Why the AZ Election Audit Should Concern Montanans, Americans

The Arizona audit isn't the end of the investigation, it should be the start of the investigation. That's what Heritage Foundation policy expert Hans von Spakovsky had to say on Monday. This, as 80-plus Montana legislators are calling for a special committee to focus on election integrity in Montana.

Here's the full audio of our chat with Hans:

Here's the rough transcript of our chat with Hans:

Hans von Spakoksky: Aaron, thanks for having me back.

Aaron Flint: Yeah, well, let's throw it right to you. First off, what did the audit show and and then we could get into why election officials should be embarrassed?

Hans: Well, look, I think the media all concentrated on the wrong thing last week, when this came out, they said, Oh, well, you know, the recount. The hand recount showed that Joe Biden won End of story. Well, yeah, that's exactly right. But that's no surprise recounts, I've been involved in many of them as a former election official, they almost always match the machine count of the ballot. There's sometimes there's small discrepancies. But all that means is that the ballots that were cast, whether we counted them, yeah, they matched the prior number. But that a recount doesn't tell you whether those votes were legitimate votes. In other words, they don't tell you whether, for example, is no 10,000 votes were voted by individuals that don't actually live with they are registered to vote. And what's probably what's very disturbing is the rest of the audit, which shows all kinds of potential. And that's a key word potential problems like over 5000 voters who may have voted in multiple counties. 23,000 mail in ballots voted from a prior address. In other words, there's a possibility that the person didn't even live there anymore. It's just there's a list of them a list of potentials like that, including almost 2600 duplicate ballots, where they apparently couldn't match them up with the original ballots. It's just one thing after another like that, and what needs to happen is the audit isn't the end of the story. It should be the be the beginning. Because what now needs to happen is election officials and law enforcement need to investigate the problems that they found. And for example, the over 5000 voters that the audit says may have voted in multiple counties, well, they need to pull the file on every single one of those voters, find out whether in fact they were they were registered in multiple counties, and whether they filled out and completed and sent in more than one ballot, because of course, double voting is highly illegal.

Aaron: Yeah. And it just seems Yeah, I think you're exactly right. This, this audit isn't the end of the story. This is the beginning of the story. And yet, CNN and some of these other fake news media outlets, want to just sweep this all under the rug and bury the findings of this audit. You're probably too distinguished of a guy to have watched South Park back in the day, but I was still in high school. So that's my excuse. But you know the police officer in South Park would be standing in front of the UFOs and the cows, and he'd say nothing to see here folks. And that's what the media is doing with this story as well. Nothing to see here folks move along. Once again, it's like COVID-19 lab leak theory, right?
Hans: Yeah, and, and, and but look, it's not just them, it's the election officials in Maricopa County, they have been, they've been tweeting at first of all, they, they refuse to cooperate as much as possible. And you would think that they would want an audit to occur to show that they did everything correctly. They clearly knew they had problems. They didn't want to be embarrassed by that coming out. And they're now actually saying the same things: see the recount matched the machine count and that's the end of the story. And it looks like they may not do anything about it, which which is the worst thing and ever.  I can give you a quick example of why we need to do audits. Look, audits are retained in the business world. Nobody thinks twice about it. And then all these people have voiced opposition to this. Well, the Maricopa County audit has gotten a lot of attention. An audit that didn't get a lot of attention, but demonstrates why they should be done, was done in Windham, New Hampshire. And shortly after last year's election, the results came out of just a couple of months ago. They were auditing a local election. And guess what they found- they found that their computer scanners- you know, these are the scanners that read the paper ballot and and total up the votes- apparently had malfunctioned, during the election last year. And they discovered that the winning candidate in this local election had not been credited with 300 votes that he actually got and that the losing candidate actually lost by more votes than the machines had counted. Now, it didn't change the outcome of the election, but if they hadn't conducted this audit, they wouldn't have known that their voting equipment is malfunctioning. Now they can fix that so that it doesn't affect a future election. And that's clearly what needs to happen in Arizona. They need to investigate these problems, find out whether they are correct or not, and then fix the issue and for anybody who intentionally engaged in wrongdoing potentially prosecute them.
Aaron: Yeah, why should I mean Aside from the obvious examples that you just gave out of out of Arizona? Why should election officials really across the country be embarrassed because I get the sense that this is broader than just Maricopa County Arizona?

Hans: Again, I would go into the business world any any public company company that refused to conduct an audit of its company, the public shareholders, the SEC all would be saying whoa, wait a minute why don't you want to conduct an audit? Why don't we you want your business dealings, your business operations check. What are you trying to hide? And that's exactly the same reaction folks ought to have to these elected officials all over the country who are saying, Oh, no, there's no there's no reason for audits there's no reason for any outside independent groups or organizations to audit and review what we do. That should raise a lot of suspicions.
Aaron: It's kind of like you know, if you call for accountability at the Pentagon over the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, oh, no, we're not gonna have an audit of that either. We'll throw you in the brig just for calling for that audit. If you call for an investigation of of the Whoo hoo flu in the COVID-19 Lab in China, no, nope, not going to pursue that. Lack of accountability across the board, almost sounds like a cover up is what it sounds like.