Election experts dispute Arizona vote audit before it's even released: report

According to a report from the Associated Press, election experts are awaiting the release of the Arizona audit of votes in Maricopa County this week and are already disputing the findings before even seeing them based upon how it was conducted.

Saying experts are already warning the public to not take the results seriously, the report quotes Tray Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky, already cutting to the chase and admitting, "There are too many flaws in the way this review was conducted to trust it."

Adding that the report is expected to be handed over to Arizona officials on Monday, but likely won't be made public immediately, the AP reports "leaders of the review have a history of making misleading claims about their findings, and those claims are amplified by Trump and his allies."

Among the flaws in how it was conducted, experts first point at the people who conducted it.

"The auditors recruited workers from Republican activist groups and did not live up to promises to screen them for biased social media posts. A former Republican state lawmaker who was at the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was spotted counting ballots for several days. His unsuccessful state House race was on thousands of the recounted ballots," AP's Jonathan Cooper reports before adding, "Standard election reviews are conducted by bipartisan teams following rigid procedures designed to prevent bias and human error from corrupting the results, said Jennifer Morrell, a former Utah elections official and partner at The Elections Group, a consulting firm."

Additionally, experts are questioning the financing of the audit.

"As of July, five groups had raised nearly $5.7 million for the effort. Among those leading the fundraising groups are Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor; Sydney Powell, his attorney who filed a number of baseless lawsuits challenging election results; Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of Overstock.com; and correspondents from the pro-Trump One America News Network," AP reports before turning to Republican election expert Ben Ginsberg who sagely noted, "The audience is the funders. The outside funding sources is really important to concentrate on in terms of talking about the legitimacy of the audit."

Experts note that the audit is less an attempt to get the voting right than it is a hunt for proof of a conspiracy and cited one person linked to the audit as a prime example of who should not have been allowed to participate.

"The auditors appear to be chasing down bizarre conspiracy theories. Jovan Pulitzer, an inventor and former treasure hunter, has said technology he calls 'kinematic artifact detection' was being used to look for altered ballots," Cooper wrote. "Pulitzer is the author of a series of books on lost treasures, including one titled 'How to Cut Off Your Arm and Eat Your Dog.' In 2000, he developed a barcode scanner called Cuecat that purported to link print magazine ads to the internet. It was later named one of the 50 worst inventions of all time by Time magazine."

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