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

[neonzx]

https://www.azleg.gov/videoplayer/?clie ... 2021051030

"The service is unavailable."

[fierceredpanda]

I'm literally watching it right now.

[fierceredpanda]

https://player.invintus.com?clientID=63 ... 2021051030

[neonzx]

I'm literally watching it right now.

Could be maxed on on # of feeds it supports?

[sugar magnolia]

These geniuses are probably using the free 50 person limit zoom or something.

[tek]

FRP gotta be our eyes and ears on this!

[fierceredpanda]

Sorry, I closed mine. Got sick of listening to the witnesses and two legislators jerk each other off. Lots of insisting that they're very experienced and nothing they're doing is anything unusual.

[LM K]

Livestream on azcentral.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/po ... 139031001/

[LM K]

[fierceredpanda]

They're insistent that the routers are everything. This is never going to end.

I also want to mention that Warren Peterson has one of the most punchable faces of all time.

[Chilidog]

Finally got in.

Mostly whining about minor crap.

[Chilidog]

OMG.

Poor babies whining about batch grouping.

[LM K]

They're insistent that the routers are everything. This is never going to end.

I also want to mention that Warren Peterson has one of the most punchable faces of all time.

And they never explain why they need the routers, esp when, in April, they agreed that the machines were never connected to the internet.

[Slim Cognito]

Because they know they'll never get them and it would be tacky to say, out loud, it's their escape hatch?

[tek]

They're insistent that the routers are everything. This is never going to end.

goal-posts-moving.jpg (98.99 KiB) Viewed 2557 times

[Uninformed]

Re the meeting: What a load of disingenuous crap.

[Chilidog]

And it is boring.

[Chilidog]

Is it over yet? I stopped watching and can't get back it.

[Uninformed]

Is it over yet? I stopped watching and can't get back it.

Yup. It’s over.

[Gregg]

This guy seems nice:

It is truly astonishing. How do these people manage to tie their own shoe laces? How do they get through a semblance of normal life? How?

One word

Loafers

[neonzx]

And it is boring.

Yes, it was boring- - and I only got to watch for under 10 minutes before my Internet blew-out. Blessing?

[LM K]

Election auditors say they have data that Maricopa County officials were accused of deleting

A contractor helping run the Arizona Senate's audit of Maricopa County election results said Tuesday that he has located data the Senate previously accused county election officials of deleting.

In what appeared to be a walk back of the incendiary claim that prompted credulous statements from Arizona lawmakers and even former President Donald Trump, top Senate Republicans toned down attacks on county officials in a meeting at the Capitol.

I guess yesterday's spanking worked on Fann ... a little. She seemed quite tired today.

The change came amid mounting scrutiny of their efforts to recount Maricopa County voters 2.1 million ballots.

Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott, invited county officials to the meeting with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, and Senate liaison Ken Bennett to discuss that claim and others first outlined in a public letter last week.

But county leaders made clear they did not plan to participate, having issued a blistering rebuke to accusations by GOP senators that they deleted and mishandled election materials.

The Senate backed off threats to issue subpoenas that would require county officials to appear. But Fann and Petersen went ahead with a meeting anyway, which was attended by three representatives from the audit.

What was said at Senate's meeting

The event turned into something of a status update on the recount effort, which started April 23 and has dragged on well past the 16 days that the Senate's contractors initially said they would need to count ballots.

Contractors had to move the ballots out of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where they were working, at the end of last week to make way for high school graduations. They expect to resume counting next week.

Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm the Senate has hired to run the process, said he expected counting to be completed by the end of June — when the Senate's new lease on the facility expires.

Looming over the meeting was the Senate's claim last week that the county deleted a directory of computer files it was ordered to provide.

The claim was first lodged by the audit’s Twitter account, which said: “Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit. This is spoilation of evidence!”

As of Monday, it was reposted more than 14,000 times and was referenced by Trump in at least two separate statements, including one in which the former president described the election as “corrupt” and “third world.”

But Ben Cotton, founder of CyFir, a firm involved in the process, said Tuesday that he has the files.

