A state official in Arizona on Thursday said the state Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results revealed “potentially thousands” of missing serial numbers on ballot copies that had been duplicated from damaged originals.

In the state Senate hearing on Thursday, Senate Liaison Ken Bennett described the process by which election workers duplicate a ballot. “If a ballot gets damaged and has to be sent to duplication, there is a very specific process in the [state] elections procedure manual,” he said. That process involves applying matching serial numbers to both original and duplicated ballots.

“We found, I would have to say, thousands of duplicate ballots where those serial numbers are not on them,” he said. “And so it has created great difficulty to try to match up a duplicated ballot to its duplicate.”

Bennett said many serial numbers were applied with a “dot-matrix printer” atop border lines around the ballot, a mixup which “made for some very difficult matching of duplicated ballots and their duplicates.”

During his testimony, state Senate President Karen Fann asked Bennet: “If the corresponding numbers aren’t on there, how would you know whether it was duplicated once or ten times?” To which Bennett responded: “You wouldn’t.”