The election integrity organization We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA), which discovered in 2022 that Maricopa County ballot affidavit reviewers were verifying signatures at speeds of up to one signature per second, revealed in a new video this week that reviewers during the 2024 election also verified signatures at a similarly rapid pace.
The group alleged that AI was used, especially in the 2020 election, which the county had previously denied, despite it being mentioned in contracts.
WPAA’s co-founder Shelby Busch, Bryan Blehm, who represented Kari Lake in her election challenge, and WPAA’s technical guru Chris Handsel, who has over 20 years computer experience with databases, analyzed a chart Handsel put together showing a timeline of how many signatures were verified in the days leading up to last fall’s election.
The group observed that up to 25,000 ballot affidavits were reviewed per day during the week immediately preceding the election. Busch said that with employees working 7-hour days, with a break, they would have had to verify one signature per second at a nonstop pace without slowing down.
“I think, my opinion is, that’s pretty solid evidence that these are most likely being digitally and sort of manipulated. I don’t see how a human can maintain that clicking pace. I think that’s a … [Guinness] World Book record,” she stated.
Blehm said that the private vendor Runbeck Election Services was hired to conduct AI verification of signatures. Runbeck came under suspicion after the 2022 election for refusing to turn over video of its loading docks to WPAA, fighting them in court over it and denying there was any video.
Handsel said the signature verification speed hadn’t changed much since the 2020 election. “We don’t see any significant improvement over 2020, at least from this point of view, things kicked into gear after October 14,” he said, referring to the 2024 chart and comparing it with a chart of signature verification he put together from 2020. “You can see that there’s still lots of purple — five to 10k ballots processed by a person on a day.”
Busch speculated that AI signature verification was used in 2020. “They used a total of 220 workers to perform signature verification on what was approximately 1.4 million ballot affidavits,” she said. “So they literally used nearly twice as many workers to perform signature verification on half a million less ballots, and they were still having to hyper process and speed click to get the job done. Again, do you not think this may be credible data supporting the idea that non-human interactions were being done in 2020? The fact that we’re able to do a half a million more.”
Handsel responded, “This is still fraudulent signature verification.” Busch added, “I believe mail-in ballots and signature verification are criminal,” and Blehm said he agreed “wholeheartedly.”
He added, “Just the day after the election, 18,000 ballot affidavit envelopes with voted ballots within those envelopes that they promptly then added to the mix and counted — the ability for fraud in our elections based upon mail in voting is huge.”
Blehm said, “I don’t know of any countries other than maybe some of the Western democracies that have the same problems we’re having politically, that allow widespread use of mail-in voting because of the fraud.”
Handsel pushed back on the frequently touted fact that 80 percent of Arizona voters cast their ballots by mail. He said, “80 percent of the voters in Arizona got signed up for mail-in ballots, and they’ve left themselves on the mail-in ballot voter roll. But I would suspect that many of them are like me [in the past], who just stay on it as a matter of convenience because they don’t know what’s wrong with mail-in voting.”
Blehm said, “We absolutely do not believe that the Maricopa County Recorder in the 2022 general election followed Arizona law. … The problem was Judge Thompson came out after we presented our findings to the court, and in trial number two of Kari Lake, the judge found that the law allows discretion to the recorder to determine whether or not signatures are valid or not, and that he had no authority to overrule that.”
During Lake’s trial contesting her election loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race to Katie Hobbs, her attorney Kurt Olsen disagreed and said the extremely fast review did not comply with A.R.S. 16-550(A), which was “designed to stop voter fraud.” He said, “There are defined criteria for comparing a signature with a record statement or to verify whether it is consistent or not.” Olsen said the word “shall” means comparing signatures is “mandatory,” and “the law is not that flexible.”
Olsen demonstrated that the approval rate for signature verification was nearly 99.99 percent. In contrast, he pointed out that then-Maricopa County Co-Elections director Rey “Valenzuela testified that when he reviewed approximately 1,600 ballots, he rejected about 311,” Olsen said. “That’s a pass rate of about 81 percent.”
Former Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent a letter in April 2022 to then-Senate President Karen Fann, stating that his Election Integrity Unit civil attorney, Jennifer Wright, found “problematic system-wide issues that relate to early ballot handling and verification.” The signature verification system in place within Maricopa County is “insufficient to guard against abuse,” Brnovich said. Part of the problem, he said, was that election workers had only seconds for each signature verification, averaging 4.6 seconds.
In Reyes v. Cuming, a case where signatures on the envelopes were not compared to the voter registration list, violating a non-technical statute, the Arizona Court of Appeals said that where “almost one-third of the ballots cast counted without compliance with A.R.S. section 16-550(A), the trial court abuses its discretion by finding that the Recorder substantially complied with the statute. To rule otherwise would ‘affect the result or at least render it uncertain,’” citing Miller v. Picacho Elementary School District No. 33.
The court said, “Miller established that an election contestant need only show that absentee ballots counted in violation of a non-technical statute changed the outcome of the election; actual fraud is not a necessary element. … Therefore, the trial court’s finding that there was no evidence that any ballots were cast by persons other than registered voters is irrelevant.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to .
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