Falsehoods Unchallenged Only Fester and Grow
https://thefogbow.com/forum/
a GOP chairperson ordering the police to make arrests 
Nope!
Ours are bedsheets and pencils...jemcanada2 wrote: ↑Fri May 21, 2021 7:01 pm Someone joked about post-it notes and number 2 pencils. That’s how we vote in Canada still!
Maricopa County on Friday sent a litigation hold and preservation notice to Senate President Karen Fann asking that contractors and others associated with the the election audit preserve documents and evidence for possible legal action.
The four-page notice, sent by Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel, comes in the same week the county has fought back against a claim from the audit’s Twitter account that election databases were deleted and evidence spoiled.
“It is clear the Arizona Senate and its contractors do not intend to retract false allegations defaming the County and its employees,” Maricopa County Chairman Jack Sellers said in a statement.
“For that reason, Maricopa County is formally requesting Senate President Fann, Senator Petersen, Senate liaison Ken Bennett and contractors involved in the ‘audit’ preserve documents and evidence as they may be subject to future legal claims.”
The America First Grade Caucus
Please tell me those are the guns that fired on Ft Sumpter to start the Civil War.orlylicious wrote: ↑Thu May 20, 2021 6:16 pm Vernon Jones was in cahoots with Ali "Alexander" Akbar on this. Even the invite form was shared by the two of them. Georgia reporters need to remember that during the campaign. Independents hate this and even a lot of Republicans are getting worried that focusing on this bullsh*t instead looking forward to the next election is going to bite them in the ass. So maybe they should keep dead-ending and going for it. Nothing is going to change, they will just piss off their marks.
LM K wrote: ↑Fri May 21, 2021 4:47 pm The circus returns to the coluseam on Mon.
Some of my questions.
Will they be adequately staffed?
Is the senate going to subpoena Dominion?
How long until the senate files a lawsuit to get the routers?
Will a router still be connected on the counting floor?
Will another company come swooping in to "help"?
Will a citizen's arrest be attempted?
More will come to mind later, I'm sure.
Gregg wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 12:58 amLM K wrote: ↑Fri May 21, 2021 4:47 pm The circus returns to the coluseam on Mon.
Some of my questions.
Will they be adequately staffed?
Is the senate going to subpoena Dominion?
How long until the senate files a lawsuit to get the routers?
Will a router still be connected on the counting floor?
Will another company come swooping in to "help"?
Will a citizen's arrest be attempted?
More will come to mind later, I'm sure.
I got a buck that says they have to be reminded they can't have blue or black pens.
Bet.
When Arizona’s secretary of state asked me if I would serve as an observer of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, I expected to see some unusual things. Post-election audits and recounts are almost always conducted under the authority of local election officials, who have years of knowledge and experience. The idea of a government handing over control of ballots to an outside group, as the state Senate did when hiring a Florida contractor with no elections experience, was bizarre. This firm, Cyber Ninjas, insisted that it would recount and examine all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county in the 2020 general election.
So I figured it would be unconventional. But it was so much worse than that. In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged.
I arrived at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the morning of May 4. Security was conspicuously high: At three stations, guards checked my ID and my letter from the secretary of state. No bags were permitted on the floor, and I had to surrender my phone, laptop and smartwatch. I was allowed a yellow legal pad and red pen to take notes, and provided with a pink T-shirt to wear so I would be immediately identifiable. The audit observers hired by Cyber Ninjas, in orange T-shirts, followed me wherever I went and reported random things about me they found suspicious, like that my foot had crossed the tape perimeter separating the work and observation areas. Several times someone asked to test my pen, to ensure it really had red ink. Once, they even demanded that I empty my pockets, in which I carried that pen and a pair of reading glasses. I was allowed to ask only procedural questions of the Cyber Ninjas attorney; I couldn’t talk to anyone else performing the work. The atmosphere was tense.
I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed things up.
