to the county attorney’s office, which forwarded it to the state attorney general.

Virtually all the cases identified by county election officials are in Pima County, home to Tucson, and involved voters who attempted to cast two ballots.

The Pima County Recorder’s Office has a practice of referring all cases with even a hint of potential fraud to prosecutors for review, something the state’s 14 other county recorders do not do. Pima County officials forwarded 151 cases to prosecutors. They did not refer 25 others from voters over age 70 because there was a greater chance those errors — typically attempts to vote twice — were the result of memory lapses or confusion, not criminal intent, an election official said.

None of the 176 duplicate ballots was counted twice. A spokesman for the Pima County Attorney’s Office, Joe Watson, said that the 151 cases it received were still being reviewed and that no charges had been filed.

Pima County’s tally of referrals to prosecutors after last year’s election was in line with those in 2016 and 2018. Prosecutors filed no voter fraud cases after the 2016 election and just one after the 2018 election, and that case was later dismissed, Watson said Friday.

But there were some new patterns this year, said deputy recorder Pamela Franklin. An unusually high number of people appeared to have intentionally voted twice, often by voting early in person and then again by mail. In Arizona, where nearly 80% of voters cast ballots by mail, it’s not unusual for someone to forget they returned their mail-in ballot and then later ask for a replacement or try to vote in person, she said. But this pattern was new.

Franklin noted several factors at play, including worries about U.S. Postal Service delays. In addition, Trump at one point encouraged voters who cast their ballots early by mail to show up at their polling places on Election Day and vote again if poll workers couldn’t confirm their mail ballots had been received.

The results in Arizona are similar to early findings in other battleground states. Local election officials in Wisconsin identified just 27 potential cases of voter fraud out of 3.3 million ballots cast last November, according to records obtained by the AP under the state’s open records law. Potential voter fraud cases in other states where Trump and his allies mounted challenges have so far amounted to just a tiny fraction of Trump’s losing margin in those states.


The Associated Press conducted the review following months of Trump and his allies claiming without proof that he had won the 2020 election.

His claims of widespread fraud have been rejected by election officials, judges, a group of election security officials and even Trump’s own attorney general at the time. Even so, supporters continue to repeat them and they have been cited by state lawmakers as justification for tighter voting rules across the country.

In Arizona, Republican state lawmakers have used the unsubstantiated claims to justify the unprecedented outside Senate review of the election in Maricopa County and to pass legislation that could make it harder for infrequent voters to receive mail ballots automatically.

Trump, in a statement, called AP’s tally an attempt to “discredit the massive number of voter irregularities and fraud” in key battleground states and said the “real numbers” will be released “shortly.” He did not provide any evidence to back up his assertions.

Senate President Karen Fann has repeatedly said her goal is not to overturn the election results. Instead, she has said she wants to find out if there were any problems and show voters who believe Trump’s claims whether they should trust the results.

“Everybody keeps saying, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah well, let’s do the audit.’ And if there’s nothing there, then we say, ‘Look, there was nothing there,’” Fann told the AP in early May. “If we find something, and it’s a big if, but if we find something, then we can say, ‘OK, we do have evidence and now how do we fix this?’” Fann did not return calls this week to discuss the AP findings.

Aside from double voting, the cases flagged by officials mostly involved a ballot cast after someone had died, including three voters in Yavapai County who face felony charges for casting ballots for spouses who died before the election.

In Yuma County, one case of a voter attempting to cast two ballots was sent to the county attorney for review. Chief Civil Deputy William Kerekus told the AP that there was no intent at voter fraud and the case was closed without charges.

Cochise County Recorder David Stevens found mail-in ballots were received from two voters who died before mail ballots were sent in early October. Sheriff’s deputies investigating the cases found their homes were vacant and closed the cases. The votes were not counted.

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Philadelphia’s elections board voted Friday to reject a Republican state senator’s request for access to its voting machines for a “forensic investigation” into former President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection defeat.

The Office of the City Commissioners’ unanimous decision will be laid out in a letter telling state Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin, that Philadelphia “will not participate in your proposed analysis.”

Omar Sabir, one of two Democrats on the three-person board, said shortly before the meeting that he thinks it’s time to move on.

“It’s time, it’s resources,” he said. “The 2020 election has been proven by many standards that there was no fraud and the election went well.”

The vote occurred during a brief meeting at which the three election board members said little about Mastriano’s July 7 request that gave them until the end of the month to reply.

Mastriano has said he plans to subpoena the three counties through the state Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, which he chairs, but it’s unclear if he has enough support from his fellow Republican senators to follow through with that threat.

He’s said to expect a meeting of his committee shortly, but so far none has been scheduled.

