The pro-audit camp outside the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Credit: Jeremy Stahl

Sitting in the press booth at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, several rows above where some two dozen tables of counters were retallying the 2020 presidential votes of the citizens of Maricopa County, Bennie Smith acknowledged something that has become readily apparent to most outside observers of the process that has come to be known as the “Arizona audit.”

“They’re not trying to capture an accurate count,” said Smith, a Democratic Tennessee election official who had traveled to Phoenix to advise the auditors. In fact, Smith said he expects the end result to be “wildly different from the count.”

Smith said he was advising the audit—a process specially ordered by the Arizona Senate and which began last month outside the county’s ordinary recount system—because he hopes to see a standardization of independent machine ballot audits of most U.S. elections. What’s going on in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, former home to the Phoenix Suns and commonly used these days for gun shows and high school graduations, is not that. Nor is it […]

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