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The Arizona Senate-ordered audit of Maricopa County s general election will take a one-week hiatus at the end of the week to make way for high school graduations at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.
The plan is to move the ballots and equipment to another area of the Arizona State Fairgrounds on Friday and move back in May 23 to pick back up on May 24.
“We’ll stand aside and secure all the ballots and equipment here on the property and be ready to go when they’re finished,” said the state Senate s audit liaison Ken Bennett.
Jen Yee, assistant executive director at the Arizona State Fair and Exposition, confirmed the plan, but said nothing had been signed as of Monday.
May 10, 2021 12:00 p.m.
Arizona Senate Republicans’ conspiracy-theory-infused “audit” of 2020’s election results in Maricopa County will soon be interrupted by the sounds of Arizona teenagers celebrating the end of their high school years.
That’s right: Having counted just a fraction of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots, audit leaders at the end of the week will have to pack up and clear the floor of Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum to make space for… graduations. Several days of them.
Audit leaders haven’t been totally clear about what happens after that: Their lease on the Coliseum which they obtained after Maricopa County made clear that they wouldn’t allow the audit to take place at a county facility runs through Friday.
A review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, ordered by the Republican-led Arizona Senate, is far behind schedule and won’t be finished in the time frame officials previously promised.
That puts completion of the audit and recount of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in November in doubt.
Firms hired by Senate President Karen Fann (R-Prescott) have been conducting the review inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds since April 23. In late April, Fann’s liaison, former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, told reporters they’d pick up the pace after getting off to a slow start.
As of Wednesday morning, though, Bennett estimated that roughly 200,000 ballots had been recounted so far. The recount effort, led by the Florida-based cybersecurity company Cyber Ninjas, has increased its capacity by adding more tables at which groups of three workers count votes for president and U.S. Senate on ballots. The firms have struggled to fill those tables, however
Crazy Times Carnival to take place on same grounds as Maricopa County election audit Nicole Sadek, Arizona Republic
The Arizona State Fairgrounds announced Monday that a new carnival will kick off Thursday on the same grounds where a Maricopa County election audit is taking place.
Maintaining security at the coliseum has been a key concern during the audit.
Jen Yee, a spokesperson for the fairgrounds, said the carnival will be fenced off, with the north lot set aside for audit parking.
The fairgrounds marketing team brainstormed names for possible live events early in the pandemic when the world first imploded, Yee said. They came up with Crazy Times Carnival well before the Nov. 3 election or before anyone imagined a ballot recount happening inside the coliseum.