Fogbow

tek wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 7:04 am I have no idea what the rules are on AZ Senate subpoenas, but this seems like "we just want to nose around"..

IANAL, but I'd think in a real legal case this ought to be able to be limited or quashed based on being overly broad. Of course, this is not a legal case..

neonzx wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 8:15 am

LM K wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 11:52 pm The Senate wants to see the router's IP numbers.

Bennett already admitted that the machines weren't connected to the internet.

These asshats have no idea HOW ANYTHING WORKS how these closed systems work.You can rip the lead coax inet feed from of your home network and all your devices will still work (just no Netflix and chill). They are private IP addresses CLOSED SYSTEM. The machines were not on the open internet.

fierceredpanda wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 8:18 am

tek wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 7:04 am I have no idea what the rules are on AZ Senate subpoenas, but this seems like "we just want to nose around"..

IANAL, but I'd think in a real legal case this ought to be able to be limited or quashed based on being overly broad. Of course, this is not a legal case..

I don't know about Arizona, but legislative subpoena power is usually pretty broad, because the empowering statutes are drafted by...the legislature.

About 13 percent of the nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona in the 2020 election have been counted in an ongoing election audit, an official said Monday.

About 275,000 ballots have been reviewed so far by workers hired by companies tapped by the Arizona Senate, former Republican Secretary of State Ken Bennett told reporters at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

The audit started on April 23. Workers take off Sundays. That means workers have processed about 20,000 ballots a day.


Senate-hired firms have been trying to hire more workers but only 19 tables on Monday were staffed, far below the 46 tables Bennett has said would be ideal.

Background checks for potential hires are slowing things down, he told reporters.

“Hopefully within a few days or when we come back after the graduations, we’ll be fully stocked at the tables and ready to go,” he said.

The ongoing farce that is the Arizona Audit has begun to alienate the locals, especially now that the people running it are saying that it might extend into July. The sheriff has had enough, and the dwindling band of sane Arizona Republicans are scared witless of the long-term political cost.
From the Republic:

'I just want it over. I think Arizona needs to move on and not be the center of more of this political gossip,” said Betsey Bayless, the former Republican secretary of state for five years beginning in 1997. Jan Brewer, the former Republican governor and Trump surrogate who served as the state’s election czar before her ascent to the governor’s office, typically speaks her mind. She didn’t want to talk about the audit. Neither did former GOP Secretary of State Michele Reagan, who cited her role as a justice of the peace…

Former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, who rose to become the No. 2-ranking Republican in the chamber, made clear he’s not associated with the audit, and sees little upside to it. “It is always the case that when there are serious controversies within a political party, it doesn’t do the party any good,” Kyl said during a phone interview. “And I think the divisions within the Republican Party will not reflect well on the party's chances of success in the next election. That's pretty obvious.”


“If people would stand up,” Hobbs said, “regardless of party, regardless of political consequences, and just say this is wrong, that would make a difference.” Hobbs said she was referring specifically to Ducey.

In addition, the state senate and the Maricopa County election officials are about to go to war with each other because the county board is standing behind one pissed-off sheriff, and because the people running the audit are a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Bennett, the audit liaison, says the routers are needed to test another conspiracy theory -- whether the county’s ballot tabulators are connected to the internet. “Well, there are people that have always suspected something nefarious about elections being connected to the Internet," Bennett said Saturday to audit pool reporter Dan Zak of the Washington Post. "And so I think that's why the request was made." An independent audit done for the county earlier this year found there were no connections to the internet.

Yeah, like that will matter.

LM K wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 4:30 pm Arizona Locals Are Revolting Against the Clown-Show 'Audit' of Its 2020 Election

because the people running the audit are a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

woodworker wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 5:26 pm I suspect that they are having trouble getting "volunteers" because ....

neeneko wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 5:44 pm

woodworker wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 5:26 pm I suspect that they are having trouble getting "volunteers" because ....

Another possibility : they are so incompetent and unprepared that they do not even have the infrastructure in place to recruit people in any significant numbers.

