State Senator Karen Fann, a Republican and the president of the Arizona State Senate, again defended the review at the hearing, denying charges that the audit was politically motivated or was intended to overturn the election. “This has never been about anything other than election integrity,” she said. Maricopa County officials, who have long opposed the review and defended the accuracy of their election work, mounted a rebuttal on Twitter, explaining that antivirus updates were not applied to voting software because they would alter its official certification for use. The official database of registered voters was never broken into, they said. Lawyers for the senators said that the State Senate did not have the records and that companies were exempt from the state’s open-records law because they were private entities.

Source: New York Times July 15, 2021 21:25 UTC