Former Maricopa County Recorder shares his thoughts on the release of the audit

The State Senate released a report of what it found regarding Maricopa County election ballots. Former Maricopa County Recorder, Adrian Fontes, spoke with us earlier about what “he” took from the report.

“I’m glad I guess, we’re getting close to the end. That’s my first thought. My second thought though is… the Cyber Ninjas didn’t find any fraud and some of the things that they have questioned, they didn’t really have answers for…they’ve even said there’s some reasonable explanations,” Fontes said.

He continued that those two main things are very important, “if there was no fraud then there was no fraud and number two if they still have unanswered questions then they didn’t do their job. Because their job was to investigate, their job was to look at these things, their job was to understand these things, as Karen Fann would say, so they could improve the systems.”

Fontes questions that if they did their job, why would they still have unanswered questions, that they admit could be reasonably answered.

When asked what surprised Fontes about the report, he mentioned, “some of their recommendations are already things that we do in elections in Arizona. Saying that we should look at the national change of address database to do a check against NCOA, we already do that before every single election because the County is going to be mailing out millions of ballots, why would we want to send them to somewhere where we can check the address, we’re going to save 30,40,50-thousand ballots worth of postage.”

Another suggestion that surprised him was the checking of databases like social security, etc. to have a solid look at who is eligible to vote. He said, “that’s automatic voter registration…I’ve been advocating for that. You get a much more complete list.”