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Maricopa County GOP Recorder: There Is No Legitimate Reason for an Exam
Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer said Monday he had no choice but to oppose the consideration of the 2.1 million ballot papers that were cast in his county during the November presidential election. The GOP-led Arizona Senate used subpoenas to get the ballots, voting machines, and personal information about the voters, and hired a Florida-based cybersecurity firm called Cyber Ninjas to conduct the exam. There is no “legitimate reason to conduct this review,” Republican Richer told ABC News Lives The Breakdown. “It doesn’t happen because the evidence deserves it. All the tests came back clean. The parties themselves oversaw the handcount test of 47,000 plus votes.” Cyber Ninjas has no experience with elections, and its CEO tweeted in support of former President Donald Trump’s false claim that he really won Arizona, not President Biden. Richer said it was “frustrating” that “some professional, legitimate companies have made offers to the Arizona Senate for this work, and we would have welcomed that.” The audit will cost taxpayers millions as Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said the custody chain was broken with the voting machines, and since election officials have no idea what cyber ninjas may have been doing with the machines, they cannot to be used in future elections. Richer told The Breakdown that he planned to remain silent during the audit, but when an anonymous Twitter account falsely accused Maricopa County of deleting voter records – a claim Trump quickly expanded – he crossed the line. I wanted to stay out of it, but when the good Maricopa County workers – my friends, my teammates, my co-workers – are accused of unlawfully destroying evidence under my surveillance, I had to say something. Maricopa County, he added, is now looking to bring defamation charges. More stories from theweek.com5 inflammatory hilarious cartoons about the GOP’s opposition to the Jan. 6 Commission The Myth of Bipartisanism Under New Florida Law Social media companies can be fined for banning political candidates