The delay is but the latest snag in an exercise that many critics claim is wrecking voters’ confidence in elections, not restoring it. Since the State Senate first ordered it in December, the review has been dogged by controversy. Republicans dominate the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which supervised the election in the county. They said it was fair and accurate and opposed the review.

After a week marked by mounting accusations of partisan skulduggery, mismanagement and even potential illegality, at least one Republican supporter of the new count said it could not end soon enough.

“It makes us look like idiots,” State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, said on Friday. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”



In an interview, Mr. Bennett said that no storage site had been selected, but that he was optimistic that the hand count would be wrapped up quickly.


Journalists, election experts and representatives of the secretary of state, whose office is responsible for elections in Arizona, have struggled with getting permission to observe the review, while the far-right One America News cable outlet has raised money to finance it and has been given broad access to the proceedings.


The review came under heavy fire last week from both the Arizona secretary of state and the federal Justice Department, which separately cited widespread reports that slipshod handling of ballots and other election items threatened to permanently spoil the official record of the vote. The Justice Department noted that federal law requires record to be kept intact under penalty of a fine or imprisonment. Some of the most serious questions involve the management of the review.

On Wednesday, Katie Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, charged that the review was being conducted with uncertified equipment and that ballot counting rules were “a significant departure from standard best practices.”

She wrote: “Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use — they do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit.’”


Ms. Fann, who had largely remained silent about criticism of the review, chose last week to mount a public defense of it. Appearing in an interview on the Phoenix PBS news outlet, she applauded the role of One America News in supporting the review and said the Senate had no role in choosing Mr. Kern or others who counted votes.

“I don’t know why he’s there or how he got there, but that’s one of the people that was selected, and that is what it is,” she said. “I don’t know that it’s a great thing, to be honest.”

And she said that the news media had blown concerns about the objectivity and management of the review out of proportion.

“They talk about conspiracy theories,” she said, referring to reports that the review is examining ballots for evidence of bamboo fibers and watermarks baselessly said to be signs of fraud. “But I tell you what, there’s almost a reverse conspiracy theory to demean this audit.”

She suggested that her support of the review would be proved right in the end.

“I think we’ll find irregularities that is going to say, you know what, there’s this many dead people voted, or this many who may have voted that don’t live here any more — we’re going to find those,” she said. “We know they exist, but everybody keeps saying, ‘You have no proof.’ Well, maybe we’ll get the proof out of this so we can fix those holes that are there.”

More common is the notion that the review has become an alarming exercise in undermining faith in America’s elections.

One expert on election law, David J. Becker, founder of the Center for Election Administration and Research in Washington, said Ms. Fann’s assurances about the integrity of ballots and other records appeared unlikely to satisfy the Justice Department.

“There’s no question that contamination of ballots and records is an ongoing issue that raises serious concerns about federal law,” said Mr. Becker, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s voting rights section. “We’ve never seen anything like this before, where some haphazard effort allows some unknown out-of-state contractor to start riffling through ballots. I think it’s pretty clear that the response does not resolve concerns about ballot integrity.”

Routers serve as the mail carrier of a computer network: They deliver messages using maps of networks and computer addresses.

Think of it like a mail carrier who relies on maps and addresses to get mail to the right place.

Given access to the mail carriers' — or routers' — information, it would be easier for a bad actor to get access to a person's mail, or to target the information inside the network.

That's an analogy one tech expert – Matt Bernhard, a research engineer at Voting Works, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for open source election technology — gave while explaining the importance of keeping Maricopa County's routers secure.

Arizona Senate Republicans are trying to get access to the county's routers and administrative passwords to the county's voting machines, and to provide that to private contractors they've hired to audit the county's 2020 election results, which began April 23.

Bernhard said providing access to the routers is a "pretty specific risk" to the county. Also, he and other election security consultants across the country are unsure why exactly the auditors would need the routers to audit the election results

Senate liaison Ken Bennett has said they are needed to check whether the county's voting machines were connected to the internet during the election. But a county spokesperson said that the auditors already have the information and machines to perform that check, and a previous independent audit commissioned by the county proved they were not.

