#AZAudit Maricopa & Other Arizona County Election Audits - #CyberNinjas / Jovan Pulitzer / Fann / Birther Ken Bennett

[Volkonski]

Helen Kennedy
@HelenKennedy
Maybe they genuinely expected they would find fraud and are losing interest. I had assumed they were there to manufacture evidence.
Quote Tweet
Dennis Welch
@dennis_welch
· 4h
Audit update: Ken Bennett estimates auditors have counted about 200K of the 2.1M ballots and, once again, says more volunteers are coming to help as nearly half the counting stations remain empty. Wouldn’t say when they will arrive. #azfamily

[Gregg]

water marks, "FRAUD!!!"

[Gregg]

wear a funny hat.

[Luke]

The AZ Audit Live Feeds Chat folks are going out of their minds (still). They are in their prayer group live chat, they hate the settlement agreement and the transparency. "When is the military going to step in???" "EOJ Always" is the owner of the group apparently and spews misinformation. EOJ & the marks keep saying the DOJ has no authority over the Audit. "Nanna BJ" with a gravel voice is pissed off they aren't going door to door "verifying" voters. She says Mark Finichem said they're going door to door. EOJ doesn't believe anything Mark Finichem says

Department of Justice asks Arizona Senate to respond to concerns about election audit
Jen Fifield Arizona Republic

The U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is asking Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to respond to concerns the department has about the security of ballots and potential voter intimidation as the Senate's contractors perform an audit of November's presidential election in Maricopa County. In a letter sent to Fann on Wednesday, Pamela S. Karlan, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the division, asked for Fann's response to its concerns with an explanation of "the steps that the Arizona Senate will take to ensure that violations of federal law do not occur" during the audit.

The department's concerns may have been prompted in part by a letter it received Thursday from three organizations, including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, asking the department to dispatch federal monitors to oversee the audit. That letter raised the same concerns that the department said it has, regarding the security of ballots and potential voter intimidation. The Arizona Senate got the county's 2.1 million ballots, voting machines and private and public voter information last month after issuing subpoenas to the county that a court ultimately upheld. The Senate then handed over the ballots, machines and information to private contractors to perform the audit, which began at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix on April 23 and is ongoing.

The audit has three aspects:

Attempting to recount all ballots cast in the election.
Examining the voting machines to see whether votes were counted correctly.
Reviewing voter information for potential voter fraud.

The Arizona Democratic Party and Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo filed a lawsuit to stop the audit, amid growing concerns over the lack of clear procedures for safeguarding the ballots and regarding the transparency around the audit. Karlan wrote that the department had reviewed "news reports and complaints regarding the procedures being used for this audit" and was first concerned by a number of reports suggesting the ballots, machines and voter information are no longer under the control of state and local elections officials, aren't being kept secure, and are at risk of "being lost, stolen, altered, compromised or destroyed.""Federal law creates a duty to safeguard and preserve federal election records," Karlan wrote, citing specific provisions of the law.

The department's second main concern, Karlan wrote, involves the contractors' plan for how it will attempt to verify voter information and who voted in the election. Cyber Ninjas, the Senate's main contractor, said in its work plan to the Senate that it would be reaching out to voters through a “combination of phone calls and physical canvassing” to “collect information of whether the individual voted in the election." This raises concerns of voter intimidation, which is illegal under federal law, Karlan wrote.

Federal law says that no one can or threaten to "intimidate, threaten, or coerce" someone for voting or for encouraging someone else to vote. "Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act," Karlan wrote. "Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future." Fann told The Arizona Republic that the Senate's attorney is preparing a response.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/po ... _azcentral

They're about to start another Idiot chat at 11:15pm ET. No idea who David Clements is:

Arizona Audit Live Feeds, [05.05.21 23:14]
[Forwarded from The Professor's Record]
Live Now with with David Clements.
Open session today.
5/5/2021

🎙https://t.me/theprofessorsrecordlivecast
—
Main Channel: https://t.me/theprofessorsrecord
Chat room: https://t.me/theprofessorsrecordchat

[AndyinPA]

I'm surprised that took this long.

[neonzx]

Better late than never.....

[Luke]

Posted info about Akbar and the insurrectionists connected with AZ Audit here: https://thefogbow.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 196#p17196

[neeneko]

The AZ Audit Live Feeds Chat folks are going out of their minds (still). They are in their prayer group live chat, they hate the settlement agreement and the transparency. "When is the military going to step in???" "EOJ Always" is the owner of the group apparently and spews misinformation. EOJ & the marks keep saying the DOJ has no authority over the Audit. "Nanna BJ" with a gravel voice is pissed off they aren't going door to door "verifying" voters. She says Mark Finichem said they're going door to door. EOJ doesn't believe anything Mark Finichem says

Hrm. So does the DoJ have any authority over the audit?

