Arizona Attorney General Debunks Trump Supporters’ Election Fraud Claims

Accusations that hundreds of ballots ended up solid in Arizona in 2020 in the name of dead voters are unfounded, the state’s Republican legal professional general mentioned on Monday in a sharply worded letter to the president of the Arizona Senate, who has sophisticated wrong statements of voter fraud.

The legal professional general, Mark Brnovich, wrote in his letter to Senator Karen Fann that his office’s Election Integrity Unit experienced used “hundreds of hours” investigating 282 allegations submitted by Ms. Fann, as nicely as much more than 6,000 allegations from four other reviews. Some of them “were so absurd,” he wrote, that “the names and birth dates did not even match the deceased, and other individuals integrated dates of loss of life right after the election.”

The promises in Ms. Fann’s criticism stemmed from a greatly criticized audit of the 2020 election that the organization Cyber Ninjas performed very last year in Arizona’s biggest county, Maricopa. That audit uncovered no proof for previous President Donald J. Trump’s statements that the election experienced been stolen from him in simple fact, it counted a little fewer votes for Mr. Trump and more for Joseph R. Biden Jr. than in the official tally. A subsequent report from election authorities accused Cyber Ninjas of earning up its figures completely.

Even so, Ms. Fann sent the accusations of lifeless voters to Mr. Brnovich’s office environment in a September 2021 grievance.

“Our agents investigated all people today that Cyber Ninjas noted as lifeless, and several have been incredibly stunned to study they were being allegedly deceased,” Mr. Brnovich wrote in his letter. His office environment concluded, he wrote, that “only one of the 282 men and women on the list was deceased at the time of the election.”

Mr. Biden gained Arizona by a little more than 10,000 votes.

In a assertion on Monday night, Ms. Fann thanked Mr. Brnovich for his “tireless work” in “answering some hard thoughts from voters and lawmakers who experienced grave considerations around how the 2020 typical election was carried out in Arizona.”

“They asked us to do the really hard work of simple fact acquiring, and we are offering the points,” she claimed, calling the investigation “critical to restoring the diminished self-assurance our constituents expressed subsequent the past election” and praising “the increased voter integrity actions place in put soon after the audit unveiled weaknesses in our election procedures,” even though the audit did not expose weaknesses in Arizona’s election processes.

Spencer Scharff, an election attorney in Arizona and a previous voter security director for the Arizona Democratic Bash, mentioned that when there was price to a public assertion from a Republican official that the allegations were unfounded, it would not undo the damage accomplished by the authentic lies, and by the willingness of so quite a few elected Republicans to entertain and promote them.

“The matter that I believe is most unfortunate is that it will come extended right after these allegations were being built, and they weren’t clearly refuted by folks who had the capacity to refute them immediately,” Mr. Scharff mentioned, noting that, by distinction, officials in Maricopa County debunked a lot of of Cyber Ninjas’ promises months back.

Mr. Brnovich sent the letter one particular working day right before Arizonans go to the polls for a different election — 1 in which he himself is functioning. He is a applicant in the Republican Senate most important, the winner of which will problem Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, in November. The front-runner in community polling is Blake Masters, a undertaking capitalist who has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and has promoted the previous president’s bogus claims of election fraud.

Mr. Brnovich has sought to stroll a good line on Mr. Trump’s lies — refusing to contact for overturning the 2020 election effects, but seldom explicitly rejecting the promises. He publicly defended Arizona’s vote depend soon after the election, and Mr. Trump blasted him in June and endorsed Mr. Masters rather. But he has also advised that 2020 unveiled “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral procedure, and said cryptically on the previous Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in April, “I assume we all know what happened in 2020.”