Did the Arizona audit show that Donald Trump won the state? No, that's not true: The audit in Maricopa County, Arizona's most populous county, showed that Joe Biden beat Trump there by nearly 45,000 votes. That edge contributed to Biden's victory in the state as a whole, where he won by close to 10,500 votes.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) posted to Facebook on September 27, 2021. The title of the post read: "Arizona Audit Shows Trump Won The State!" During the clip, conservative pundit Dick Morris claimed:
The audit had very different conclusions and basically proved that Trump won the state.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Sep 28 13:34:42 2021 UTC)
The results of the GOP-commissioned audit, which can be seen here, do not show that Trump won Arizona. In fact, the audit shows the opposite: It turned up 99 more votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Trump, as compared to the official count by county election officials. Biden won Maricopa County by nearly 45,000 votes. He won Arizona by close to 10,500 votes.
Nowhere in the report from Cyber Ninjas, the company hired to do the audit, does it say that Trump won the vote in Arizona.
As support for his claim, Morris argued that there's a difference between a recount and an audit. That's a specious argument. The full hand-recount of all 2.1 million ballots from the 2020 election in Maricopa County was part of the audit. And while it's true that the report made a number of arguable claims about alleged voting irregularities, it does not declare Trump the winner of Maricopa County -- much less of Arizona.
Lead Stories has written about the Arizona audit before. See here for a collection of those stories, in which we found that the report does not show thousands of illegal ballots and that so-called duplicate ballots are not proof of voter fraud.