County Attorney Allister Adel has said that giving access to the routers would risk county residents' Social Security information and public health information, along with sensitive law enforcement data.

Bernhard and others said it would be odd to find that information on a router, but said, given the information that is on the routers, it might be easier for someone to hack into the county's network to get it.

Meanwhile, an attorney for Senate Republican leaders has dismissed this idea and threatened to file another subpoena to haul the county Board of Supervisors before the state Senate to explain why they won't cough up the routers.

Why do auditors need the routers?
Senate Republicans in January issued subpoenas to the county requesting not only all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county's general election, all of the county's voting machines and the county's voter rolls but also "access or control of ALL routers, tabulators or combinations thereof, used in connection with the administration of the 2020 election, and the public IP of the router."

Cyber Ninjas, the main contractor hired by the Senate to oversee the audit despite having no experience leading election audits, said in its original work plan that it would inspect the county's voting systems in many ways, but offers nothing specific about examining routers.

One item says that the contractors will attempt to identify "usage of cellular modems, Wi-Fi cards, or other technologies that could be utilized to connect systems to the internet or wider-area-network."

Bennett said he believes the contractors want the routers to address concerns from "people that have always suspected something nefarious about elections being connected to the internet."

But Megan Gilbertson, spokesperson for the county Elections Department, has reiterated that the county's ballot-counting machines are not connected to the internet. She said the county has provided the contractors with what they need to confirm that.

"In January, the county provided Windows event logs, precinct-based tabulator logs, Election Management System workstations, server logs and more in compliance with the Senate’s subpoena," Gilbertson said. "Someone with knowledge of the equipment would be able to confirm through a review of those logs that the equipment was not connected to the internet."

Also, independent contractors hired by the county already checked for that in a previous audit. The results from that audit found no malicious hardware on voting machines, found that the machines were not connected to the internet, and found that the machines were programmed to tabulate ballots accurately.

Nicholas Weaver, a network security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and computer science lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, said that the router might have logs about internet access different from what's seen on a server or the voting machines. But they could probably still thoroughly check whether the machines were connected to the internet without the routers, Weaver said.

Providing the routers would be disruptive to county business, since the county would need to take the routers offline to make a forensic copy, and get other routers to provide the network service in the interim, he said.

"What the (routers) would provide the state recounters is absolutely nothing other than making life completely miserable for those providing the data," Weaver said.

County Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers said last week that it would cost as much as $6 million if the county has to replace the routers while the Cyber Ninjas has them.

Many election security consultants told The Republic they are concerned by the demand. The routers aren't needed to audit election results, and the lack of clear answers about why the Senate's contractors want them raises questions, said Matt Masterson, former head of election security at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

He said when voting systems are tested at the federal level, there is typically:

*Full transparency about the standards used to test the equipment.

*Details about how the equipment will be tested.

*Information about what will be included in the final report.

The private contractors haven't provided that clarity.

“The request leaves those who understand these systems and processes with their hand up in the air saying, 'What are you doing? What are you trying to do?” Masterson said.

Weaver said there is "no logic" in the demands.

"It is a 100% malicious request," he said, referring to the inconvenience and potential risk to the county with no clear benefit.

What routers did the Senate demand?
Routers are hardware that connect local networks to the internet or to other networks.

There are many different types, including simple routers used at home to connect computers and smartphones to the internet, as well as complex commercial routers that can be programmed to store logs of activity and data and protect from outside intruders, Bernhard said.

The routers demanded in the January subpoenas route network traffic across 50 different county departments, not just the Elections Department, said county spokesperson Fields Moseley.

Some county routers aren't connected to the internet and are used to route internal network information, such as case management files or public health information, he said. Others are connected to the internet and are "specialty routers that have a significant level of security and are sized to handle a high level of network traffic," Moseley said.

What information is stored on the routers?
County IT experts say that a router is like a switchboard in that it shows how the county's entire network is laid out, Moseley said.

"If you have access to the router, you potentially have the IP 'blueprints' for the entire county, giving a hacker the ability to infiltrate or intercept confidential and sensitive information on the county network," he said.