"All of this may be a moot point because subsequently, I have been able to recover all of those deleted files and I have access to that data," Cotton told Fann and Petersen.

The county uses a multi-layered storage system to store its data. Cotton said the county didn't provide an explanation of how that system was structured, making it hard for the auditors to know what settings and configurations to use to make a copy of the county's databases, and to search the databases.

After making the copy, the Senate's contractors saw the missing directory and assumed that it was deleted. It appears the contractors might have just looked in the wrong place.

Wait. You found the "deleted files"? Uh, they were never deleted! Thus, you didn't find deleted files. You found the files you were too incompetent to find without help.

And now, you're blaming MBOS (Maricopa Board of Supervisors) for your lack of knowledge about what you're doing?

I saw only a little of the hearing. I did hear Cotton say his company works with giant corporations that require security clearances. But they can't figure out the fucking settings to use as they look at data? I think Cotton's company is going to see a lot less work in the future.

On Monday, the county provided the auditors an explanation of their system in their response to Fann's letter.

Cotton didn't say whether the county's explanation had helped.

The speakers also used the meeting to rebut some of the criticisms of the audit, such as reports that security was so lax a reporter was able to freely wander the coliseum unimpeded on numerous occasions the first week the Senate took over the facility.

Ken Bennett, the former secretary of state acting as the senate’s liaison, said security was tightened and “you don’t get close to the building unless your name is on a list of needing to be there for the right reasons.”

So, yes, your security was so lax that unauthorized people were on the counting floor.

Fann: Doubts about intentional wrongdoing in election

And after a back-and-forth with the county, Fann also sought to lower the volume of the debate around an undertaking that has captured international headlines and dominated much of the legislative session in the Senate.

Fann argued the effort was not an attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election but merely meant to improve the election process. And she suggested that Arizona's audit might serve as a model for other states interested in launching similar undertakings.

“I have said from the get go I am relatively sure weren’t going to find anything of any magnitude that would imply that any intentional wrongdoing was going on. I believe that we were going to find what we’ve known all along and some of the things is we could do a better job,” she said.

Showing that they could also throw barbs on social media, the county’s official Twitter account quickly chimed in with what would prove one of numerous “fact checks” it published in real time during the hearing.

In that instance, the county noted Fann and then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Eddie Farnsworth initially sought election data ahead of Jan. 6, when Congress would tally electoral college votes.

But by holding a meeting rather than a formal hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Fann and Petersen were able to keep out Democrats who might have asked very different questions, such as what private donors are anonymously funding the audit.

The Senate has fought the county for months to obtain all the ballots cast by Maricopa County voters in the last general election. And the Senate’s letter last week not only reignited tensions between the two entities but also underscored mounting concerns about whether the firms the Senate has hired for the unprecedented process are even capable of the job.

Democrats kept out of meeting

Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios, D-Phoenix, said she tried to attend the meeting with some lawmakers but that Fann told her the meeting was closed.

“What kind of hearing is that?” Rios said later.

Neither the press nor the public were allowed to attend either, under the Senate’s ongoing health precautions.

What Rios did see of the hearing did not seem to allay any of her concerns, though.

“This is still a one-sided, partisan witch hunt that has no basis in reality,” she said.

The minority leader noted she has heard more Republicans expressing discontent with the audit. And the county recorder — a Republican — spoke out for the first time last week with concerns about the allegations his staff spoiled evidence. He and other GOP county officials signed a letter calling for the Senate to end the audit.

But Rios said it remained to be seen whether the Senate, where Republicans control 16 of 30 seats, would bring the undertaking to an end.

[Luke]

Anons are excited:

[keith]

1 MST is 3 CDT. We're on CDT. (Why are they MST? Do they hate the west coast so much they have to be in their own time zone?)

Yes. Or maybe it has something to do with MLK day...

Arizona has never been on daylight savings time. I think it has to do with the calculation that if you leave Dallas or Houston or someplace, its just about time to start looking for a motel. If Az was on daylight time yould have another hour to get to California. Either that or the cows wont know when to show up for milking

[AndyinPA]

Some reservations are on DST.