Arizona 2020 election audit allegedly finds deleted data, unsecured ballots, missing chain of custody

The Republican audit of Maricopa County, Arizona 2020 election ballots has already turned up "three serious issues."

According to a letter from Karen Fann, President of the Arizona State Senate, sent to the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, the county continues to flout valid, legislative subpoenas, refusing to hand over virtual images of routers. The county has also allegedly failed to provide the passwords necessary to access vote tabulation devices for the audit.

"...attorneys for Maricopa County have refused to produce virtual images of routers used in connection with the general election." Karen Fann, Arizona Senate President

A second issue flagged by the audit has to do with "anomalies" in chain of custody processes for ballots. The letter says the county has yet to provide chain of custody documentation, bags storing the ballots were not sealed, batch dividers are missing, and ballot boxes were sealed with regular tape rather than tamper evident seals.

The third issue mentioned is the alleged deletion of "the entire 'Database' directory from the D drive of the machine 'EMSPrimary'.” That would mean subpoenaed data has been removed. According to the audit, there is also evidence that the "main database for all election related data for the 2020 General Election has been removed."

Arizona is one of several important states where Donald Trump enjoyed an initial lead, only to have it disappear as questioned mail-in, dropbox, and absentee votes were counted.

The vast majority of votes cast in Arizona, 2.1 million of nearly 3.4 million ballots, were cast in Maricopa County.

According to the official tally, Biden beat Trump by 10,457 votes, or 0.3 percent.

In not turning over the routers, Maricopa County officials have said that providing them would “endanger the lives of law enforcement officers, their operations, or the protected health information and personal data of Maricopa County’s citizens." The county has also said that producing the internet routers for inspection would cost up to six million dollars.

I am writing to seek your assistance and cooperation in the resolution of three (3) serious issues that have arisen in the course of the Senate’s ongoing audit of the returns of the November 3, 2020 general election in Maricopa County.

The first issue concerns Maricopa County’s apparent intent to renege on its previous commitment to comply fully with the legislative subpoenas issued on January 13, 2021, which, as you know, Judge Thomason found were valid and enforceable.

To date, attorneys for Maricopa County have refused to produce virtual images of routers used in connection with the general election, relying on a conclusory and unsupported assertion that providing the routers would somehow “endanger the lives of law enforcement officers, their operations, or the protected health information and personal data of Maricopa County’s citizens.” If true, the fact that Maricopa County stores on its routers substantial quantities of citizens’ and employees’ highly sensitive personal information is an alarming indictment of the County’s lax data security practices, rather than of the legislative subpoenas. Similarly, the County’s assertion that producing the internet routers for inspection would cost up to $6,000,000 seems at odds with Deputy County Attorney Joseph La Rue’s prior representation to Audit Liaison Ken Bennett that the routers already had been disconnected from the County’s network and were prepared for imminent delivery to the Senate.

Nevertheless, in an effort to resolve the dispute regarding production of the routers, we propose that agents of CyFIR, an experienced digital forensics firm and subcontractor of Cyber Ninjas, review virtual images of the relevant routers in Maricopa County facilities and in the presence of representatives of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Such an arrangement would permit Maricopa County to retain custody and monitor the review of router data, while ensuring that the Senate may access the information it requires—and to which it is constitutionally entitled—to successfully complete its audit. The Senate has no interest in viewing or taking possession of any information that is unrelated to the administration of the 2020 general election.

Separately, Maricopa County has refused to provide the passwords necessary to access vote tabulation devices. Its attorneys’ insistence that the County does not have custody or control of this information is belied by the County’s conduct of its own audits, which, if they were as comprehensive as they purported to be, almost certainly would have entailed use of the passwords to examine the tabulation devices, and it strains credulity to posit that the County has no contractual right to obtain (i.e., control of) password information from Dominion.

As the audit has progressed, the Senate’s contractors have become aware of apparent omissions, inconsistencies, and anomalies relating to Maricopa County’s handling, organization, and storage of ballots. We hope you can assist us in understanding these issues, including specifically the following:

The County has not provided any chain-of-custody documentation for the ballots. Does such documentation exist, and if so, will it be produced? The bags in which the ballots were stored are not sealed, although the audit team has found at the bottom of many boxes cut seals of the type that would have sealed a ballot bag. Why were these seals placed at the bottom of the boxes? Batches within a box are frequently separated by only a divider without any indication of the corresponding batch numbers. In some cases, the batch dividers are missing altogether. This lack of organization has significantly complicated and delayed the audit team’s ballot processing efforts. What are the County’s procedures for sorting, organizing, and packaging ballot batches? Most of the ballot boxes were sealed merely with regular tape and not secured by any kind of tamper-evident seal. Is that the County’s customary practice for storing ballots? The audit team has encountered a significant number of instances in which there is a disparity between the actual number of ballots contained in a batch and the total denoted on the pink report slip accompanying the batch. In most of these instances, the total on the pink report slip is greater than the number of ballots in the batch, although there are a few instances in which the total is lower. What are the reasons for these discrepancies? For your reference, please see several illustrative (i.e., not comprehensive) examples in the table below:

Pallet Ballot Type Batch Pink Slip Total Actual Total Discrepancy 5 EV 2104 200 198 -2 5 EV 9276 200 165 -35 15 EV 9278 200 187 -13 15 EV 1643 200 218 18 7 EV 6359 197 187 -10

For your convenience, images of the corresponding pink report slips are attached in Exhibit A.

We have recently discovered that the entire “Database” directory from the D drive of the machine “EMSPrimary” has been deleted. This removes election related details that appear to have been covered by the subpoena. In addition, the main database for the Election Management System (EMS) Software, “Results Tally and Reporting,” is not located anywhere on the EMSPrimary machine, even though all of the EMS Clients reference that machine as the location of the database. This suggests that the main database for all election related data for the November 2020 General Election has been removed. Can you please advise as to why these folders were deleted, and whether there are any backups that may contain the deleted folders?

The image below shows the location of the files known to be deleted. In addition, the main database for “Results Tally and Reporting” is not present.

I am hopeful that we can constructively resolve these issues and questions without recourse to additional subpoenas or other compulsory process. To that end, I invite you and any other officers or employees of Maricopa County (to include officials in the Elections Department) who possess knowledge or information concerning the matters set forth above to a meeting at the Arizona State Capitol on Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. in Hearing Room 109. Chairman Petersen, former Secretary Bennett and I will attend the meeting, which will be live-streamed to the public.

Please let me know at your earliest convenience whether you accept my invitation and, if so, which Maricopa County personnel will attend.

ACTION PROJECT

MAR-A-LAGO Attn: President Donald Trump
1100 South Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach, Florida 33480

Judicial Watch 425 3rd Street, SW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20024
TELE 1-888-593-8442 between 8:30am and 5:30pm EST.

US CONGRESS SWITCHBOARD: (202) 224-3121

TALKING POINTS

Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone now says surrendering the county’s computer routers to
auditors would result in “horrendous consequences” for L/E personnel.

Penzone sounds like he knows p-l-e-n-t-y about Maricopa voter fraud.

Not only did Biden “miraculously” win Maricopa, but he won the election by 81 million votes.

Maybe Penzone can even explain this?

<><> Biden was the first Democrat to win the Arizona county since Harry Truman.

<><> This “miracle” happened after Biden/Harris held their first event together ........but no one showed up.

<><> Arizona 10-TV (VIDEO) outside the Heard Museum in Phoenix found no one cheering, no one lining the streets, no one holding signs.

<><> No one was outside the campaign venue to greet the candidates....not even a local Democrat.

<><>And where was L/E? The election was less than 4 weeks away.

<><> Penzone’s sheriff’s office was contacted to do crowd control
for a most significant event (Biden/Harris’ debut as a 2020 team).......... werent they?

The auditors have to find the point where the vertical jump was applied, b/c other Acorn blips will be hard to connect to a conspiracy to rig the election.

<><>The approach used would have to have been multifaceted.

<><> An unprecedented “pause” by the fraudsters was a necessity b/c the serious manipulation needed to get the Biden win had to be put into action.

<><> The pause was needed when it was finally certain Trump was going to win overwhelmingly.

<><> First, everyone in the fraud process was given a small part to make everyone part of the “game”..... all for one and one for all.

<><> 10 votes here, a thousand votes there….all adding up to a Biden win.

<><> The “pause” was necessary to get the vertical jump needed to reset the algorithm back on the winning curve.

<><> But an injection of the magnitude needed to pull this off is hard to deny.

Let’s hope they find it.

In the aftermath of the historically flawed 2020 election, conniving Democrats
finagled to control the election machinery, and, so far, have managed to avoid scrutiny.

The cast of lefty voter fraud characters are stupefying in their originality. We have seen stories of:
<><> shredded mail-in envelopes,
<><> lost thumb drives,
<><> wiped computers,
<><> slow-walked requests for documents,
<><> rigged voting machines,
<><> suspicious looking ballots,
<><> disappearing Trump ballots,
<><> a federal judge fixing the all-important Georgia Senate race,
<><> and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseaum.

There’s nail-biting in The Swamp WRT the mountain of voter fraud revelations emerging
plus the ever-widening audience of voters hearing about voter fraud for the first time.

Penlosi, Schmanure and all the Pubbie sellouts McConnell, Sasse, Kinzinger, got sap-happy.....thinking they’d finally be rid of Trump.

