Liaison blocked from entering building where Arizona elections audit taking place

PHOENIX — The man who was the voice of the Senate audit of the 2020 election to the public is effectively out over a dispute about to whom he has been speaking.

Randy Pullen confirmed Tuesday to Capitol Media Services that he ordered security at Veterans Memorial Coliseum not to allow Ken Bennett back on the premises. Pullen said that was at the direction of Senate President Karen Fann following Bennett’s decision to share certain information with outsiders before the audit was complete.

Bennett, who was Fann’s initial pick as her liaison with Cyber Ninjas, the firm she hired to conduct the audit, acknowledged that he did provide some data — he thought in confidence — to some election experts. He said they had a way of determining whether the count of the ballots being reported by Cyber Ninjas was in fact accurate.

“I feel bad about that,’’ he said. “I’ve apologized to President Fann.’’

But Bennett told Capitol Media Services that all this occurred because he was concerned about transparency of what was going on there.

Questions were raised about the difference between the county’s count of the number of ballots cast and the count performed while Cyber Ninjas was reviewing the ballots to check the results of the presidential and U.S. Senate races. That led Fann to obtain separate equipment solely to count how many ballots there are.

That equipment, Pullen said, was being operated by people who had volunteered. He said they were not employees of Cyber Ninjas, though some had worked for that firm earlier in the process.

Bennett said he only sought outside help after Pullen refused to share with him the procedures that were being used to do a third count of the ballots “so I could make sure that we weren’t force-balancing numbers’’ to have them agree with the Cyber Ninjas count, versus the one done by Maricopa County.

That, said Bennett, involved a “limited number of box counts’’ of the ballots inside each that the experts said could be used to verify whose tallies are correct. And, as it turned out, Bennett said, many of those counts did agree with the numbers the county provided in the first place.

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It was those experts, he said, that shared the information with reporters, not him. But he said too much is being made of this.

“It was not findings, it was not results, it was not vote counts, it was not anything that a lot of reports are claiming it was,’’ Bennett said.

Fann, however, said even that was too much.

“It is irresponsible to disclose partial information to the media since they are not ‘confirmed’ facts until the audit is final,’’ she said in a prepared statement. “This only leads to confusion and misinformation with the public.’’

For the moment, Bennett remains a co-liaison with Pullen, if only on paper, as he has no access to the audit.

“I’m going to sit down with Karen Fann and decide whether I’m going to be able to continue to be the liaison,’’ Bennett told Capitol Media Services. “But I won’t continue under many of the conditions that have existed.’’