Arizona recount auditors have found the files of voting data Trump claimed were destroyed as part of a plot to deprive him of victory

Tom Porter
·2 min read
trump vote count arizona
A composite image of former President Donald Trump and a photo of the Arizona ballot recount. AP

  • Arizona election auditors said Tuesday they'd found files that were initially thought to be missing.

  • Trump had seized on claims of missing voter data to push his election fraud "Big Lie."

  • The GOP-commissioned Arizona recount has been heavily mocked and criticized.

  • See more stories on Insider's business page.

Auditors conducting the Republican-commissioned recount of 2020 election votes in Arizona's Maricopa County have found files of voter data that former President Donald Trump falsely claimed had been destroyed.

In a statement last week, Trump seized on a claim by auditors that data they subpoenaed while conducting the recount had gone missing as he pushed his conspiracy theory that last year's election was stolen from him.

"The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!" Trump wrote at the time, claiming that journalists were too afraid to cover the story.

The statement had drawn a withering response from Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, who had called the statement "unhinged."

But on Tuesday it turned out that the missing data had been found. Ben Cotton, one of the auditing officials, told state senators that the files had been located on different computer hard drives to the ones they had been searching, the Associated Press reported.

Collins went on to describe Trump's claim that files were deleted as a "moot point," the AP reported.

In a Tuesday tweet, Maricopa County officials criticized the auditors for making the baseless accusation about missing data in the first place.

"Just want to underscore that AZ Senate's @ArizonaAudit account accused Maricopa County of deleting files- which would be a crime- then a day after our technical letter explained they were just looking in the wrong place," the tweet said.

"All of a sudden 'auditors' have recovered the files," officials said.

The ballot recount, which was commissioned by the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate in April, has been embroiled in allegations of mismanagement and partisan bias for weeks. State Republican officials, the Arizona secretary of state, and the Justice Department have all raised concerns.

The state GOP claims that the recount is necessary as part of an investigation into tightening election integrity, but critics, including Maricopa's GOP-controlled election board, have described it as a sham, driven by the desire to give credibility to Trump's election-fraud conspiracy theories.

At a Tuesday meeting, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann said that despite criticism of the audit, it would go ahead.

The audit was scheduled to be wrapped up on May 14, but is now expected to go on for several more weeks.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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