“Arizona Analysis Shows That Many Republicans Did Not Vote for Trump in 2020”

Steven Rosenfeld:

About 75,000 Republican-leaning voters in Arizona’s two most populous counties did not vote to re-elect President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, according to an analysis of every vote cast by a longtime Arizona Republican Party election observer and election technologists familiar with vote-counting data.

The analysis from Maricopa and Pima Counties underscored that the Arizona state Senate’s ongoing audit of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County’s November 2020 election was based on a false premise—that Democrats stole Arizona’s election where Trump lost statewide to Joe Biden by 10,457 votes.

“I am continuing my analysis of why Trump lost in Arizona,” Benny White, a former military and commercial pilot who has been a Republican election observer for years in Pima County and was part of the research team, said in a May 10 Facebook post. “Bottom line: Republicans and non-partisans who voted for other Republicans on the ballot did not vote for Trump, some voted for Biden and some simply did not cast an effective vote for President.”

The analysis, whose methodology is similar to academic research by political scientists, offers a counternarrative to Trump’s continuing claims that he lost a rigged election. It also underscores that election experts can extract records from voting systems to affirm and explain the results, such as showing that at least 75,000 Arizonans voted for many other GOP candidates but not for Trump….

Bryan Blehm, an Arizona attorney representing Cyber Ninjas, replied to White’s post on Facebook—without identifying that relationship—by saying that White was not working with reliable data and was angling for a job with Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

“Of course data facts matter,” Blehm wrote on May 10. “That is why Mr. White relies on data supplied to him by government buearocrats [sic] rather than the actual real data. Hence, he questions anyone actually working with the underlying real data. I think Mr. White is pushing for a job with the Secretary of State.”

However, a handful of political scientists who study voter turnout confirmed that using cast-vote records to analyze voting patterns, including voters who split their votes between major party candidates, was a standard research methodology.

“Yes, political scientists have done research using cast-vote records,” said Charles Stewart III, who directs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. “Last year, I published a co-authored article that looked at the 2016 election, and we concluded that Republicans were much more likely to abstain in that election than Democrats—and the Republicans who did abstain had been anti-Trump in the primary.”

“This approach is similar to research we have done,” said Matthew Thornburg, a University of South Carolina Aiken assistant professor of political science. “What we find in political science research is that voters are more likely to defect in races they know more about. In presidential races, everyone knows the candidates well by November and can be persuaded by factors other than partisanship.”

“Given that you have the data, you can make all kinds of analyses,” said Duncan Buell, chair emeritus of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of South Carolina, who has analyzed public election records in a half-dozen states. “This is not rocket science, and it is not partisan.”

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