Generally, some routers retain logs about internet connections and searches, said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science and engineering professor who specializes in election security. There may also be information about virtual private networks, or VPNs, and firewall configurations.

All of that information could be useful information for someone who wanted to try to hack into a system, Halderman said.

Bernhard said it could be that the data would reveal IP addresses of confidential computers or servers where law enforcement is storing data and how that data is protected, for example.

But it's unlikely that the logs would give detailed information about the actual information on the county's internet or networks, Bernhard said.

Back to Bernhard's mail carrier analogy, the carrier takes your information and sends it somewhere else but doesn't open it up to see what's inside.

If the carrier was to look inside, in this example it's likely the messaging would be gibberish. That's because the county is probably encrypting its data in some way.

What passwords do the Senate contractors still want and why?
The Senate's second demand is for passwords to the county's ballot tabulators used on Election Day at voting centers.

The private contractors conducting the audit returned most of the county's machines after pulling data from them, but hung onto the vote center tabulators.

The password and security tokens the state Senate wants provides administrative access to Dominion Voting Systems' proprietary firmware and source code, Sellers said.

The county does not have that administrative access, Sellers said.

Dominion Voting Systems, which leases the voting machines to the county, has that information, Gilbertson said.

But it's not clear what the auditors could see with the administrative access.

Masterson said it's unlikely that the source code is kept on the machines, considering there is a requirement within federal standards for voting systems that source code is not kept that way. Bernhard agreed that it's unlikely the source code is on the machine.

Auditors could look at the hash coding of the machine to see that it is still the same as when it was provided to the county, Masterson said.

It's unclear whether the auditors have the access or information to do that without the administrative passwords.

Typically when you look at a machine's firmware, Bernhard said, you compare it to something else to see whether it has changed. He isn't sure the auditors have anything to compare what they are looking at with, and reverse engineering it would take a lot of time.

During the county's independent audit, the companies were able to compare the hash coding of the machines to the original, perhaps because they are accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to certify voting machines and have that information available.

Examining the machines' firmware is generally a way to analyze the system vulnerabilities by looking where the holes in security are, Halderman said.

"It's quite concerning if information about the technical specifics of security flaws in voting machines falls into the wrong hands," he said.

Dave from down under wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 3:21 am Why would a group called CyberNinjas want to know how to break into... oh Ninjas... right...

The dumb version of DarkSide..

LM K wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 2:19 am I am OBSESSED with this!

Foggy wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 8:31 am

LM K wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 2:19 am I am OBSESSED with this!

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Foggy wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 10:52 am Hell, she has me under control most of the time.

One of the most outspoken Republican critics of the audit is Bill Gates, who was re-elected as a Maricopa County supervisor in 2020, and along with other supervisors helps oversee the county’s election procedures.

Mr. Gates is a lifelong Republican who once worked as an election lawyer for the party. He considers himself a loyal member of the G.O.P. and points to former President Ronald Reagan as an inspiration for his interest in politics. But he is horrified at the partisan audit taking place in his district, saying that the recounts Arizona already conducted had sufficiently validated the results of the election.


I want to ask you straight away: Do you think the audit should be happening?

The audits that we conducted — I think that those were sufficient. I appreciate that there’s a certain segment of the population who continues to have concerns about our electoral process and the integrity of the election. I don’t believe that this process, the way that it’s played out, is really going to address those concerns. And also this has turned into a recount, and Arizona law has specific instances for how and when a recount is to occur. And also it’s a recount that’s been outsourced to known partisans. So I think for all those reasons, I don’t think this is a helpful exercise.

Having said that, although we’ve been accused of it over and over again, the board of supervisors is not acting to obstruct this exercise. From time to time we have gone to the courts, for example, and we’ve been concerned that people are being asked by the state or actually by the president of the Senate and the Senate judiciary chair to take actions that we thought might have been in violation of state law.

What kind of consequences do you think the audit will have?

Well, first of all, I think that it’s being conducted by a partisan entity. So that means that a majority of the people probably won’t even acknowledge the findings of it.

