Presenting on Friday its findings in a six-month review of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona’s largest county, a Republican-backed cybersecurity venture ended in roughly the same place it began: without any evidence to contradict the certified election results showing that Joe Biden won.

Yet Cyber ​​Ninjas, which had never audited an election before, spread numerous lies that ignored the basic facts of how elections work in Maricopa County, including unfounded allegations of duplicate ballots. , missing files and illegitimate votes.

Over the weekend, snippets of the company’s findings – including various versions of its report – proliferated on social media, prompting an increase in bogus posts suggesting the election results were wrong. Biden won Maricopa County by around 45,000 votes, the key to its 10,500 victory over Arizona.

Here is a closer look at some of the claims.

CLAIM: More than 57,000 ballots cast in Maricopa County had serious problems and should have been disqualified.

THE FACTS: This is not true. The number is calculated from a long list of misleading claims debunked in a draft report.

Claims that there were 57,734 ballots with “serious problems”, which were “illegal” or “should have been disqualified” cite the sum of what one draft report called “Ballots Impacted”. The draft itself stated, “In many cases there could be legitimate and legal votes in the amount of impact of the ballots.”

In fact, the three most important parts of the total – all of the so-called voting problems presented as being of “critical” or “high” severity – are flawed.

One of the “critical” figures included in the total is 23,344 mail-in ballots cast by people who allegedly moved before the ballots were mailed. But that number is based on an unrelated business database, and that doesn’t mean something wrong has happened. Election officials explained many voters move to temporary locations while still voting legally at their registered addresses.

Another statement added to the total is that 9,041 voters were recorded as receiving one mail-in ballot, but returning two. However, Maricopa County said on twitter that this happens when a voter returns a ballot with an incorrect signature – such as a blank or non-compliant signature – and election officials contact the voter to resolve the issue. A second record is then created in the system. In these cases, of course, only one ballot is counted per voter.

The draft report also included the flawed claim that 10,342 voters voted in multiple counties.

__

CLAIM: Voters who voted in multiple counties totaled 10,342.

THE FACTS: This claim from a draft Cyber ​​Ninjas report is false. The number is a count of the votes of people who share the same full names and birth years. Experts say such an overlap is common in a county where more than two million people have voted.

County officials gave an example on Twitter: “If you search for Maria Garcia born in 1980, you will get 7 active voters in Maricopa County and 12 statewide. And that’s just a name.

Election officers typically rely on additional information to maintain voter lists, such as the full date of birth and the last four digits of a voter’s social security number.

Cyber ​​Ninjas softened its language in the final report, saying it was plausible that the repeated names and birth years could come from “legitimate and distinct individual voters.”

__

CLAIM: More than 17,000 duplicate ballots were counted in the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County.

THE FACTS: No, they weren’t. Shiva Ayyadurai, the COVID-19 vaccine skeptic and failed US Senate candidate who made the claim, based his analysis on images of ballot envelopes, not ballots. Unlike Ayyadurai’s assessment, there are often images of the same ballot envelope, but the ballot inside is only counted once.

Departmental electoral officials to say they re-scan the images of the ballot envelopes every time a voter submits an envelope with a blank or incompatible signature and the problem is resolved. When the county contacts the voter and signs the envelope, a new image of the envelope is captured.

Since the Senate summons requested all ballot envelope images, the county included both original and duplicate envelope images, even though each ballot was only counted as one. one time.

Ayyadurai also pointed out that many images of duplicate ballot envelopes arrived after election day. There is a simple explanation for this: Under Arizona law, there is a five working day period after an election during which voters can correct certain irregularities with their ballots. Maricopa County hired additional staff to contact voters and resolve discrepancies in the final days of voting and in the days following the election.

Social media users took advantage of a moment in Ayyadurai’s presentation when he said Maricopa County did not list duplicate ballots in its prospecting report. But this report lists the number of ballots cast, counted and rejected, and does not deal with the scanned images of the ballot envelopes.

___

CLAIM: Maricopa County purged records from the 2020 election machine the day before an external review of the vote began.

THE FACTS: Data never went away. As officials moved election data from a server to backup drives to prepare for a county-commissioned audit in February, they archived and preserved everything, the county confirmed.

Maricopa County has denied claims it was ‘CAPPED’ by intentionally deleting data in some sort of sinister plot, explaining that there was not enough space for the data to remain on the server indefinitely. .

“We have backups for all of the November data and this archive has never been subpoenaed,” Maricopa County tweeted Friday.

__

Associated Press writer Jude Joffe-Block contributed to this Phoenix report.

__

This is part of AP’s efforts to tackle widely shared misinformation, including working with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to the deceptive content circulating online. Learn more about fact checking at AP.