By Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX -- The head of the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding access to copies of the more than two million ballots cast by Maricopa County voters in last month's election.
And Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, R-Gilbert, wants access to the equipment used to tabulate those ballots and the software that ran the equipment.
Farnsworth said there needs to be an audit of the votes to determine if the results reported actually match the votes marked on the ballots. And the only way that can happen, he told Capitol Media Services, is if forensic examiners have access to everything.
The subpoenas, served on county supervisors on Tuesday, call for the information to be delivered to Farnsworth before 5 p.m. on Friday.
Farnsworth told Capitol Media Services that doesn't mean he expects the county to haul the equipment to his Senate offices. Instead, he said, it means that the county must provide full access to auditors who can take a look at not just the equipment but also the programming.
Those auditors, Farnsworth said, have yet to be selected.
The subpoenas are a direct result of a six-hour hearing of the Judiciary Committee on Monday where lawmakers raised a series of questions about the conduct of the election. Some of those dealt with procedural matters, like the level of access given to political party observers during the process of opening early ballots, comparing signatures and counting.
But the biggest questions surrounded the use of Dominion Voting Systems hardware and software and whether it could be counted on to deliver accurate results.
Farnsworth has not leveled some of the charges brought by lawyers for President Trump who have said the company deliberately programmed the machines to either ignore votes for the Republican or convert them into ballots for Democrat Joe Biden. But he said there is a need to take a closer look, at least at some level.
He compared it to an audit done of voting equipment in Michigan.
"I don't believe they ended up going into the proprietary 'base code,' '' he said.
"But those things can be adjusted or manipulated by introducing (changes), either through a USB or some other kind of card,'' Farnsworth said. He said that requires that auditors have access "to whatever they need'' to determine if the programming was in any way altered or whether it might just be flawed.
"These are the experts who do this,'' Farnsworth said.
The senator, who is leaving the legislature at the end of the year, said he's not suggesting there is fraud.
"There may be fraud,'' he said. "But what I'm suggesting is if there are irregularities because of some flaw in the code or somebody tampered with the code by adding a USB drive or anything else, I just want them to have access to the information so they can do a full forensic audit.''
And if no fraud is found?
"Well, that goes a long way to restore confidence in our election process,'' Farnsworth said. "And if we do find fraud, that's what we need to do is somehow identify it and see what we can do to stop it.''
Farnsworth said while he wants digital copies of all two million ballots, that doesn't mean the auditors will need to review all of them to determine if the results reported match what was marked on the ballots. He said it will be up to auditors to determine how many they need to make them comfortable with the results.
That move comes despite statements by Scott Jarrett, the county's elections director, who pointed out that such a hand-count audit already was conducted by reviewing more than 47,000 ballots that were selected by officials from both political parties. He told lawmakers that there was a 100% match between what reviewers found by looking at the ballots with what the machines tallied.