A draft of the Philadelphia board’s three-page letter said Mastriano’s review would be duplicative of other efforts that have turned up no problems with the vote count but could lead the state to decertify the machines. The Department of State recently told Fulton Countyits machines could not be used again after it agreed to a similar post-election review Mastriano had pressured the commissioners for.

The draft letter also said it would cost the city more than $35 million to replace the equipment, plus related labor and other costs.

“There is no claim that Philadelphia County’s election systems or processes were compromised nor is there any basis to jeopardize the constitutionally mandated secrecy of the votes cast by city of Philadelphia residents, to expose the taxpayers of the city to tens of millions of dollars in additional and unanticipated expenses, or to risk the very ability of Philadelphians to cast ballots in future elections,” according to the draft letter.

Mastriano, a leading proponent of Trump’s efforts to overturn his narrow loss in the state to Joe Biden in November, did not respond to a phone message seeking comment. Since Trump lost last year, Mastriano has generally has avoided speaking to reporters outside of conservative-friendly outlets.

It was the second rejection in two days for Mastriano’s effort to get access to voting equipment and records in three counties.

The Republican-majority Tioga County commissioners wrote Mastriano on Thursday to say they would not cooperate, saying their participation had hinged on Mastriano helping arrange the purchase and installation of new machines for the Nov. 2 vote.

York County, also with a GOP-majority county board, has raised questions about the legality and cost of Mastriano’s request. A county spokesman said Friday there were no new developments, suggesting the deadline will pass without that county agreeing to his review.

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hanimmal said:

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mooray said:

That is just nuts, to keep that shit alive. Buuuuuuuut, the crazy segment of their party has been legitimized by trump and they're not going to be regressing anytime soon, so republicans are going to have to keep feeding them tidbits of subtle crazy like that to keep them voting their way.

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hanimmal said:

Yeah because of that I think it will be interesting to see how this September rally to support the domestic terrorists who attacked our capital goes down.

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ATLANTA (AP) — Republican efforts questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential race have led to voting system breaches that election security experts say pose a heightened risk to future elections.

Copies of the Dominion Voting Systems software used to manage elections — from designing ballots to configuring voting machines and tallying results — were distributed at an event this month in South Dakota organized by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an ally of former President Donald Trump who has made unsubstantiated claims about last year’s election.

“It’s a game-changer in that the environment we have talked about existing now is a reality,” said Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration. “We told election officials, essentially, that you should assume this information is already out there. Now we know it is, and we don’t know what they are going to do with it.”

The software copies came from voting equipment in Mesa County, Colorado, and Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump allies had sue unsuccessfully challenging the results from last fall.

The Dominion software is used in some 30 states, including counties in California, Georgia and Michigan.

Election security pioneer Harri Hursti was at the South Dakota event and said he and other researchers in attendance were provided three separate copies of election management systems that run on the Dominion software. The data indicated they were from Antrim and Mesa counties. While it’s not clear how the copies came to be released at the event, they were posted online and made available for public download.

The release gives hackers a “practice environment” to probe for vulnerabilities they could exploit and a road map to avoid defenses, Hursti said. All the hackers would need is physical access to the systems because they are not supposed to be connected to the internet.

“The door is now wide open,” Hursti said. “The only question is, how do you sneak in the door?”

A Dominion representative declined comment, citing an investigation.

U.S. election technology is dominated by just three vendors comprising 90% of the market, meaning election officials cannot easily swap out their existing technology. Release of the software copies essentially provides a blueprint for those trying to interfere with how elections are run. They could sabotage the system, alter the ballot design or even try to change results, said election technology expert Kevin Skoglund.

“This disclosure increases both the likelihood that something happens and the impact of what would happen if it does,” he said.

The effort by Republicans to examine voting equipment began soon after the November presidential election as Trump challenged the results and blamed his loss on widespread fraud, even though there has been no evidence of it.

Judges appointed by both Democrats and Republicans, election officials of both parties and Trump’s own attorney general have dismissed the claims. A coalition of federal and state election officials called the 2020 election the “most secure” in U.S. history, and post-election audits across the country found no significant anomalies.

In Antrim County, a judge had allowed a forensic exam of voting equipment after a brief mix-up of election results led to a suit alleging fraud. It was dismissed in May. Hursti said the date on the software release matches the date of the forensic exam.

Calls seeking information from Antrim County’s clerk and the local prosecutor’s office were not immediately returned; a call to the judge’s office was referred to the county clerk. The Michigan secretary of state’s office declined comment.

In Colorado, federal, state and local authorities are investigating whether Mesa County elections staff might have provided unauthorized individuals access to their systems. The county elections clerk, Tina Peters, appeared onstage with Lindell in South Dakota and told the crowd her office was being targeted by Democrats in the state.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said she alerted federal election security officials of the breach and was told it was not viewed as a “significant heightening of the election risk landscape at this point.” This past week, Mesa County commissioners voted to replace voting equipment that Griswold had ordered could no longer be used.

