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Along the edge of the floor at the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Veterans Memorial Coliseum, teams of two or three snap high-resolution images of voters’ ballots.

One worker picks a ballot from a pile, slides it under a mounted camera pointing straight down, clicks a mouse to take images of the front, then the back, and passes it on to another worker. That person slides the ballot under four microscope cameras, clicks the mouse, then puts the ballot into a box.

The mind-numbing work at the 12 ballot-examination tables is deceptively routine. If you step back and examine what’s happening at the tables, you realize it represents the key flaws of the so-called audit that has put 2.1 million voters’ ballots in the hands of contractors with suspect motives and methods.

The examination process is motivated by conspiracy theories.

The determination of questionable ballots is an opaque, experimental process.

Money and politics can influence the contractors’ judgments about whether a ballot is fraudulent.

On Tuesday I worked a five-hour shift in the press pool organized by ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ news outlets, observing the post-election review that the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Senate’s GOP caucus has imposed on Maricopa County voters, despite two post-election audits that verified the results.

Three days later, on Friday, the contractors packed up the ballots, the equipment and the furniture for 10 days of storage, so that pre-scheduled high-school graduations can take place at the coliseum. This ballot review is scheduled to resume May 24.

Up in the press box, 10 rows above the floor, the view was dominated by round tables in four colors — red, blue green and yellow — where workers were counting votes in two races that Democrats won — president and U.S. senate. The rectangular ballot-examination tables are in the same colors but to the side of the vote-counting tables.

I talked with Ken Bennett, who regularly visits with the pool reporters. He is the former ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ secretary of state and Senate president, now working as the liaison between the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Senate GOP caucus, the contractors, and the press.

Bennett has the key qualities of familiarity and ease with the press corps and the public. People forget that he dallied with birtherism in 2012, and that he primaried GOP Gov. Doug Ducey from the right in 2018, accusing the governor of wanting to take people’s guns, and implying Ducey would appoint Cindy McCain to replace the then-living Sen. John McCain.

“Everything at the paper evaluation (tables) is about verifying the authenticity of the paper, the ballots, the folds and all that,� Bennett told me. “It’s just a bunch of commonsense things you would do to verify a very close election.�

Seeking bamboo, watermarks

Actually, they’re not commonsense things, unless you have bought into one of several wild conspiracy theories propagated by Trump’s true believers on social media.

One of them is that 40,000 ballots were flown in from China, or somewhere in East Asia, and for some reason taken to Maricopa County and slipped in among legitimate ballots. The high-resolution photos are supposed to help figure out whether there are traces of bamboo in the paper or other signs the paper is from abroad.

There’s no evidence this actually happened. It’s just a story people came up with on the internet.

Another thing they’re looking for is folds in the paper. The idea here is that, since about 90% of the ballots were cast in envelopes, mostly by mail, the ballots they process should reflect that proportion. But other conspiracy theories say that ballots were printed out and slipped in unfolded to the total.

That’s one of the reasons for the microscope cameras. Those cameras take photos of, among other things, the ovals that voters fill out to indicate their choice. Another story suggests that some ballots were laser-printed with the ovals filled out.

John Brakey, the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ election activist who has been working at the audit alongside Bennett, told me the images can show whether the ovals have the indentations naturally produced by people writing with pens on them, but not produced by printers.

If the high-resolution images find filled-out ovals that aren’t indented, that could be a sign of laser-printing. So the thinking goes.

In the early days of this process, workers at the ballot examination tables also used ultraviolet lights to examine the ballots. The idea there was to follow up on a theory popular in QAnon circles — that the Trump Department of Homeland Security had put watermarks on ballots in an effort to ferret out fraud.

Of course, the federal government has no role in printing ballots. The audit workers found nothing and put away the ultraviolet lights, because Maricopa County had put no watermarks on its ballots.

“We are myth-busting,� Brakey said. “I believe this is all going to add up just fine. But we still have to unhinge people. We’ve got to pull them back from the edge.�

Opaque analysis

People could share Brakey’s faith if there were any reason to believe in the process. But neither Bennett nor Brakey could explain to me how the contractors will evaluate the ballots and determine if they’re fraudulent.

On Friday, Bennett told pool reporter Garrett Archer of ABC 15 that the collected data would be taken to a lab, either in Phoenix or in the vendor’s secure facility in Montana, to be analyzed. That’s the closest I got.

So, whoever analyzes the ballot images will have free rein, and plenty of motivation, to say thousands of ballots show signs of fraud. Bamboo, watermarks, unfolded paper, suspicious ovals — pick your poison.

This post-election process is only budgeted $150,000 of money from the state Senate. But online fundraisers have brought in millions more from Trump true believers, who have proven a dependable source of donations. The ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ GOP and other groups, too, have been fundraising regularly off the audit.

One of the people who apparently will participate in the analysis is Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, the inventor of a failed barcode scanner and a treasure hunter seeking detritus of the Roman Empire in ... Nova Scotia. I asked Bennett about Pulitzer, who changed his name from Jeffry Jovan Philyaw.

“All I was told is he’s a consultant on what they’re doing with the paper,� Bennett said.

So, a variety of conspiracy theories, spread in part by Pulitzer, are the main reasons for this ballot-analysis component of the “audit.� And Pulitzer will apparently be involved in whatever analysis happens of the millions of images that workers are creating.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, run by Republicans, and Katie Hobbs, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s secretary of state, a Democrat, have lambasted this post-election review for many reasons, among them that the processes results will not be verifiable.

“If you’re going to conduct a post-election audit, designed to verify the election results, then you need to follow certain best practices,� Hobbs said. “That’s not happening here at all. Regardless of the intent of the folks conducting it, their results will not be valid because they’re not following best practices.�

Deletions alleged

The intent of the folks running it, though, has also become clear, through the unprofessional, partisan Twitter feed representing the audit.

Last week, the @arizonaaudit account accused Maricopa County of “spoliation of evidence� by deleting certain election files before they were handed over to the contractors. Bennett acknowledged later there was likely an innocent explanation for the deletion. But the damage was done — true believers are still spreading word that the county had deliberately destroyed evidence of fraud.

The opportunity to make bigger baseless allegations will be wide open going forward.

It will be shocking if Pulitzer and the contractors don’t declare that the millions of ballot images don’t show evidence of fraud.

And now, Bennett says the Senate GOP may try to extend the review to the many other races on the ballot — a second “audit.� That means an endless opportunity for fundraising and partisan conclusions reached through arbitrary processes.