Topic: Newsmax
Brian Truesdell wrote in a Sept. 24 Newsmax article:
Auditors who reviewed voting results cast in Maricopa County, Arizona, in last November's election said Joe Biden's vote total was 99 more than officially certified — and Donald Trump's was 261 fewer.
But at the same time, they maintained they'd found multiple election anomalies, among them more than 17,000 duplicate ballots.
The findings of the audit, commissioned by Arizona Senate Republicans and conducted by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, were both hailed and decried by Trump critics. At once, they said the review debunked the former president's claim of fraud, but also disputed other assertions of irregularities at the polls.
That was the only reference to "critics" or any other viewpoint Truesdell would make in the article. The rest of his article largely consisted of repeating claims about the audit by those who conducted it and by Donald Trump, who hyped its results. He wrote at one point:
Among others who testified was Shiva Ayyadurai, who identified himself as an expert in pattern recognition with more than 40 years of experience. He raised several issues with the county's signature verification system — particularly the mail-in ballots, including voters receiving more than one voter ID number.
Truesdell didn't tell his readers that, as we've noted, Ayyadurai mislead in his stated finding and appeared to have no knowledge of Maricopa County policies and procedures regarding the early ballot envelopes and signature verification.
Truesdell touted Trump's comments about the audit results but didn't mention that, as even a Newsmax article earlier in the day by Jeffrey Rodack admitted, a newspaper found the results misleading and factually dubious. The closest Truesdell got to noting that the audit would have no impact onthe 2020 election was an admmission that "The after-the-fact audit is not expected to change the election results retroactively" -- though he then promoted how "Trump supporters" have embraced the audit.