At the same time, the sap-happy lefties want the flawed Biden administration to at least SEEM seem legitimate....
even with a doddering moron, his “Dr” wife at his side, and the greedy Biden Crime Family salivating in the wings.

Is that the reason for the gallons of vodka and valium in the Democrats’ Capitol cloakroom?

One of this “eternal president’s bright ideas” flopped bigtime.

In Massive Blow To Obama and Holder, Republicans Handily Won Virtually Almost Every House Race
Huge Loss for Obama’s dream: a permanent Dem majority
Thegatewaypundit.com ^ | November 20 2020 | Mike LaChance / FR Posted by SmokingJoe

.....one aspect of the 2020 race is being overlooked even though it’s huge. Not only did Republicans make considerable gains in the House, that no one expected, they won most of the races that will entail redistricting. This is like a double loss for Democrats Every 10 years, after the census, congressional and state legislature districts are redrawn to maximize the number of districts that favor their party — a tactic known as gerrymandering. And as we wrote last month, the 2020 election represented the last chance for voters to weigh in on who would draw those maps.
Both parties went into the election with a chance to draw more congressional districts than the other, but the end result was just about the best-case scenario for end result was just about the best-case scenario for Republicans. As the map below shows, Republicans are set to control the redistricting of 188 congressional seats — or 43 percent of the entire House of Representatives. By contrast, Democrats will control the redistricting of, at most, 73 seats, or 17 percent.
How did Republicans pull that off? By winning almost every 2020 election in which control of redistricting was at stake… (Excerpt) Read more at thegatewaypundit.com ...

latimes.com
CIRCA 2019 Obama and Holder take on partisan gerrymandering with redistricting
SOURCE https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-08-27/obama-partisan-gerrymandering-redistricting-u-initiative
Aug 27, 2019 — In one of his first public political actions since he left the White House, Obama unveiled Redistricting U on Twitter as an in-person training arm ...All On The Line, launched earlier this year, is a combination of Obama’s “Organizing For Action” and former Attorney General Eric Holder’s “National Redistricting Action Fund.”

Pelosi, Who Claims to Oppose Gerrymandering, Funnels $300,000 to [Eric Holder’s] Democratic Gerrymandering Group
freebeacon ^ | FEBRUARY 22, 2021 | Joe Schoffstall
/ FR posted on 2/22/2021, 4:52:07 PM by MarvinStinson

After calling for an end to partisan gerrymandering, House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) quietly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to former attorney general Eric Holder’s effort to redraw electoral maps in favor of Democrats, filings show.

Pelosi’s leadership PAC, PAC to the Future, pushed $300,000 to Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee late last year. In 2019, Pelosi said partisan gerrymandering efforts “compromise the integrity of our democracy.”
Holder’s group is gearing up for a once-a-decade redistricting process that significantly influences which party controls Congress. It will serve as a data and legal hub and as a go-between for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and state legislatures, according to Politico.

Paul Pelosi, the speaker’s husband, oversees the finances for her PAC, the only political committee linked to a politician that has donated to Holder’s group in the past two years. The group is at the forefront of left-wing gerrymandering efforts, the likes of which Pelosi once opposed.
“This year, the Democratic Majority passed H.R. 1, the For The People Act, which works to end to partisan gerrymandering by requiring all states to establish independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions to draw open and transparent statewide district maps after each Census,” Pelosi said in 2019. “We will continue to fight partisan gerrymandering, ensure every citizen’s vote counts and oppose any attempt to compromise the integrity of our democracy.”

Holder’s group has also received a six-figure contribution from George Soros’s Democracy PAC, which is primarily funded by the billionaire’s nonprofit network. A number of union PACs, including Service Employees International Union, Transport Workers Union, and the American Federation of Teachers, have also poured cash into Holder’s group.
The group’s board is composed of individuals from a host of left-wing groups, including Ali Lapp, executive director of the Pelosi-linked House Majority PAC, and Noam Lee, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association. It has also been aided by top Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, a partner out of the D.C. office of the Perkins Coie law firm who has led challenges against Republican-drawn electoral maps in recent years.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee was born out of a quiet strategy session between former president Barack Obama, Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), and former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe before Obama left the White House. The group identified breaking up Republican-controlled legislatures as a top priority. Holder has said the group’s mission is “personal” to Obama, who resented Republicans for disrupting his agenda in the House of Representatives.

The coronavirus pandemic has made redistricting efforts more complicated than usual. The Census Bureau has pushed back the release of its population count—which is used to allocate House seats—from March to September. The delay will leave states scrambling and time crunched to redraw their congressional maps ahead of the 2022 elections.

An inquiry sent to Perkins Coie, which is listed as the contact for Pelosi’s leadership PAC in FEC records, was not returned.

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