The auditors said there were 74k ballots for which there was not a match between the EV32 ballot sent form, and EV33 ballot receipt form, and they were looking for an explanation. They did NOT say that 74k more ballots were received than sent, and even clarified the point.
People have been misstating what the auditors said, and the AP appears to mis-state it as well, in addition to some other deceptions and anointments as fact of things they don’t actually know.
The EV-32 is the legal indicator that someone asked for it, isn't it?
The effect is the same in either case, the votes must be (and should have been) invalidated.
The EV-32 is there by law to protect from exactly the thing that seems to have taken place.
Also, I suspect the EV-32 likely should contain a signature to be used for signature verification.
When an Arizona mail-in ballot is returned and scanned in as a mail-in ballot, the Dominion Democracy Suite EMS system automatically should throw that ballot into a “validation queue”.
Someone will have to look at that ballot image from the mail-in document scanner, and I would bet money that in Arizona, when that mail-in ballot image is launched from the validation queue in the Democracy Suite EMS workstation, the document management server probably knows the location of the scanned image of the EV-32 and pulls it up so the person doing validation can compare the signature on the EV-32 with the signature on the ballot.
I have never actually seen one of these systems, but I’ll bet that is one of the two reasons for the EV-32, those being the ballot request, and the documentation of the signature for later retrieval and validation.
Of course, these things can and probably were “batch validated” where they selected a thousand at a time and marked them as validated without even looking. Knowing the way government employees work, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
From the article:
"...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..."
Well, that seems to be the case when you watch the video. So CyberNinjas asked them for an explanation and Maricopa County Election Board told them to go pound sand.
Not surprising, I guess, given how their ineptitude, ignorance and possible criminality is being exposed, and I blame myself for not having a better handle on the context of the issue, if what AP says is true.
I have tended to discount the input of people or entities that have lied non-stop to my face. If AP is like a stopped clock that is right twice a day, I can live with that.