GOP Rep. Andy Biggs told a Democrat colleague that "we don't know" who won the 2020 election in Arizona in a terse back-and-forth during a House hearing that reviewed an audit about the disputed results from Maricopa County.
The Arizona Republican, a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump, got into a heated exchange with Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., during Thursday's House Committee for Oversight and Reform hearing in which Arizona election officials testified, the Washington Examiner reported.
Raskin asked Biggs, "Who won the election in Arizona — Donald Trump or Joe Biden?"
"We don't know," Biggs answered. "As the audit demonstrates very clearly, Mr. Raskin, there are a lot of issues with this election that took place."
Biggs maintains that the Maricopa County audit's findings, which reiterated that the votes counted the first time were essentially the ones counted the second time and resulted in Biden winning the county, left unanswered questions about the integrity of last year's election.
The audit found multiple election anomalies, among them more than 17,000 duplicate ballots.
Maricopa County Supervisors Jack Sellers and Bill Gates, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, Gowri Ramachandran of the Brennan Center for Justice, and Arizona Senate audit liaison Ken Bennett testified before the oversight committee.
Sellers and Gates, both Republicans, were critics of the state Senate-led audit, the Examiner said.
Maricopa County officials were alleged to have experienced chain of custody problems with nearly 2.1 million ballots given to the Senate for auditing purposes in April this year.
"I disagree with that," Sellers said.
Bennett, however, said that out of "1,691 boxes there were some 40 boxes of errors." He cited examples such as "two boxes that were on the manifests but not present on the pallets. And then we found three boxes that were on different pallets than they were listed."
The Examiner reported that officials strongly resisted additional subpoenas seeking sensitive equipment before the state Senate and county officials came to a last-minute agreement to provide router information sought as part of the audit.
Bennett said the audit's hand recount of the 2020 election results closely aligned with the official post-election count by Maricopa County.
He added that the county's election recount utilized 26 batches of ballots out of 10,341 total, each batch containing 200 ballots, noting "it's not even a random sample."
"It's very front-loaded, and it's not a random sample of all 10,341 batches," Bennett said.
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