Arizona GOP chairwoman rejects election audit attacks: 'World-class experts' conducting review

Amid the Maricopa County election audit, former Arizona state Sen. Kelli Ward on Wednesday called biased media and misreporting "un-American."

"It is not the First Amendment," Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, also said on the "John Solomon Reports' podcast.

While discussing the 2020 election audit and what she considers the media's biased portrayal of election integrity laws, Ward also told Solomon, "The free press is what is supposed to protect us as the citizenry from corruption in any part of our government, not in one party versus another. They're supposed to tell us the truth so that we can think about it, we can digest it, and we can make our own decisions. And that's been taken away."

"Look at Facebook and their so-called commission that I think it's made up of communists and anti-American, anti-free speech zealots, who have now permanently banned the former president of the United States of America from their platform, when they still have terrorists — they still have leaders of countries that have no human rights whatsoever, who are able to spout off on their platform. And the former president, who, you know, still hasn't conceded the 2020 election, is not able to communicate with the masses. It's unconscionable," continued Ward, referring to Trump being banned from major social media sites including Facebook and Twitter.

Ward also explained the process for the Maricopa County election audit, ordered by the GOP-controlled state Senate.

"We're looking for objective information about what happened,"she said. "So we aren't just doing a simple run the ballots back through the same machine and see if the numbers match up on the tape, from the zero to what we expect it to be.

"There's a full hand-count going on of 2.1 million ballots. So there are teams that are looking at every single paper ballot, and they're deciding, you know, what that ballot -- how it was cast, and they are tabulating those, so it takes a lot of time."

The experts that they hired to do this audit, you know, the left is trying to discredit them and belittle them and really besmirch their abilities, they are world-class experts at doing the work that is being done in Arizona. And so we're not just looking at the paper ballots, we're looking at the paper, we're looking to make sure that those ballots are legitimate, and at the machinery to make sure that the hardware, the software, the logs, etc., were also legitimate. So we'll see what we find … they're going to give the report to the State Senate and the State Senate will let us know."

Ward said the purpose of the audit is to "find the truth behind what happened."

"And, you know, over 50% of Americans believe that there was funny business in 2020,"she said. "And I think anybody should want to know what happened in that election, especially when we had record turnout, maybe more than 100% turnout in many places across the country.

"We have to know what happened in that election so that no funny business ever happens again, and people can have confidence that when they cast their vote, it's going to be counted, it's going to be counted once, and it's going to be counted for the person that they filled in the bubble for or pushed the button for."