Sen. Cris Dush made a trip to Arizona this week, but it wasn’t to bask in the desert sun.

He, Sen. Doug Mastriano and House Judiciary Chairman Rob Kauffman went at the invitation of the Arizona legislators who are involved in the audit of the November 2020 presidential election.

“It is what we should be doing here in Pennsylvania,” Dush, R-Brookville, said Friday, regarding the audit. “The audit needs to happen because the audit will tell us what needs to be fixed and what doesn’t.”

The Era spoke with the senator about why he feels the audit is needed.

“First of all, this is the issue that won’t quit,” Dush replied. “In my six years in the House and six months in the Senate, I’ve never been stopped on the street so much on a single issue.”

While he acknowledged the outcome of the presidential race can’t be changed, he said it’s important to verify if something went wrong.

In Arizona, “the things they are examining are the things everybody has questions about.”

Dush disagreed with mainstream media reports saying the audit, conducted by Cyber Ninjas, has security issues or that the company is inexperienced to handle the task at hand.

Explaining that he had been in law enforcement and in security with the Air National Guard, Dush said, “These people are doing a chain-of-evidence that is unbelievable. Every time someone touches a ballot it is documented, by video and hand receipt.”

And the data is being stored in huge files, even greater than terabyte size, in a size called petabytes, he explained. “It’s all going to be out there for the public.

“No one is going to be able to question the data that comes out of there, whether you think something happened or something didn’t.

“If we don’t find anything untoward, then people can have confidence” in the election, Dush said.

If something were found, “we can start working on the things that were necessary to fix the processes.

“You’ve got 47 percent of the nation saying there was something not right with the way the election went down,” the senator said. “If we’re going to instill confidence, it has to be done to the scale they are doing (in Arizona).

“The whole point is finding out what actually happened and what we need to do,” Dush said.

Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has called the Arizona trip “an effort to discredit the integrity of our elections” and an insult to the voters. Attorney General Josh Shapiro has pledged to fight any attempt to audit the election here. Will they be obstacles to getting an audit done in Pennsylvania?

“Neither the governor nor the attorney general control the auditor general nor the Senate,” Dush said. “The Senate is gaining steam.”

Sen. Kim Ward, R-Greensburg, the Senate majority leader, is interested in hearing what the contingent learned, Dush said.

Why is all of this so important to Dush?

“The effect is that if people don’t think that their vote counts, they are not going to show up,” he explained. “We have to do everything we can to make sure when they take time to fill out the ballot, that every ballot that is counted is legal and their vote actually does count.

“If they feel disenfranchised, they won’t show up to vote,” Dush said. And in his district, where the rural population is already physically distant from the decision-makers, that could mean a silencing of the rural voice.

“If we do that, we lose any influence at the state and federal levels,” he said.

On Dush’s Facebook page, he has a short video showing a sample ballot in Arizona that would clear up many concerns. It is printed on similar paper as money, has a holographic image embedded into it, has a QR code and other security features that are read by the computer to count the votes. Any fake ballots would be immediately rejected.

“It seems like an outstanding idea,” Dush said, adding he wants them in Pennsylvania, and would like to have them produced with specific identifiers for each county. He addressed the cost of such a ballot, too.

“People were fighting to get us to put postage on the ballots” that are being distributed by mail currently. “The cost of this paper with the safety features, the cost quoted to the Arizona legislature, is about 25 to 26 cents a piece,” Dush explained. “Less than the cost of postage.”

He added, “And we haven’t even touched on voter registration. We’re getting reports that third party entities were able to import new voters into that system.”

Reports have been conflicting, and the senator said he wants a definitive answer. “We need to find the truth.”

His next step, he explained, is to speak to Ward and other legislators to advocate for an audit. “We need to have this. People deserve to have confidence in this.”