And county officials say ballots cannot be counted without human review.

Brnovic cited a letter to his office from Edward Novak, a private attorney representing the county. Novak explained how the software will be used to sort the ballot envelopes into batches. One batch is classified as high confidence that the voter’s signature matches what is on file, the other as low confidence.

The Attorney General’s Office, which filed a letter with the Capitol Media Service in response to a request for public records, said this is the basis for the allegations made by Brnovic in a recent podcast with Steve Bannon.

But the letter itself seems to undermine the claim that a computer determines which signatures are valid and which early votes count.

In a March 31 letter to Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright, Novak said, “Facilitators ignore high and low trust labels and follow these cues with the same procedures established for all signature reviews. We are trained to treat them equally,” he wrote.

This is corroborated by other documents obtained separately from Maricopa County by Capitol Media Services.

And Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Recorder and Elections Office, elaborated on this point.

“It’s 100% human-verified,” Gilbertson said.

Brnovic’s allegations were made during an April 7 appearance on Bannon’s podcast. Bannon, a former adviser to former President Donald Trump, has become one of the main supporters of the discredited allegations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Brnovic was one of the first Arizona Republicans to initially dismiss claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Republican candidates.

“If there was really some big conspiracy, it obviously didn’t work,” he told Fox News a week after the election. Instead, Brunovich said it was a simple matter of Arizona voters splitting their ballots and electing Democrats for President and Senate, and leaving Republicans in obscure congressional, legislative and local elections. .

“There is no evidence, no facts to make us believe that the outcome of the election will change,” he said.

But Brnovic is now running for the U.S. Senate and is trying to distance himself from other Republican contenders. He has also come under pressure from some pro-Trump factions within the Republican Party to allege fraud and file criminal charges against county and state election officials.

In a podcast with Bannon, the attorney general discussed an “interim report” released on April 6 regarding the review of offices for the 2020 election, with Maricopa County in particular in mind.

The report provides no evidence of fraud other than the few individuals charged with voter fraud. But Mr. Brnovic told Mr. Bannon that the report revealed problems.

“There is reason for people to be concerned about how this 2020 election was handled,” Brnovic said.

He repeated allegations in the interim report that the county sometimes took less than five seconds to verify each signature on each ballot. To date, however, Brnovic has not provided the Congressional Media Service with the numbers he used to draw that conclusion, which county officials dispute.

Brnovic also spoke to Bannon about the claims of artificial intelligence. “Just this week we received another letter from their lawyers, which is not on the report, but acknowledged for the first time that they are using AI to verify signatures,” he said. .

“The whole signature verification process, regardless of where it falls on the spectrum, is trying to verify hundreds of thousands of signatures so quickly is troubling and disturbing,” Brnovic continued. “And of course, the question arises as to how humanly it is possible.”

What is clear is that the computer is part of the process.

Gilbertson said all signatures on ballot envelopes will be scanned and a human will review the signatures on a computer screen and compare them to the signatures on file rather than handling individual envelopes.

But the county also uses computer software to analyze the signature strip on all early ballots. “We’re collecting data in the background,” Gilbertson said.

The goal, he says, is to determine whether a computer can identify and sort unsigned envelopes. Gilbertson said that would give the administrators the envelopes right away, and they would call voters and give them an opportunity to come to the county office and turn in the missing signatures by 7:00 p.m. on Election Day. Said I can give. This is a measure permitted by state law.

An initial sort is also performed in the same process.

According to documents obtained by Capitol Media Services, “the current affidavit signature (on the ballot) will be compared to past reference signatures that have been previously verified and determined to be good signatures.” It says.

If they are comparable, the record (in this case the signature) is placed in the high confidence queue. If it cannot be compared or if there is no reference record, it will be placed in the unreliable queue.

The county’s response to Brnovic doesn’t stop there.

It reads, “Staff should evaluate each record in the same way by comparing the gross and local features of each signature.”

“This technology is not used for signature verification,” Gilbertson added.

The current Republican administration at the County Registrar’s Office isn’t the only one to issue such a statement. That’s also the assessment of then-County Recorder Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who lost to Republican Stephen Richer in the 2020 election.

“Every envelope had to have a human eye,” Fontes said.

Brnovic’s press aide, Katie Conner, declined to comment further on the boss’s allegations or the content of Novak’s letter. Instead, she issued a prepared statement that the Secretariat “will continue to be committed to the integrity of the election.”