NOTE: This is about this specific issue. All the other things CyberNinjas are doing is rock solid, IMO. This explanation is as much a severe criticism of the Maricopa County Election board for their deliberate stonewalling and recalictrance as it is of the error CyberNinjas may have made by bringing it up as they did which caused many of us (including myself) to misinterpret it.
We have to be careful about this "74,000 more ballots were returned than were mailed out" assertion from Arizona. CyberNinjas doing the forensic audit did not actually assert illegality, but merely said in their Arizona Senate Hearing that they see a discrepancy between a set of forms involved with mail-in ballots. (These forms are called the CV32 and CV33...when CyberNinjas asked for clarification and were deliberately ignored, they assumed that the CV32 was the request for the county to send a mail-in ballot, and the CV33 was the recording of a ballot returned to be counted. In fact, they are not generated or used in that fashion, hence the disparity. The CV32 appears have to do with ballots requested more than 10 days before the election, and the CV33 is for requests from 10 days to election day.)
CyberNinja CEO Doug Lauren said in the hearing:
"...We have 74,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent,” Logan said at a meeting livestreamed at Arizona’s Capitol on Thursday. “That could be something where documentation wasn’t done right. There’s a clerical issue. There’s not proper things there, but I think when we’ve got 74,000, it merits knocking on a door and validating some of this information..."
CyberNinjas apparently did not understand the two forms in question, and asked the Maricopa County Elections Board how they were used, and were told to go pound sand. No explanation. So when CyberNinjas publicly asked for an explanation from the County of how exactly the forms were used (asked during the hearing) it was misinterpreted by many on our side (including me) that they were making an assertion, when they weren't, and it spread across many conservative sites including Free Republic, the War Room, and many others.
Here is the response on this "fact check" from CyberNinjas spokesman:
"...Rod Thomson, a public relations consultant working for Cyber Ninjas, said Maricopa County refused to answer questions posed by the audit team in private, forcing Logan to ask for explanations in public.
"Mr. Logan never said this was fraud or criminal, he merely stated the facts as they were provided to him and did not have an explanation,” Thomson said. “None of this would be necessary if the county would simply communicate with the audit team when there are questions..."
So, CyberNinjas did not contest it but provided context, and I can deal with that. (I watched the entire Arizona Senate hearing over the weekend, so I can vouch that he was not saying this was a fact, he was saying it is a question that needs answering, and hoped it would be forthcoming)
AP did a "fact check" article debunking the claim (again, CyberNinjas did not make the claim, they were making a public request in the hearing for an explanation) and Leftists on the board and allied with them were quick to make hay out of it, finally providing an explanation of this.
It very nearly sounds like a setup by the Maricopa Election Board, but the appearance of making the assertion as it does when appearing in dozens of conservative websites after the fact is an "unforced error" on our part, so we bear responsibility for taking it out of context, and they are definitely crowing over this proof of "misinformation".
For my part, I certainly bear responsibility as well, but...as I said to someone else on this, if I don't view AP fact check articles because they lie nearly every time I hear of one of their "fact checks", I can live with a one-off error like this one.
There are plenty of things to go after, that 74,000 disparity won't be one of them, though.
Note: I said all this in my post because CyberNinjas did not dispute the criticism of them by the Leftists giving the explanation.
I do keep in reserve that the people explaining the error are lying through their teeth in a boldfaced attempt to bluff their way through this. But if CyberNinjas knew their interpretation was correct, they would have stuck with that instead of saying they asked for, but did not get an explanation of the issue from Maricopa County.
Just to be clear where I stand.
The article (post) title reads: “Fact check: Arizona audit chief baselessly raises suspicion about 74,000 ballots”. That’s just propaganda, plain and simple. Remove the word “baselessly”, and it’s a good headline.
I agree we need to be careful about reading too much into the excerpted testimony. It always pays to read the full testimony in context. For myself, I heard the comments about the 74,000 vote discrepancy as it was intended - an open question as to why their ballots-out and ballots-in counts don’t align. The testimony was that they had some 74,000 more ballots received than documented as mailed - but that the discrepancy could be attributable to a variety of causes, including clerical errors, poor recordkeeping, or the Cyber Ninjas’ ignorance regarding the process and use of such ballots. Too much was made of the discrepancy, when the real message should have been the intransigence of the county officials when asked directly about the processes.
It has been asked many times - if there is nothing to hide, why is the county spending so much time and effort hiding requested information from the Senate’s auditors?
And in doing so it perfectly fulfilled the intent of the audit organizers.
This exercise isn't about finding fraud or errors. It's about motivating the base to send money, buy pillows, sign up for "chat rooms" so they can get on fund raising lists, and get out to vote in 2022.
That's why the process has been dragged out for so long, and why Bannon's now pushing the 50 State Audit grift. The manipulation only works when they can hype something like the "missing" 74K". Bannon & Rudy were doing it yesterday even though the explanation you provided was known to them over the weekend (if not earlier).
It's entertaining theater but I feel sorry for the people who give precious time or money to these grifters.
“(These forms are called the CV32 and CV33...when CyberNinjas asked for clarification and were deliberately ignored, they assumed that the CV32 was the request for the county to send a mail-in ballot, and the CV33 was the recording of a ballot returned to be counted. In fact, they are not generated or used in that fashion, hence the disparity. The CV32 appears have to do with ballots requested more than 10 days before the election, and the CV33 is for requests from 10 days to election day.)”
Logical speculation is valuable in a fact-starved environment. Are these assertions based on hard-fact sources? (If so, please cite). It is odd that Bennett and other members of the audit team with substantial election experience would neither know how these processes work and what data categories would be required, nor be able to figure it out by testing different definition sets to find where the data DOES balance.
I agree that the 74,000 question has been magnified far beyond what CyberNinjas stated, and we can’t tally it up as a sure thing. Prematurely dumping partial audit results is a bad idea, and the auditors painstakingly eschewed the practice before this.
The Senate should subpoena expert testimony and/or written interrogatories and production of documents, both to the Board of Supervisors and particular individuals who ran the election as employees or consultants.
So has it been settled that is is an administrative issue, not fraud?
The CV32 appears have to do with ballots requested more than 10 days before the election, and the CV33 is for requests from 10 days to election day.)