The Election Systems Integrity Institute (ESII) released a concerning report that has prompted the Attorney General’s Office of Arizona to demand officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, to surrender mail-in ballot signature files from the 2020 presidential election.
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, a systems engineer and the founder of ESII, conducted a study that exposed the flawed process used by Maricopa County to authenticate signatures written on mail-in ballots. The report indicates that nearly 200,000 ballot envelopes with incompatible signatures were counted without a second review. In one particular case, duplicated ballots more than doubled the number of voters assigned to the polling ticket.
Ayyadurai’s team discovered that 34,448 duplicate ballot envelopes were linked to 17,126 voters. However, Maricopa County officials dismissed the discrepancy and ensured that the duplicates were returned to the respective owner after going through the curing process. ESII argues that Maricopa County failed to send back the correct number of duplicated ballots.
According to ESII, “Researchers reported that 11.3 percent of the 1.9 million mail-in ballots should have gone through the curing process, rather than the 1.31 percent that did.” Referencing ESII’s report in the letter written to Maricopa County officials, Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright, R-Ariz., stated that “In the study, it is alleged that over 250 of those sampled ballot affidavits on the envelopes did not appear to match the voter’s signatures.”
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, R-Ariz., responded to the matter by asking, “What are they hiding,” after Maricopa County officials refused to comply with the Attorney General’s office. Fann, however, isn’t the only president to vocalize an opinion. President Donald Trump slammed the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors for withholding information that the “American people deserve” to know.
Election integrity is a top priority among voters, and according to Trump, “there is no time to waste.”