My fear is that all of this is further tearing at the foundations of our democracy and tearing at people’s faith in our electoral systems. If there were fraud going on, if there was systematic corruption going on, I would be the first to speak out against it. But we have looked at this again and again and again with numerous audits here. These issues have been litigated and relitigated in the courts, both state and federal courts. And there was no basis. And now we’re seeing these conspiracy theories that are being pursued.

If people lose faith in the electoral system, then I mean, where we go from there is very scary, right? Either people just disengage, they stop voting, or they cannot redress the government any further. They pursue what — armed rebellion? These are things that I can’t believe are even coming out of my mouth. This is such unchartered territory.


How do you convince rank-and-file Republicans, and other Republicans in general, that the election was fair and legitimate?

People ask me about Pennsylvania, Georgia, and what happened there. And honestly, I’m not going to comment on those elections because I wasn’t involved in those. I don’t know. But when we’re talking about Maricopa County, I can tell them how the election was run. It’s a collaborative effort here in Arizona. That’s how it’s set up. We took part in the election or ran it as elected Republicans. So if there was truly fraudulent results in Maricopa County, — the Republicans on the board of supervisors had to be a part of that. That is quite an accusation, to be either involved in it or look the other way; it makes no sense. And when you consider we were on the ballot as well and we were all re-elected. So that’s another thing to sort of suspend belief and say, "OK, it was just fraud in the presidential race, but not in a Republican state house.”

I’ve been a Republican my whole life. I mean, it’s like Liz Cheney: Nobody’s ever questioned her conservative credentials. That’s not what this is about at all. It has become about the big lie. And sadly, I feel like that is now the defining feature of the Republican Party. Whether you believe that the 2020 election results were a big lie.


So how do you persuade other Republicans to believe the election was legitimate?

I think it’s a real challenge because unfortunately so many of our leaders of the party are telling them something else. I’m concerned that at this point, this is something that is going to take a while. It’s so important that we deal with reality and we’ve gotten away from that. We’re not living in our sort of normal human environment. We’ve all gone into these rabbit holes on social media.

And so there’s got to be this kind of civic reawakening, a belief in democracy. Trying to appeal to those who see that Donald Trump won the election in 2020, that is probably about the worst way to accomplish that.

If we don’t do those things, then I think we’re destined to be a minority party. And by that I mean a party that doesn’t win elections.

LM K wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 2:07 pm From NYT:

One of the most outspoken Republican critics of the audit is Bill Gates, who was re-elected as a Maricopa County supervisor in 2020, and along with other supervisors helps oversee the county’s election procedures.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is demanding details about how voting equipment and nearly 2.1 million ballots will be secured when the state Senate-ordered audit of the 2020 Maricopa County election goes on a planned hiatus at the end of this week.

"The Secretary is deeply concerned about Defendants’ plan to move the ballots and other election equipment from their current location in the Coliseum after May 14, without returning them to Maricopa County,” Hobbs’ legal counsel wrote Tuesday in a letter to Senate attorneys.

"The Defendants do not seem to have and, if they do, they have not disclosed any policies or procedures related to the secure moving or secure storage of ballots at some other, unknown location.”


The letter from Hobbs’ attorneys alleges that the auditors haven’t been following their own published security plan, demanding “immediate corrective action.”

“If Defendants are going to retain the ballots and election equipment after May 14, they must move and retain them in a secure and documented manner, including using tamper-evident and numbered seals which Defendants do not appear to be using currently,” the letter says.

“Pursuant to sections 1(a) and 1(d) of the Settlement, please immediately provide any and all policies specifying how Defendants plan to do so. Please also notify us when and where the ballots and election equipment will be packed and moved so that the Secretary’s observers may observe pursuant to section 1(h) of the Settlement.”


No formal rental deal for the audit to continue at the original home of the Phoenix Suns beyond Friday had been announced as of Tuesday afternoon. However, former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett has repeatedly said an arrangement was being made for ballots and equipment to be secured in other parts of the building to make way for the Phoenix Union High School District ceremonies.

Kristy Clark, [12.05.21 17:08]
Not that it was a fair election but what happens if it was... lol... like do we all just sit down