PHOENIX — Attorney General Mark Brnovich claims Maricopa County admitted to using artificial intelligence to verify signatures on early ballots. But the document he says supports that assertion does not say that.
And county officials say no ballot gets counted without being reviewed by a human.
Brnovich cites a letter to his office from a private attorney representing the county, Edward Novak. Novak explained how software is used to sort ballot envelopes into batches, one batch for those for which there’s high confidence the voter signatures match what’s on file, and one for those where there is low confidence.
The Attorney General’s Office, which furnished the letter to Capitol Media Services in response to a public records request, said that is the basis for the claim Brnovich made during a recent podcast with Steve Bannon.
But the letter itself appears to undermine the claim that computers are deciding which signatures are valid and which early ballots to count.
“The staff members are trained to ignore the high and low confidence labeling and work with these queues equally, with the same protocols established for all signature review,’’ Novak wrote in the March 31 letter to Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright.
That is backed up by other documents separately obtained from Maricopa County by Capitol Media Services.
And Megan Gilbertson, spokeswoman for the Maricopa County recorder and Elections Department, put a finer point on it.
“It’s 100% verified by humans,’’ Gilbertston said.
Brnovich’s assertion came April 7 when he appeared on the Bannon podcast. A former adviser to ex-President Donald Trump, Bannon has become one of the chief proponents of the discredited allegations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Brnovich initially was one of the first Arizona Republicans to dismiss claims the 2020 election was stolen from GOP candidates.
“If, indeed, there was some great conspiracy, it apparently didn’t work,’’ he told Fox News a week after the election. Instead, Brnovich said it was a simple question of Arizona voters splitting their tickets, choosing Democrats for president and U.S. Senate and opting to keep Republicans in lower-profile congressional, legislative and local races.
“There is no evidence, there are no facts that would lead anyone to believe that the election results would change,’’ he said.
But Brnovich now is running for U.S. Senate and attempting to separate himself from the pack of other Republican contenders. He also has been pressured by some pro-Trump factions in the GOP to conclude there were irregularities and even to bring criminal charges against county and state election officials.
In the podcast with Bannon, the attorney general discussed the “interim report’’ he released April 6 on his office’s review of the 2020 election, with Maricopa County specifically in mind.
That report produced no evidence of fraud other than a handful of individuals who have been charged with improper voting. But Brnovich told Bannon the report did identify issues.
“There are reasons why people should be concerned about how this 2020 election was handled,’’ Brnovich said.
He repeated his claim, made in the interim report, that the county at times was taking less than five seconds verifying each signature on each ballot envelope. To date, however, Brnovich has not provided Capitol Media Services with the numbers he used to come up with that conclusion, which county officials dispute.
Brnovich also told Bannon about the artificial intelligence claim. “Just this week we got another letter from their lawyer that confirms for the first time — and this is not in the report — that admitted they are using AI to verify signatures,’’ he said.
“The whole signature verification process is something that, regardless of where you fall in the spectrum, it should be troubling and concerning that they are trying to verify hundreds of thousands of signatures so quickly, ‘’ Brnovich continued. “And, of course, that raises the question of how is that even humanly possible.’’
What is clear is that computers are part of the process.
Gilbertson said all signatures on ballot envelopes are scanned in, with humans reviewing them on computer screens and comparing them with signatures on file, as opposed to handling individual envelopes.
But the county also is using computer software to analyze the signature box on all early ballots. “It’s gathering data in the background,’’ Gilbertson said.
The purpose is to determine if the computer can identify and sort out unsigned envelopes, she said. Gilbertson said that would allow those envelopes to be given to managers quickly, who then can call the voters and give them an opportunity to come to county offices and provide the missing signature by 7 p.m. on Election Day, something allowed under state law.
The same process also is doing an initial sort.
“The signature on the current (ballot) affidavit is compared against a historical reference signature that was previously verified and determined to be a good signature,’’ according to documents obtained by Capitol Media Services.
If they are comparable, the record — in this case, the signature — is placed in the high confidence queue. If they are not comparable, or if there is no reference record, it is placed in the low confidence queue.
The county’s response to Brnovich does not stop there.
“Staff are required to assess each record the same, by comparing broad and local characteristics of each signature,’’ it reads.
“This technology is not used to verify signatures,’’ added Gilbertson.
It’s not just the current Republican administration at the county Recorder’s Office making that statement. It is also the assessment of Democrat Adrian Fontes, who was the county recorder at the time but lost his 2020 race to Republican Stephen Richer.
“Every envelope had to have human eyes on it,’’ Fontes said.
Brnovich press aide Katie Conner declined to comment further on the assertion made by her boss or on the content of Novak’s letter. Instead she issued a prepared statement that the office “will continue to do everything we can to fight for election integrity.’’
