Critics of the forensic audit of Maricopa County, Arizona—including local election officials and many reporters—who are crowing that the audit confirms that President Joe Biden won the election in Arizona, either don’t understand the purpose of an audit or are trying to deliberately obscure the most worrying findings in the audit.
In fact, by concentrating on only one finding—that the hand recount essentially matched the machine count from last November—they are missing the forest for the trees. That is shown by misleading headlines such as that in The Washington Post: “Ariz. Ballot Report Affirms Biden Win and Lack of Fraud.”
No one doubts that the vote tabulation shows that Biden won the state. The fact, however, that the hand recount essentially matched the machine count from last November comes as no surprise to anyone with experience in election administration.
As a former county election official in two different states, I was involved in multiple recounts. Recounts almost always only show slight differences from the original ballot tabulation. The fact that the hand recount in Maricopa County matched the machine recount simply means that the computer scanners used to scan and tabulate paper ballots were working properly.
