The comment came amid increasing scrutiny of the audit, which many experts say is not credible and will only further undermine confidence in the 2020 race. They’re looking for where the ovals are marked, is there a little bit of an indentation or was the mark made by a Xerox machine? It’s just kind of a general expression for ‘we’re checking the paper and the folds and everything to make sure that these are authentic ballots.’”

“I think that’s more of a euphemism for saying ‘we’re looking for everything related to the paper so that we can verify that the ballots are authentic,’” he told the Guardian. Ken Bennett, the liaison between the auditors and the Arizona senate, said in an interview he wasn’t sure if auditors were looking for bamboo fibers specifically. Those images are supposed to help auditors verify the authenticity of the ballots by allowing them to examine fibers, as well as folds in the paper and ink marks on ballots.Įxperts have expressed concern about whether this method is a reliable way of identifying fraud. There are about a dozen tables on the audit floor at Veterans Memorial Coliseum where auditors are taking pictures of ballots and then running them under microscopic cameras that are supposed to provide high-quality images of the ballots.

Earlier, workers were using UV lights to examine ballots while the purpose of doing so was never clear, there was a conspiracy theory after the election that Trump had watermarked ballots (the UV examinations have stopped). After election day, rightwing activists falsely claimed that China had imported ballots to tip the election for Biden and that those ballots could be identified because there was bamboo in the paper.

The search for bamboo fibers illustrates how the latest GOP audit of all 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, home to a majority of Arizona voters, is elevating absurd claims about the 2020 election.

Bamboo papier