Secretary of State Hobbs on Maricopa County election audit

The state senate’s audit of the Maricopa County Presidential and U.S. Senate votes is making national headlines, with concerns over the integrity of the process and the backgrounds of those involved in the effort. We spoke with Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs about what’s happening at Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum.

Recently, Secretary of State Hobbs was granted permission to have observers watch the audit. They are not observers that work for her office, but instead national election experts.

“A lot of their observations confirmed the concerns we had going into this that the procedures were pretty loose, that they weren’t really procedures appropriate to this type of post-election audit, and procedures are changing midstream which is definitely causing confusion for some of the folks counting the ballots but really just raise questions about the accuracy of what results they’re going to come up with if they’re continuing to change procedures midstream,” Hobbs said.

Hobbs believes these election experts have no relationship with the working audit team.

“We offered to connect Senate President Fann with these folks to help craft procedures that would legitimize the process that’s going on right now, but now that they were allowed in and I want to reiterate they were allowed in through a court order, it was not because the folks conducting this are being transparent. The other observers that are part of the process being told not to talk to the folks from our team. They are put in a different color shirt and so they are pretty much left out of any conversations that other folks are talking about in there,” Hobbs said.

Hobbs is not confident that these ballots are secure in the coliseum.

“We saw, early on, that people were able to get into the building and walk around unfeathered and got into areas that should’ve been secured,” Hobbs said.