Arizona Senate Majority Leader Karen Fann, a Republican, said the state Senate doesn’t have the ability to recall electors for the Nov. 3 election, after a fellow Republican lawmaker called for new elections.
Fann told One America News Network (OANN), which has been covering the audit of Maricopa County, that the upper chamber has the ability to provide auditors with the materials they need—including via using subpoenas—but the certification of electors is a different matter.
“The Senate body—we do not have the authority to do that. So, this is what we have said, and I want to make this very clear on the record,” the Republican state leader said on Friday.
It came as former President Donald Trump issued a statement declaring that the audit revealed there were irregularities and fraud that would have swayed the election in his favor last year. On July 15, the Senate held a hearing in the midst of a months-long review carried out by Florida-based tech firm Cyber Ninjas, and teams told lawmakers they discovered discrepancies.
Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, told senators that auditors couldn’t find any record of Maricopa County sending some 74,000 mail-in ballots and also discovered that around 18,000 people voted but were taken off voter rolls “soon after the election.” He added that there were “11,326 people who were not on the voter rolls on Nov. 7, 2020, but appeared on the rolls on Dec. 4, 2020, and 3,981 people who voted after registering after Oct. 15, 2020.”
After the hearing, some GOP senators called for Arizona’s 11 electors—who went for Biden—to be recalled.
“A new election must be conducted. Arizona’s electors must not be awarded fraudulently & we need to get this right,” Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican, wrote in a pair of Twitter posts last week.
But Fann, in her OANN interview, said that the Senate in this situation only has “the ability to subpoena information because we make laws,” adding that they’re “entitled to have the information to determine how to write those laws.”
