The Maricopa County Elections Department released a 93-page report on Wednesday debunking claims of fraud in the 2020 election, with county officials saying the report was intended to draw attention to the danger of false claims of fraud on the anniversary of the Capitol riot.
“We have seen how people react when they think that an election has been stolen. They storm the U.S. Capitol. They threaten to kill and hang and shoot election workers. And they called other Americans traitors,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, told the Washington Post. “The American family cannot stand for that. I will not stand for that.”
Gates said in a press release that “the people who have spent the last year proclaiming our free and fair elections are rigged are lying or delusional.”
Supervisor Jack Sellers, also a Republican, praised Maricopa County elections staff for rebutting allegations of fraud investigated by Arizona State Senate Republicans.
“We asked [staff] to chase down every claim made by Senate contractors, to see what might be true and what was false or misleading, and they delivered those answers in astounding detail,” Sellers said. “The facts show the 2020 election was run with integrity and the Senate’s ‘audit’ findings are not to be trusted.”
The hand recount of the Maricopa County election, conducted by contractor Cyber Ninjas, ultimately concluded that President Biden won the election in the county by over 45,000 votes, tipping Arizona’s electoral votes to the Democratic candidate. Cyber Ninjas had never conducted an election audit prior to its work in Maricopa County, and the company’s CEO, Doug Jones, had promoted fraud claims before receiving a contract to conduct the audit.
A person helping with the audit told a local CBS affiliate in May that auditors were looking for traces of bamboo on county ballots, based on an allegation that 40,000 ballots were flown in from Asia.