A Pennsylvania state senator and ally of former President Trump said his state should conduct an audit of the 2020 election modeled on Arizona’s review, after receiving a briefing on the intensive recount operation in Maricopa County.
State Sen. Doug Mastriano and two fellow Republican legislators from Pennsylvania toured the audit operation in Phoenix on Wednesday. Pennsylvania’s legislature has not yet considered a proposal to conduct a similar audit of the 2020 presidential election in the wake of persistent complaints from Mr. Trump and his supporters that the state vote counts were badly flawed.
“I’m impressed. This is a model for any audit in any nation or the world,” Mr. Mastriano told the Gateway Pundit. “We need to do an audit and this is the model.”
Mr. Mastriano also told WEEO-FM that his group would take the “information back to the Senate leadership” in Harrisburg and “back-brief them on the way ahead.”
“And then hopefully we can come up with an approach here to make sure every person in Pennsylvania can rest assured they have one vote, and it counts,” he said.
After viewing the procedure in Maricopa County, Mr. Mastriano said he was impressed by the controls put in place by the auditors.
“This audit is so secure, transparent and organized that other states want to duplicate the process,” he said.
Arizona Senate Republicans ordered the audit of the 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa, the state’s most populous county. The count is about halfway completed. President Biden won the county by about 45,000 votes.
Mr. Biden also won Pennsylvania, by a margin of more than 80,000 votes.
The audit won’t change the outcome of Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona, but it could become a model for Republicans who are questioning the results in other states. A group called Audit the Vote PA has collected about 65,000 signatures for a petition asking state legislators to launch their own election investigation.
Wake Technology Services Inc., an information technology company that is conducting a hand recount of the nearly 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, also conducted an election audit in rural Fulton County, Pennsylvania, at the request of Mr. Mastriano.
Wake TSI is part of the audit team in Arizona led by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity company.