Speed doesn’t necessarily pose a problem if the audit has a process for catching and correcting mistakes. But it didn’t. Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers recounted only if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.
I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it had been marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to groundless speculation that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea.
The fourth reason was folding. The auditors reasoned that only absentee voters would fold their ballots; an in-person, Election Day voter would take a flat ballot, mark it in the booth and submit it, perfectly pristine. I almost had to laugh: In my experience, voters will fold ballots every which way, no matter where they vote or what the ballot instructs them to do. Chalk it up to privacy concerns or individual quirks — but no experienced elections official would call that suspicious.
At one point, I overheard some volunteers excitedly discussing a stain on a ballot. “It looks like a Cheeto finger,” one said. “Like someone’s touched it with cheese dust!” That had to be suspicious, their teammate agreed. Why would someone come to the polls with cheese powder on their hands? But I’ve seen ballots stained with almost anything you can imagine, including coffee, grease and, yes, cheese powder. Again, when you have experience working with hundreds of thousands of ballots, you see some messes: That’s evidence of humanity’s idiosyncrasies, not foul play.
Their equipment worried me more than their wild theorizing. At the forensics tables, auditors took a photo of each ballot using a camera suspended by a frame, then passed the ballot to someone operating a lightbox with four microscope cameras attached. This was a huge deviation from the norm. Usually, all equipment that election officials use to handle a ballot — from creating to scanning to tallying it — has been federally tested and certified; often, states will conduct further tests before their jurisdictions accept the machines. It jarred me to see volunteers using this untested, uncertified equipment on ballots, claiming that the images would be used at some point in the future for an electronic re-tally.
In a sense, it was heartening that, whenever the secretary of state released letters listing our concerns, the auditors would try to address them. On my first day in the arena, for example, I noticed runners collecting tally sheets from the counting tables and bringing them to a single person who entered the data into some kind of aggregation spreadsheet, without anyone to verify that this person was entering the data correctly. By my last day of observation, on May 7, the auditors were attempting to set up a quality-control station.
But procedures should never change in the middle of an audit. Here, they did, and not just a couple of times, but almost daily. The training for volunteers also evolved: At first, they got no guidance about how to determine a voter’s intent on a ballot; only a week later did the auditors add a few slides to their training presentation, summarizing a few scenarios in which the volunteers might run into this issue. When I asked my designated auditor about these shifting guidelines, he called it “process improvement.”
What I saw in Arizona shook me. If the process wraps up and Cyber Ninjas puts together some kind of report, that report will almost certainly claim that there were issues with Maricopa County’s ballots. After all, Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has publicly voiced his wild conjecture about the 2020 election. But the real problem is the so-called audit itself.
Audits are supposed to make our elections more secure and transparent — to strengthen the public’s trust in our democratic process. Maricopa County is known for having some of the best election practices in the country: Officials had already undertaken a hand-count audit and a forensic audit of their 2020 ballots and found no evidence of fraud. Now a group with no expertise, improvising procedures as it goes, is sowing doubt about the result of a well-run election.
This is not an audit, and I don’t see how this can have a good outcome.
QAnon Wikipedia
QAnon, or simply Q, is a discredited American far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles run a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against former President Donald Trump during his term in office. QAnon is commonly described as a cult.
PANIC: Rachel Maddow devoted her entire first segment to “QAnon” and Lin Wood.
1,352 views•May 22, 2021
Captain S
I’ve been waiting for the Fake News to play the ‘Lin Wood card’ and here it is!
They’ve sat on this Lin Wood footage from the event in Oklahoma in mid-April, just waiting for the right moment to use it when they are in a deep moment of desperation.
Nice try, Rachel. Nothing can stop what is coming.
ISSUE #1: There’s No “There” There
There is no evidence of fraud or malfeasance in Maricopa County’s 2020 Presidential election results. Professional election administrators in Maricopa County already performed a post-election audit of the election, and confirmed the correctness of the reported results.
