by WorldTribune Staff, February 24, 2022
Election officials in Maricopa County counted more than 200,000 mail-in ballots with mismatched signatures without review in the 2020 election, according to a scientific study by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai.
The ballots were counted without being reviewed (“cured”), according to the study, which was commissioned by the Arizona Senate.
"This is a first study, to the best of our knowledge, to calculate signature matching rates, to provide a quantitative framework for assessing signature verification of mail ballots, the whole area of mail in ballots obviously has become a very controversial area, it’s split up the country, there’s a lot of division," Dr. Ayyadurai said.
There were 1,911,918 early voting, mail ballots that were received and counted in Maricopa County in 2020. The county reported no more than 25,000 of these ballots (1.31%) as having signature mismatches.
Dr. Shiva said his study found a 12 percent signature mismatch rate.
"Our pilot study recruited three novices and three experts forensic document examiners to calculate signature matching rates on the same sample of 499 AVB envelopes," Dr. Ayyadurai said. "All six reviewers who were presented images of EVP envelopes evaluate if the signature on those envelopes match with the genuine signatures on file, concurred 60 of those 499. So all six, agreed that they were all mismatches.
The six reviewers all worked independently.
"Maricopa says 1.3%. Now based on the study, over 200,000, early voting ballots have should have been cured, versus at most 25,000, that the county actually cured," Dr. Ayyadurai said.
Dr. Ayyadurai testified to state Senate leadership last month that his team’s review found thousands of duplicate ballots, suggesting people voted more than once. Ayyadurai, who holds a PhD in systems engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that there were 34,448 ballot envelopes from just 17,126 unique voters.
Related: MIT biologist suggests panic over coronavirus was intentional, March 15, 2020
Joe Biden reportedly won Arizona by less than 11,000 votes.
Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington said in a Telegram post: "This analysis by Dr. Shiva is unimpeachable. 6 people -- 3 forensic document examiners and 3 novices all agreed that 12 PERCENT of early mail-in ballots had mismatched signatures Maricopa County only sent 1.3% for curing."
Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, says the discrepancies found in the audit of Maricopa County's 2020 election ballots must be further investigated to determine if illegal and/or result-changing conduct occurred.
“This audit is just the start of what needs to be done in Maricopa County,” von Spakovsky, now an election law expert with The Heritage Foundation, told Newsmax.
Newsmax host Heather Childers highlighted some of the potentially problematic issues reportedly uncovered by auditors, including 23,344 mail-in ballots sent from a prior address, 10,342 potential voters who voted in multiple counties, and 9,041 more ballots returned by voters than received.
“What this shows is frankly great sloppiness in Maricopa County in election officials not properly doing their job,” von Spakovsky said. “If they find, for example, that there were individuals who were registered in more than one county and voted twice, those people need to be referred to law enforcement for investigation and possible prosecution.”
