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| - FACT CHECK: Did Preliminary Results Of The Audit In Arizona Find 950,000 Fraudulent Votes?
A viral Facebook post claims preliminary results of the Maricopa County, Arizona, election audit found that there were 950,000 fraudulent votes and that former President Donald Trump is ahead by 250,000 votes.
Verdict: False
The results of the audit have not been released as of May 11. A state Senate liaison for the audit has refuted the claim.
Fact Check:
The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate launched an audit of Maricopa County’s nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election, the Arizona Republic reported. The audit is being conducted by several companies, including, Cyber Ninjas, a firm whose founder has previously shared unsubstantiated claims about the results of the November election, according to the Associated Press.
An image claims in a post to show preliminary results of the audit, saying, “Trump is ahead by 250,000 votes. At the moment, almost 950,000 ballots have been declared illegal. Almost all of them were intended for Biden.”
However, the audit is still ongoing, and the Arizona State Senate Republicans have not released any results pertaining to it so far. A search of the Twitter account associated with the Senate audit returned no announcement of preliminary results as of May 11.
Major media outlets have covered the status of the audit. If the companies doing the audit had announced such findings, those media outlets almost certainly would have covered it, yet none have.
Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and the state Senate’s liaison to the recount, told PolitiFact “there’s no preliminary results.”
“There’s no such finding,” Bennett said, according to PolitiFact. “There’s been no findings released to either of those effects.” (RELATED: Did An Election Audit In Arizona Uncover ‘A Quarter Of A Million Illegal Votes’?)
Check Your Fact has previously debunked claims related to the audit, including allegations that 250,000 fraudulent votes had been found and that the election technology firm Dominion Voting Systems had a team of 70 lawyers try to stop the audit from taking place.
President Joe Biden won the state of Arizona by over 10,000 votes, receiving 1,672,143 votes, whereas former President Donald Trump received 1,661,686 votes, according to election results from the Arizona Secretary of State. Previous audits conducted by the independent firms found that the Maricopa County ballots were counted correctly, the Arizona Republic reported.
Check Your Fact sent a request for comment to the email associated with the audit and will update this article if a response is provided.
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