Furthermore, in addition to Maricopa County's own post-election audit of a sample of paper ballots, the County also commissioned an audit of its voting equipment, performed by two third-party Voting System Test Laboratories, accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The results of the machine audit found that installed software were the properly certified versions; no malicious software was installed; no information on tabulators was sent or received via internet; and no evidence of vote switching was found.
ISSUE #2: Lack of Transparency
Nothing is more important to the integrity of post-election audits than public transparency. Yet the Arizona sham currently underway repeatedly fails to meet this standard. That is likely because the contractor (Cyber Ninjas) has no experience with elections. Zero. None.
Two especially egregious examples of how Cyber Ninjas doesn’t understand civic, elections-related values:
They asked a Maricopa County Superior Court to keep their audit procedures sealed from public examination (!),claiming they were “trade secrets.”
Cyber Ninjas required observers of the post-election procedures to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Or, as one news talk show anchor put it: "You can observe... but you just cannot tell anyone what you observed."
This is not how real auditors behave. It’s clear that Cyber Ninjas simply does not understand how important it is for the integrity of a post-election audit process to have robust public transparency. They are out of their element, and in way over their heads.
ISSUE #3: Lack of Impartiality
In order for a post-election audit to be credible, it's essential that the parties administering it not be tainted by bias. Yet, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan is a vocal advocate of former President Trump's "Stop the Steal" message and platform. This is not how real auditors behave.
ISSUE #4: Poor Procedures for Voter Marks Interpretation
Seasoned election administrators all know very well that voters make mistakes when they mark their ballots, and they have different styles of marking. In an audit, there must be standards to determine the interpretation of marks (i.e., "What choice did the voter intend?") However, the post-election sham in Arizona has no documented standards for determining voter intent on marked ballots – and that’s a recipe for subjectivity and inconsistency. This is not how real auditors behave.
ISSUE #5: Poor Procedures for Ballot Security
The conditions in Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where this event was being staged (before being moved – which is another huge problem, see below), have not inspired confidence. For example, ballots were kept in a chain link "corral"—but true to theatrical form, it doesn't even have a ceiling and access control by all visual accounts is sloppy. This is not how real auditors do their work.
ISSUE #6: Poor Procedures for Bipartisanship
In keeping with the value of impartiality, it is typical in post-election audits to ensure that auditors reviewing ballots are bipartisan teams, with equal representation.
Astoundingly, Cyber Ninjas has stated they cannot guarantee any of that. This is not how real auditors behave.
ISSUE #7: Poor Procedures for IT Security
For an organization that claims to be "experts" in cybersecurity, the number of bad practices Cyber Ninjas has displayed is striking: just a couple examples include unattended laptop computers on the floor of the Coliseum, and WiFi routers connected to servers with ballot images.
The most recent case of inflammatory partisan theater raises serious concerns about Cyber Ninjas’ own technical competence. After the Senate President made baseless — and now debunked — accusations about Maricopa County “deleting” databases, it turned out that Cyber Ninjas could not even determine that they already possess files they claim are missing; they didn’t even know how to correctly restore images and data that Maricopa County properly transferred over to them.
Just. Horrible. This is not how real auditors behave.
ISSUE #8: Poor Procedures to Resolve Discrepancies
Former election official Liz Howard of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice scratched her head over the Cyber Ninjas having a lack of any procedures to reconcile different tallies for the same ballots among the human reviewers on a team. Seriously. This is not how real auditors behave.
ISSUE #9: The Snipe Hunt
Not only are Cyber Ninjas’ procedures silent on critical issues, they are also constantly changing, apparently without end. So, this sham exercise is looking like an open-ended Snipe hunt, bleeding into areas with no relevance, and no apparent hard deadline to complete the ballot counting. This is not how real auditors behave.
And to be clear, in many cases, the Senate’s requests are simply unrealistic and unreasonable: there are levels of passwords (e.g., to access voting machine firmware) that some otherwise authorized County personnel simply do not have; it’s out of the scope of their knowledge or authority and no amount of subpoena or contempt threats can make those people cough-up passwords that they do not have.
