Posted on 05/20/2021 3:07:55 PM PDT by marktwain
A forensic auditor helping conduct an audit of 2020 election machines in Arizona’s largest county disputed on May 20 reports claiming he backtracked on allegations that files were deleted from one of the machines.
“My testimony on May 19th before the AZ Senate is being taken out of context by some media outlets. To confirm: the ‘Databases’ directory on the EMS Primary Server WAS deleted containing the voting databases. I was able to recover the deleted databases through forensic data recovery processes,” Ben Cotton, founder of CyFIR, said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times by the audit’s liaison.
Some reports, including articles from The Associated Press and CNN, alleged auditors had “backtracked” from or “reversed” allegations that files were deleted from a machine.
AP, for instance, claimed that Cotton said that “data was not destroyed, reversing earlier allegations that election officials in the state’s most populated county eliminated evidence.”
CNN claimed that auditors “backtracked” from claims that a key database had been deleted.
Both outlets left out the crucial context from Cotton’s testimony before Arizona state senators on May 18.
Cotton said in examining the machine that he discovered a master file table “that clearly indicated that the database directory was deleted from that server.”
“Subsequently, I’ve been able to recover all of those deleted files, and I have access to that data,” he said. “I have the information I need from the recovery efforts of the data.”
Outlets had only included the latter portion in attempting to promote the idea that Cotton’s testimony conflicted with what Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, told Maricopa County in a May 12 letter.
The Associated Press and CNN didn’t immediately respond to inquiries.
Fann told The Epoch Times on May 20 that there was no backtracking of the deletion claims.
(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...
They can prove the county is lying in a heartbeat. Not one byte of data was changed on the original machine. He took the hard drives out of the machines and re-created them for data analysis and recovery. Can you put the hard drives back in unchanged.
All they have to do is turn on the original machine to prove the county is lying.
How small are these drives?
We can buy SSDs that hold 8 terabytes .. solves the space and speed problem at the same time.
They think we are as stupid as they are.
We know it’s not the Hag with a hammer.
That is a very good question. I watched the Maricopa County Supervisors meeting where they tried to explain that they opposed the Senate's audit, including refusing to respond to subpoenas. Their explanations all sounded more like excuses.
Similarly, the non-cooperation of the election officials, and their attempts to undermine the audit instead of support it cooperatively don't put them in a very good light.
Nothing wrong with moving files around on a working server. But as you noted, why not simply cooperate with the Senate audit? If the files had to be moved that's fine. But the elections department IT team should have documented that to the auditors and provided access to the backup copies.
People being audited often feel that the auditors really don't understand their job as well as they do. That's true, but the auditors may well understand some parts of it, or the mistakes that can occur better than the people being audited do.
The county election officials also have diminished their credibility by complaining about techniques that the auditors used that they haven't used. For example, the election officials said that using rotating tables to allow multiple people to see a ballot sequentially without touching it was "These are not things that serious auditors of elections do".
In reality, complaining about a particular technique used by the auditors with an obvious and reasonable purpose just makes the complainer look foolish.
From their point of view, it makes no sense to resist it so adamantly with contradicting excuses.
My suspicion is the Secretary of State and the Sheriff are the ones pushing for resistance, offering up various excuses, primarily that the audit "makes Arizona look bad", to hid the problems they know are there.
It is the same sort of thing they tried on President Trump "he doesn't "look" presidential" as if image were more important than substance.
Many of them actually believe this idiocy.
The Secretary of State and the Sheriff were both put into position by Soros funded organizational grants to their campaigns.
Just wait until Mariner sees this.
He’s waiting for someone authoritative like AP to weigh in.
But why are the Republicans on the Maricopa County board of supervisors playing along? Are they just anti-Trump partisans? Or are they just afraid of ending up looking bad.
It seems like they are parsing the difference between moving something from a disk drive so it is no longer present on the disk drive with deleting something from a disk drive so that it is no longer present on the disk drive.
The Secretary of State today is claiming that they may not be able to continue using the voting machines because they have been out of the custody of the election officials. That is a ridiculous idea, since part of the normal process for those machines is to check their installed software and firmware against the certified versions based on cryptographic checksums.
That’s what I’ve been saying all along. He was only partially quoted because the LSM was trying to spread a lie.
There is a database and a database “directory” (think index or catalogue). What was deleted was that directory. Using that directory would be the normal way to see the files in the database. Since the directory was deleted, the database files were initially not seen. Using means outside of the database system itself, the auditors were able to find the physical address of the database files and recover them.
BUT, what Maricopa county should have to answer for is how in the hell the database directory got deleted.
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