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

20210503 Non Sequitur.jpg

The jackalope is hilarious!

I am disappointed that Wisconsin's very own mythical creature, the hodag, did not make an appearance.

That’s cuz the hodag is much skeerier and ain’t no myth!

[bob]

So does the DoJ have any authority over the audit?

I infer the DOJ can investigate whether the Voting Rights Act is being violated. (And there are non-frivolous arguments that could be made about possible voter suppression, intimidation, retaliation, etc.)

[woodworker]

I suspect that as they find there's nothing they can hold up and scream "WE GOT IT!" with they're gonna be happy if this thing would just fade away.

Bu they've built it up so much, that anything short of finding 2 million votes for Trump out of the 2.1 million votes is gonna have the rubes screaming from the peanut gallery. They've got a rope and somebody, phuck ANYBODY, has to hang, and if they can't hang the ANTIFA people who ran the thing, they'll find someone in their own camp to heretic out and burn at the stake, hang, bury alive and make wear a funny hat.

Works for me. But give me a few minutes so that I can stock up on popcorn and knitting needles.

[neeneko]

I suspect that as they find there's nothing they can hold up and scream "WE GOT IT!" with they're gonna be happy if this thing would just fade away.

Bu they've built it up so much, that anything short of finding 2 million votes for Trump out of the 2.1 million votes is gonna have the rubes screaming from the peanut gallery. They've got a rope and somebody, phuck ANYBODY, has to hang, and if they can't hang the ANTIFA people who ran the thing, they'll find someone in their own camp to heretic out and burn at the stake, hang, bury alive and make wear a funny hat.

I kinda wonder if they are intentionally ramping up the inappropriate techniques and requests with the plan of being shut down. I've already seen lots of comments claiming that if democrats had nothing to hide they would be ok with the audit and thus fighting it is proof there was fraud.. so if they push the line enough and the audit ends, they can claim that being stopped is proof they were on to something without having to actually produce any evidence.

[LM K]

A long but very comprehensive article about this ridiculous "recount".

So, the Repubs are violating every rule they accused the initial count and recount officials and workers of committing. And there is blatant evidence that they are doing so.

Based on observer's reports, the chaos of this "recount" might cause the loss of ballots.

Observers report ballots and laptop computers have been left unattended in Arizona recount, according to secretary of state

Ballots have been left unattended on counting tables.

Laptop computers sit abandoned, at times — open, unlocked and unmonitored.

Procedures are constantly shifting, with untrained workers using different rules to count ballots.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) on Wednesday sent a letter outlining a string of problems that she said observers from her office have witnessed at a Republican-led recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona’s largest county.

In the six-page letter, Hobbs wrote that elections are “governed by a complex framework of laws and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security, and transparency” but that the procedures governing the ongoing recount in Phoenix “ensure none of those things.”

Former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett (R), who is acting as a spokesman for the audit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the audit’s Twitter account, @ArizonaAudit, tweeted that Hobbs’s allegations were “baseless claimes [sic].”

“The audit continues!” read the tweet.

On Wednesday, a top official in the Justice Department’s civil rights division wrote in a letter to the state Senate president that information reviewed by the department “raises concerns,” asking that the Arizona Senate provide information to ensure federal laws were not being violated. She wrote that reports suggested that ballots were “not being adequately safeguarded by contractors at an insecure facility, and are at risk of being lost, stolen, altered, compromised or destroyed.”

The recount of Maricopa County’s nearly 2.1 million ballots was ordered by the GOP-led state Senate, despite the fact that county officials, as well as state and federal judges, found no merit to claims that the vote was tainted by fraud or other problems.

Republicans hired a Florida-based private contractor called Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive has echoed former president Donald Trump’s false allegations of fraud, to handle the recount.

The company has been criticized for running an opaque process and failing to follow state rules for elections and recounts. Its audit has been embraced by Trump and his allies as the key to overturning his election loss, and has spawned a wave of unfounded theories about how the Maricopa vote could have been rigged.

Fueling the speculation have been the unorthodox practices of the contractors, who have been conducting physical examinations of the ballots, including inspecting their weight and thickness and examining folds on ballots under microscopes. At one point, workers were holding ballots up to UV lights.

The purpose of such inspections has not been clear. Bennett at one point said the workers were hunting for watermarks — though county officials have said the Maricopa County ballots don’t bear watermarks.

In her letter, Hobbs wrote that steps such as the paper analysis are “completely unnecessary” and “do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit.’ ”

In an interview Wednesday with a local CBS affiliate, John Brakey — an assistant to Bennett who has described himself as a Democrat who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2020 — said workers were looking for traces of bamboo.
Brakey cited unfounded accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown from Asia into Arizona. He added that he himself does not believe that theory.