Geoff Hale, who leads the election security effort at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said his agency has always operated on the assumption that system vulnerabilities are known by malicious actors. Election officials are focused instead on ways they can reduce risk, such as using ballots with a paper record that can be verified by the voter and rigorous post-election audits, Hale said.

He said having Dominion’s software exposed publicly doesn’t change the agency’s guidance.

Security researcher Jack Cable said he assumes U.S. adversaries already had access to the software. He said he is more concerned the release would fan distrust among the growing number of people not inclined to believe in the security of U.S elections.

“It is a concern that people, in the pursuit of trying to show the system is insecure, are actually making it more insecure,” said Cable, who recently joined a cybersecurity firm run by former CISA Director Christopher Krebs and former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos.

Concerns over access to voting machines and software first surfaced this year in Arizona, where the Republican-controlled state Senate hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no previous election experience, to audit the Maricopa County election. The firm’s chief executive also had tweeted support of conspiracy theories surrounding last year’s election.

After the county’s Dominion voting systems were turned over to the firm, Arizona’s top election official said they could not be used again. The GOP-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted in July to replace them.

Dominion has filed suits contesting various unfounded claims about its systems. In May, it called giving Cyber Ninjas access to its code “reckless,” given the firm’s bias, and said it would cause “irreparable damage” to election security.

Election technology and security expert Ryan Macias, in Arizona earlier this year to observe that review, was alarmed by a lack of cybersecurity protocols. There was no information about who was given access, whether those people had passed background checks or were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Cyber Ninjas did not respond to an email with questions about the review and their security protocols.

Macias was not surprised to hear that copies of Antrim County’s election management system had surfaced online given the questionable motives of the various groups conducting the reviews and the central role that voting systems have played in conspiracy theories.

“This is what I anticipated would happen, and I anticipate it will happen yet again coming out of Arizona,” Macias said. “These actors have no liability and no rules of engagement.”

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CunningCanuk said:

MAGA Election Clerk Tina Peters Accused of Not Counting Ballots in Local Races
Before she was the subject of an FBI investigation, Stop the Steal diehard Tina Peters oversaw elections where ballots went uncounted or got lost in unsecured drop boxes.

Read in The Daily Beast: https://apple.news/AMAeWeJMxR-WlrfVIBkx91w

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hanimmal said:

It was always going to be a election that Biden had to win big to overcome all the Republican shenanigans. Luckily he did.

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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.

Report author Liz Harris, an unsuccessful Republican legislative candidate and a real estate agent in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, declined to respond to specific questions but said a more comprehensive version of the report would be released soon.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

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 FACTS: The report doesn’t provide evidence for these far-fetched claims, and the county’s election results have been certified for months.

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.

Harris’ initial report offered just one specific example out of nearly 270,000 alleged ballot irregularities.

It claimed on the cover that an address in Goodyear, Arizona, was a “vacant lot” from which voters cast illegal ballots. But that claim was quickly debunked on Twitter by a local ABC15 reporter and county officials.

In fact, the address is a legitimate place of residence, according to Maricopa County Assessor Eddie Cook. In 2020, it housed three registered voters who cast general election ballots, according to Megan Gilbertson, spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Elections Department.

After the error was pointed out, Harris released a new version of the report with a different example on the cover. But the new example, an allegedly vacant lot in Tempe, Arizona, also wasn’t evidence of any foul play.

The address is vacant now but used to be a mobile home park, according to Gilbertson. In 2020, one person who cast a mail-in ballot listed it as his permanent address. He requested his ballot be sent to a temporary address elsewhere, which is legal.

And there are other concerns to be aware of when it comes to sweeping claims of “lost” votes and “ghost” votes, according to Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa County elections official.

Claims of “lost” votes — or votes cast but never counted — are problematic because research shows when people are asked if they voted months later, some will lie and say they did.

“Voters will over-report their participation in light of social pressure to demonstrate actions that they perceive as socially desirable,” Patrick said.

Meanwhile, claims of “ghost” votes — or votes cast from addresses where people don’t seem to live — don’t consider the fact that military and overseas voters are legally allowed to vote from their last domiciled address, Patrick said.

In an email to the AP, she called the report “yet another example of individuals who do not understand elections in Arizona using quasi-science to justify a preconceived position and further set a narrative.”

Called for comment, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he was happy to address questions about potential errors but that “so far, no actual problems have been identified.” He said he asked Harris for specific examples of irregularities in March and she never followed up.

Harris declined to answer most specific questions about the report, but said the first specific claim about a vacant lot was a “typo.” She said that she was confident in her findings and that a more comprehensive report would be released soon.

Finchem, the secretary of state candidate who shared the report on social media, declined to comment.

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