The Maricopa County Audit continues in a new location

The State Senate’s unofficial recount of Maricopa County ballots is still going on. The ballots and election machines have been moved out of Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum and moved to a different area of the State Fairgrounds. For the latest on the recount and what to expect next, we spoke to Jen Fifield, who’s been covering the story for the Arizona Republic.

“It’s been a long summer of this audit so we are still going on, they did finish recounting all 2 million ballots cast in the county, and also inspecting each one. At this point they’re doing their final checks to try to see how many ballots were in each box, because they had problems tracking that information. They’re doing other work but they actually had to move out of the Coliseum,” Fifield said.

This all started when it was, “…commissioned by the Arizona Senate. The Republicans in the Arizona Senate. So it’s not being done by the county to examine the election results. They’re already certified as you know, the President took the white house already. And these results will not change that. So, what Karen Fann, President of the Arizona Senate has said is she wants to ‘use the results to see if there’s changes in the elections, that they can make here to improve them’,” Fifield said.

While trying to cover the State Audit and the counting of public ballots to the residents of Arizona and specifically Maricopa County, “The Arizona Republic, filed a lawsuit against the Arizona Senate and cyber ninjas attempting to get any documents associated with the audit because, as we’ve been filing records requests , we’ve been told that the Arizona Senate doesn’t have, isn’t the custodian, for these records and doesn’t have them, and at the Republic, we firmly believe that this is a public audit with public ballots and we should be able to learn anything that that is in the public realm,” Fifield said.

After the many months of this Audit its attracted many people from outside of the country, “there’s a ton of international interest, but there’s been journalists from outside of this country coming to watch the audit, and they’re actually telling me, internationally, that this is something that some of their lawmakers on one side of the aisle are considering doing outside of this country. So I think that it’s setting a precedent for what we expect,” Fifield said.