There is a screenshot showing the files as deleted on April 12th. They plainly were. The only questions are ‘why’, and ‘was this faked’? Each answer would need some evidence. Incompetence is not a question.
Actually if you looked at the testimony you’d see that regardless of what happened, the AP story is a direct lie. The County gave an explanation for the deletion in a later part, as it being part of backing up the files and clearing space in the active device. That may or may not turn out to be true and even reasonable, but the files were deleted and the auditors did not backtrack.
“The County gave an explanation for the deletion in a later part, as it being part of backing up the files and clearing space in the active device. That may or may not turn out to be true and even reasonable, but the files were deleted and the auditors did not backtrack.”
Quite common, especially if the database and the application were running on the same device. Offloading the DB files to back-up before shutdown, deleting them from the server.
If they were running on VMWare, there could be several copies that look like they’re been deleted.
When they’ve only been moved.
““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.”
That clip from the letter should tell you all you need to know. Clients do not write directly to a database. They send their updates to the application, which writes to the database.
The most common configuration for any application is that the application and the database run on different servers, even if they reside on the same machine. Since this is a SQL database, it is necessarily so.
The ONLY question to be answered is whether the county provided a full copy of the original database along with the application.
The county says they did. The auditor stays focused on “EMSPrimary” looking for a database that may have been residing on that physical server temporarily pending batch updates to the SQL server (which may have been located on that physical platform too).