PHOENIX — An Arizona Senate committee chair is ordering Maricopa County officials to show up next week and explain why they aren’t providing 2020 election documents demanded by the attorney general.
The issue is the contention by an outside analyst — with ties to the nationally debunked “Stop the Steal’’ movement — that more than 200,000 early ballots in Maricopa County had signatures that did not match, far more than the county’s own estimates.
Senate Government Committee Chair Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction, noted it has been several weeks since an assistant to Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent a third request for public information to Maricopa County officials. To date, Townsend said, there has been no response.
So Townsend, who has questioned the results of the 2020 election, is using the legislative right of subpoena to tell the supervisors or their representatives to show up Monday “and explain to us why they are not producing the information requested by the attorney general.’’
She made it clear she also wants that information turned over to her and the Republican-controlled committee she chairs.
A county spokesman said the supervisors had just received the subpoena from Townsend. The Senate had served prior subpoenas to county officials as part of its audit of the election results.
There was no immediate response to questions about why the county has not fully provided the attorney general with the information requested. A spokeswoman for Brnovich said that, as of late Monday, the documents had yet to be provided.
Part of the request from Brnovich’s assistant Jennifer Wright is technical. For example, Wright said, an earlier production of records made reference to certain policies, but the actual policies were missing.
All this comes as Republican lawmakers insist changes are needed in how elections are run to protect against fraud.
In fact, the Government Committee was also hearing testimony late Monday about whether to make changes in existing election laws, ranging from outlawing unmonitored drop boxes for ballots, to eliminating virtually all early voting in future elections, to requiring ballots be counted by hand.
The subpoena, however, is different.
It has to do with theories about the election having been stolen from former President Donald Trump, theories that will not die despite court rulings, random hand counts and the lack of any hard evidence to support them.
And it specifically raises questions about how Maricopa County verified the signatures on envelopes for early ballots cast in the 2020 general election and how election workers decided which match and can be counted and which do not.
There were more than 1.9 million early ballots cast in Maricopa County.
Townsend said the county said no more than 25,000 of these ballots had apparent signature mismatches that required further review or “curing,’’ where voters explain to election officials why a signature may not match what is on file. After that, she said, 587 were confirmed signature mismatches and the votes were not counted.
But Townsend is relying on research done by Shiva Ayyadurai, an MIT lecturer who has espoused various election conspiracy theories and criticized COVID-19 vaccines. He contends county officials counted ballots that were questionable at best.
She said he brought together three experts and three novices to review a random sample of 499 ballots, comparing the signatures on envelopes with other signatures that are publicly available, like mortgage documents that are on file at county offices. And Townsend said those six people concluded 60 of the 499 were mismatches, or 12%.
“Based on that study, if you extrapolate that, over 204,430 should have been cured, versus 25,000 the county disallowed,’’ she said.
“The question is how does this happen, why wasn’t this cured,’’ Townsend said. “And so there’s a lot of unanswered questions that the attorney general would need to be able to answer but cannot because of the obstruction coming from the Board of Supervisors.’’
All this is occurring as the audit ordered by Senate President Karen Fann, R-Phoenix, of the Maricopa County election returns has yet to be completed. While a hand count of the ballots showed that Trump, indeed, lost Maricopa County, Fann is awaiting reports about the tabulation machines.
