PHILADELPHIA (TNS) — Pennsylvania now stands to become ground zero in the movement to “audit” the election after former President Donald Trump’s efforts to discredit the 2020 election results appear to have failed in Arizona.

A monthslong partisan review in Arizona affirmed President Joe Biden’s victory there, according to draft reports of the so-called “forensic audit” of the election results in Maricopa County, a linchpin county. That review had been widely criticized by experts for failing to follow best practices and was led by a company called Cyber Ninjas that had no previous experience with elections.

It remains to be seen how Pennsylvania Republicans will respond to the findings in Arizona, which were officially released Friday. Lawmakers in Harrisburg have insisted their “forensic investigation” is different from Arizona’s. But the Republican leading the Pennsylvania probe, state Sen. Cris Dush, of Jefferson County, traveled to Phoenix in June to tour the facility where the Cyber Ninjas team counted ballots and inspected machines.

Election experts said the developments in Arizona should serve as a warning to other states pursuing their own partisan reviews.

“It’s an unfortunate fact that after this abject failure in Arizona, after the embarrassment this biased and untransparent effort brought to the members of the Arizona Senate the pursued it, there are elected leaders in states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and now Texas, who are seeking to import this chaos to their states,” David Becker, founder of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, said Friday.

Wisconsin Republicans have undertaken multiple reviews, including one led by a former conservative state Supreme Court justice, and the Texas secretary of state’s office announced its own “forensic audit” of four major counties.

Ben Ginsberg, a veteran GOP elections lawyer who served as counsel to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, said the Arizona review “was a designed process that gave the Trump forces everything they wanted” to investigate the election results.

“That means that if the Cyber Ninja report doesn’t produce solid, smoking gun, irrefutable evidence of a fraudulent election with evidence that stands up to scrutiny, means Trump and his allies fail,” Ginsberg told reporters Thursday. “ … If Trump and his supporters can’t prove it here with the process they designed, then they can’t prove it anywhere.”

Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, almost double the margin by which Trump carried the state in 2016. Extensive litigation and post-election audits did not find widespread fraud.

Still, Pennsylvania Senate Republicans voted this month to subpoena records from Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration, including all 9 million registered voters’ nonpublic personal information, including the last four digits of their Social Security number and driver’s license number. They say they want to verify who cast ballots in the 2020 election and whether they were properly registered or fraudulent.

Senate Democrats and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, have sued to block the subpoena and the investigation.

“No surprise in Arizona,” Wolf, the Democratic governor, wrote on Twitter Friday. “I won’t let Pennsylvania Republicans bring this circus here.”

Pennsylvania Republicans are calling their efforts a “forensic audit” or “forensic investigation.”

Professional election experts sometimes conduct such reviews to make sure voting systems work as they should. For example, shortly after the 2020 election, a county board of supervisors in Arizona hired auditors to ensure voting machines weren’t infected with malicious software and that tabulators weren’t connected to the internet.

But the phrase “forensic audit” really took off after the Arizona Senate launched yet another probe in late 2020 and hired a contractor with no previous experience auditing elections to review all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County and inspect machines. That review was widely discredited by professionals, but it became a rallying cry for Trump supporters.

Pennsylvania Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, a Centre County Republican, says he’s not an expert on what constitutes a “forensic” review.

“That’s somehow become a political term. I’m not sure what forensic — I’m not an expert,” he said in September. “What we’re going to do is an investigation, right? Perception is reality. … You know, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Pennsylvanians that have had concerns about the way the last election went.”

A lot is still unknown about the review, including what, exactly, the review will entail or how it will work. That’s in part because of the messy way it started, its sudden speed, and the lack of general agreement about what the goals and processes are.

Details so far have largely become known as they’re decided in real time. We know there will be hearings, and Republicans issued a subpoena for voter information from the state.

Republicans say they’ll follow best practices in areas such as preserving the security of sensitive materials, but it’s not clear yet whether they ultimately will and how they would do so.

Best practices for post-election audits include that they are routine and happen shortly after elections, using specified procedures, said Mark Lindeman, a director at Verified Voting, a nonprofit that focuses on the role of technology in election administration.

“What’s extraordinary about what’s increasingly happening around the country — and the sort of bandwagon that Pennsylvania seems to be climbing on — is it’s not routine, there are no defined procedures, and even the objectives, beyond airing grievances and paranoid fantasies about the 2020 election, are radically unclear,” he said.

Dush traveled to Arizona in June with Mastriano to get a firsthand look at the partisan “audit” there — a trip Trump praised.

Corman has said he has spoken with the leaders of the Arizona Senate.

He told The Philadelphia Inquirer the review in Harrisburg is “Pennsylvania-specific.”

“I’m not looking to Arizona,” he said. “If we learn some things after they’re completed, that might be helpful, we’ll certainly find out.”