“What they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper,” he said, adding: “They’re doing all sorts of testing to prove if it was or wasn’t, and that’s very important, because the only way you’re going to persuade people on changing is having facts, and we’re on a mission for facts.”

Bennett did not immediately respond to a question about whether workers are indeed searching for traces of bamboo.

A cybersecurity expert who promoted claims of fraud in the 2020 election is leading the GOP-backed recount of millions of ballots in Arizona.
Independent observers had initially been barred from monitoring the recount, but were allowed in after Hobbs and the Arizona Democratic Party filed a lawsuit against the audit, calling the process a violation of state law.

Hobbs and the party agreed to settle that suit Wednesday.

As part of the settlement, the state Senate and Cyber Ninjas agreed in writing that they would maintain the confidentiality of voter information and the security of ballots and voting equipment, which they obtained from Maricopa County using a subpoena. They also agreed they would continue to allow access for Hobbs’s observers, as well as the news media, which has had inconsistent access to the audit.

Hobbs wrote in her letter Wednesday that she has serious concerns about the process, based both on what observers have seen so far and how Cyber Ninjas has described the process it is using.

Among the problems she outlined: She said it is not clear how the dozens of audit workers are going about determining voter intent to decide how they should count each ballot — a process that generally involves detailed guidelines and training for election workers.

Though each ballot is being tallied by three workers, she wrote that observers in some cases observed workers discussing how to count a ballot with one another or being instructed how to count it by a third worker — both violations of best practices.

Hobbs said that observers also saw inconsistent treatment of ballots once they were unpacked from boxes, raising the possibility that counted and uncounted ballots could become intermingled.

She questioned whether procedures were in place to hire qualified, unbiased people to serve as ballot counters, noting that reporters have spotted former state Rep. Anthony Kern (R) among the ballot counters. Kern was on the November ballot and was photographed attending pro-Trump rallies in Washington on Jan. 6.

She also said the auditors were able to provide no information as to how they will go about adding up information from the tens of thousands of hand-completed tally sheets being produced by employees as they sift through ballots.

“This is not transparency,” she wrote.

The Senate agreed to pay $150,000 for the audit, but funding has been supplemented by private donations being raised by Trump allies.

People who have interacted with Trump at Mar-a-Lago recently say that he has become fixated on the Arizona count and convinced it could spark other states to reexamine their votes as well.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump told a crowd attending a party at Mar-a-Lago last week, according to a video posted online by an attendee. “So we’re going to watch that very closely. And after that, you’ll watch Pennsylvania and you’ll watch Georgia and you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin. You’re watching New Hampshire. . . . Because this was a rigged election, everybody knows it.”

President Biden won Maricopa County in November by more than two points, becoming the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton.

While Senate President Karen Fann (R) and Bennett promised the recount of the 2020 ballots would be transparent, Cyber Ninjas fought to keep documents outlining its procedures secret. The company was previously forced to publish some documents describing its practices by the judge in the suit.

Media access to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum was for a time barred completely and later severely restricted. Some portions of the audit — including forensic analysis of voting equipment — is being conducted entirely out of public view.

The audit recruited volunteer observers to roam the floor during the count, but Bennett has conceded that most are Republicans. ABC15 in Phoenix reported this week that the audit’s official observers are being required to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Hobbs and the state Democratic Party, along with a Democratic member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, agreed to settle their lawsuit after a state judge declined last month to temporarily halt the count while the litigation proceeded. The judge had also signaled that if the lawsuit went forward, he might rule that virtually no state election laws apply to post-election audits, such as the one being run by the state Senate — potentially opening the door to routine partisan-led challenges of election results in the future.

Roopali Desai, a lawyer for the Democratic Party, said the lawsuit led to important concessions that will bring more transparency to a process that has been criticized for being opaque and failing to follow state rules for elections and recounts.

If Cyber Ninjas violates the terms of the agreement, including by blocking access to Hobbs’s observers, the secretary of state or the party could seek new intervention from the court, she said.

“We have won a significant victory in being able to get information and access,” Desai said.
As part of the settlement, Cyber Ninjas also formalized its previous assurance that it is not attempting to compare signatures on the envelopes of ballots sent by mail with voter signatures maintained on file. It requires that the company and Senate provide at least 48 hours’ notice should they decide to attempt to perform a signature match, so Democrats could potentially first seek a court intervention.

Trump and his supporters had expressed particular concern with how the county attempted to verify signatures on mail-in ballots. But election experts say authenticating signatures on ballots requires special expertise and also requires examining some personal information about voters.

[Chilidog]

So does the DoJ have any authority over the audit?