So. The new spokesperson now has keys to ballot storage.
Pullen said 260 volunteer ballot counters were trained last week. He didn't know how many would show up Monday.
A week ago, Senate audit liaison Bennett said the goal was to bring on more temporary paid staffers. Pullen indicated that's taken a back seat.
“We have so many volunteers still to be (trained)," he said, "but are considering some additional paid staff."
Pullen said he was trying to find out how many counting tables would be filled Monday, but he added that the audit was sticking with the two shifts per day that were operating before the layoff.
Who's Recruiting the Volunteers?
The Arizona Republic reported last week that the lead public fund-raiser for the audit is also helping to decide which volunteers will count the ballots.
Several weeks ago, Trump defender and former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne claimed he donated $1 million toward a campaign whose goal is raising $2.8 million for the Maricopa County audit ($1.73 million has been raised so far).
The fundraising website has also been recruiting volunteers for the audit. An email obtained by the Republic shows Byrne's America Project will handle background checks, non-disclosure agreements and volunteer agreements of audit workers.
What's Pullen's Background?
Fann, who authorized the audit, said via text Sunday that Pullen was helping Senate audit liaison Ken Bennett with responding to the media.
"Ken was being called and texted dozens of times a day, which took a lot of his time away from helping coordinate the vendors, security, facilities, and Maricopa County," Fann texted. "Randy will now triage all the media and work with Ken to keep you all informed."
Bennett made himself available for interviews with pool reporters at the coliseum. All media calls are now directed to Pullen's cell number.
Pullen was chairman of the Arizona Republican Party from 2007 until 2011. He is a longtime party activist and a former candidate for Phoenix mayor.
Pullen also serves as treasurer of the Make Arizona Safe Again PAC. The political action committee which helped Republican State Rep. Mark Finchem of Oro Valley pay for a November hearing in Phoenix that aired baseless conspiracy theories that Democrat Joe Biden didn't win Arizona's presidential vote.
Pullen has been visible walking the coliseum floor during the audit. At one point, Bennett handed Pullen the key to the fenced area where the ballots are kept.
Wanderinglord wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 3:59 pm https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/po ... 429980002/
Reality is not compatible with AZ audit
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/po ... 429980002/AZ Central wrote: Tech company running Arizona ballot recount backs out: 'They were done'
Jen Fifield, Andrew Oxford, Arizona Republic
The Pennsylvania-based IT company that was in charge of running the hand recount of Maricopa County ballots is no longer involved in the audit.
The contract with Wake TSI ended May 14, the original completion date for the hand count, and the company chose not to renew its contract, according to Randy Pullen, an audit spokesperson and former state GOP chair.
"They were done," he said. "They didn't want to come back."
Wake TSI was the subcontractor that developed and oversaw the procedures for recounting the county's nearly 2.1 million ballots, working under Cyber Ninjas, the state Senate's main contractor performing the overall audit of the county's general election results.
The audit was on break from May 14 until Monday, as high school graduations took place in the coliseum.
Pullen said that Scottsdale-based technology company StratTech Solutions took over Monday running the hand count, using Wake's procedures.
The company has been involved in the audit since the beginning, Pullen said, including helping set up the technology for the hand count procedures. It's unclear whether the company, which specializes in cybersecurity and other internet technology, has any election or auditing experience.
The switch in contractors is the most significant change yet in the unconventional audit, which has seen numerous changes since it began April 23.
Ryan Macias, former acting director of testing and certification at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission who has observed the audit for the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, said Tuesday that this represents the “continuation of the mismanagement and constant change which we have been observing since the beginning."
But Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott, said the company had completed the obligations under its contract and she was informed last week it would not be returning.
“They finished up with their contract, so they don’t need to be there anymore,” she said.
Of the auditors, Wake TSI had the most experience in hand counts► Show Spoiler
claiming they were “trade secrets.”