I infer the DOJ can investigate whether the Voting Rights Act is being violated. (And there are non-frivolous arguments that could be made about possible voter suppression, intimidation, retaliation, etc.)

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday expressed concerns that a controversial audit and recount of the November election in Arizona's Maricopa County may be out of compliance with federal laws.

Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, wrote in a letter that federal officials see two issues with the election review ordered by the Republican-led state Senate.

One issue is that ballots, voting systems and other election materials are no longer in the custody of election officials — a possible violation of federal law, which requires state and local election workers to store and safeguard federal voting records.



The other issue: Plans for door-to-door canvassing may also violate federal laws aimed at preventing voter intimidation, according to Karlan.

https://www.npr.org

[LM K]

I posted the entire long article by WaPo only because of paywall issues. I do as much as possible.

I'm sorry if my post is annoying.

[LM K]

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday expressed concerns that a controversial audit and recount of the November election in Arizona's Maricopa County may be out of compliance with federal laws.

Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, wrote in a letter that federal officials see two issues with the election review ordered by the Republican-led state Senate.

One issue is that ballots, voting systems and other election materials are no longer in the custody of election officials — a possible violation of federal law, which requires state and local election workers to store and safeguard federal voting records.



The other issue: Plans for door-to-door canvassing may also violate federal laws aimed at preventing voter intimidation, according to Karlan.

https://www.npr.org

From the NPR article:

The Senate's contract with Cyber Ninjas states the firms plan to "identify voter registrations that did not make sense, and then knock on doors to confirm if valid voters actually lived at the state address." Auditors also plan to ask voters about their voting history to determine "whether the individual voted in the [November] election."

"Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act," Karlan wrote. "Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future."

WTAF?! I would be furious if a party came to my fucking residence to interrogate me about my voter registration form and fucking voting history. I'm certain that interrogators would demand to know whom I voted for, which is none of their fucking business.

What exactly would the interrogators do if their target just shut the door on them? What would interrogators do if no one is home?

States don't register someone to vote if there is a problem with a voter's registration forum. Voter fraud is essentially non-existent.

[noblepa]

States don't register someone to vote if there is a problem with a voter's registration forum. Voter fraud is essentially non-existent.

Of course it exists. All those democrats and black people somehow got to vote, didn't they? Those votes are, by definition, fraudulent.

[neeneko]

What exactly would the interrogators do if their target just shut the door on them? What would interrogators do if no one is home?

Simple : they will mark it as 'could not locate voter' and compile into a list of 'well, in x% of cases of democrats we were unable to verify the voter'. Every person who isn't home, every person who slams the door in their face, any person who doesn't have their ID handy, becomes a false positive, which given the woo involved in what they consider 'suspicious' will probably be mostly minorities.

[Luke]

[keith]

Or maybe they were smuggled in from Italy and therefore have pizza dough flour in the paper.

Or maybe they were smuggled in from Egypt and therefore have papyrus in the paper.

Or maybe they were smuggled in from Oxford/Cambridge and therefore have parchment in the paper.

China doesn't make paper out of bamboo. They make hiking socks that don't dry if you get them wet. Australia sends gadzillions of tonnes of wood chips to China to make paper. What they should be looking for is vegemite.

[Slim Cognito]

China doesn't make paper out of bamboo.

No bamboo? That PROVES the ballots came from China.

[Gregg]

14 Chinamen living there

[Uninformed]

Somewhat at odds with other more recent reports that say no extension has been agreed, but contains some “interesting” observations.

“Maricopa County election audit could last weeks longer than expected, has 'no deadline'”
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/po ... 907865001/

“The Arizona Senate-ordered recount of nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County general election ballots could stretch beyond May 14, which is when it originally was estimated to conclude.
Senate audit liaison and former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett said Saturday there was "no deadline" for the audit and that the recount may need to be paused May 14 when Veterans Memorial Coliseum is reserved to host several Phoenix high schools' graduations.
The audit, headquartered at the coliseum at the state fairgrounds, would resume about a week later, Bennett said, adding that the Senate has talked with state fair officials and has permission to use the space "for as long as we need it" after the graduations.
The backpedaling comes just days after Bennett told reporters he was confident workers would wrap up by May 14, and despite plans to increase the number of ballot counters and shifts starting May 3.
Bennett could offer no estimate on the number of ballots recounted as of Saturday.”

[Foggy]

It will be interesting to see how many ballots get returned after the grift comes to an end. I suspect it will be a lot fewer than 2.1 million.

[Suranis]

I think they honestly thought they would be finding enough evidence to scream from the screens of FOX by this point, whether it was a large number or not. Their silence pretty much shows they are finding bugger all, so they are depending on the Democrats to shut it down to keep their martyr status.