Judge pulls back the curtain on Arizona Republicans' sham election audit

Opinion: 'It is difficult to conceive of a case with a more compelling public interest demanding public disclosure and public scrutiny.'

 

Arizona Senate President Karen Fann has been performing a Wizard of Oz act for months, talking big and hiding behind a curtain of secrecy surrounding the financing and communications between herself and the conspiracy kooks at Cyber Ninjas that she hired to perform a sham audit of Maricopa County election results.

On Thursday, however, Superior Court Judge Michael Kemp pulled back the drapery, ordering that Fann and the Republican-controlled Senate make available “any and all” records, including communications, planning, procedures, as well as who exactly is paying for this fiasco, to the nonprofit group American Oversight, which sued Fann and the Senate under public records law.

The Arizona Republic also has a lawsuit aimed at making public the financial records and communications between the Senate and the Cyber Ninjas.

 

Fann’s attorneys tried to argue that because the Cyber Ninjas are private contractors they did not fall under the state’s public records laws.

Court 'completely rejects' the Senate's argument

The judge in his ruling could not be more clear in dismissing that argument.

He wrote, “The court completely rejects Senate defendants’ argument that since (Cyber Ninjas) and the subvendors are not ‘public bodies’ they are exempt from the (public records law).”

Adding, “It is difficult to conceive of a case with a more compelling public interest demanding public disclosure and public scrutiny.”

The election audits done by Maricopa County and by the two independent, accredited (unlike Cyber Ninjas) firms it hired to review procedures and results proved there was no fraud.

That didn’t stop Fann from hiring Trump zealots to carry out an unqualified, partisan hatchet job meant to affirm cockamamie conspiracy claims about the election.

No more smoke and mirrors for Fann and Cyber Ninjas

Only now it is the hocus-pocus hustle being perpetrated by Fann and the Cyber Ninjas that is at risk of being exposed.

After the ruling was announced, American Oversight Executive Director Austin Evers said in a prepared statement, “Starting now, the Arizona Senate is going to have to face real, public accountability.

Was that a Senate hearing on the audit or a Trump infomercial?Michigan responded to the election responsibly. Arizona created a farceNo one wins in closing Phoenix hiking trails on high-heat days

“For months, the public has been asked to trust the word of senators about the sham audit of the 2020 election. Arizona law does not allow the Senate to outsource democracy and shroud it in secrecy. This ruling makes clear that the Senate must immediately begin releasing records to the public.”

Fann’s lawyers were hoping the court would pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.

 

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2021/07/16/judge-pulls-back-curtain-arizona-sham-election-audit/7990265002/

Old guy and Zombie, once again, you should go into hiding as you have backed the wrong horse. I pity both of you

Does it not concern you that three accredited auditing firms all concluded no fraud...Then one republican head of senate in AZ hires a company, partially paid for by trump supporters, who never did a single election audit. Broke many rules during teh audit. Wont reveal who is paying them.

Sounds legit eh?

LMFAO

You're done Old guy - 

Show the proof that three accredited auditing firms concluded no fraud.  Only Auditing from to audit has proof of fraud.

This auditing firm broke NO laws, that is just BS lies from the left.

If this election was so honest, what does the not want to get each audit over with proving they won?

Bladeslap, other  Elections with issues, both the right and left worked together to come to a resolution.  NOT THIS TIME!  The left has resiisted every move to find the truth.

 Get over it Biden lost and the truth is coming out!

Judge is now ordering that they release a ton of info about this "public audit".

Doomed - You keep backing the wrong horse Old guy - Not sure how else to 'xplain it

You are missing the key facts

1. They have nother done any election audit before ... Ever

2. There is dark money backing them and they refuse to say who is funding them - They were able to undercut the competitors because they were being funded externally and not only being paid by the state

3. The CEO was a part of the "stop the steal" crowd

Are you really that delusional that you can't see the writing on the wall?

It gets better ... Anybody doing an audit can ONLY bring in red pens - They brought in Blue pens, which could allow them to change or markup the ballot and make the original writing indistiguishable. 

THAT'S WHY we are only supposed to use Accredited teams, not this mickey mouse show paid for in part by people like yourself. 

You can choose to live in a sham fake world where facts and truth don't matter, but the rest of us actually like to know TRUTH. 

The truth? Trump lost in a landslide. Get used to it

A Judge orders more of the fraud info realeased to the public, how does that help your story?

other points.

    1. This maybe the very first type of audit like this that has ever been done, somebody had to be first.  The fact is any company that did this audit the left would claim no experience.

   2.  Dark money has been part of our history.  I do not see you crying when Facebook paid for voters in Nevada, or Sorros pays for people to riot.

   3.  So, the head of many election boards are part of the Democratic Party.  Like I said if they broke the law put them in jail.  But just because they are part of some group does not mean they did it wrong.

You are just grasping for straws, if something was done wrong, it will come out.  Just like the fraud during the election.  Each week we read more and more about the illegal and fraudulent things done by the left in state after state.

Tell more about the ballots in Fulton that have deem proven to get double-counted, or the voters that did not belong on the voting roles, that voted.

How about 5 states now that have bills calling for forensic audits.  Does not sound to me like they think the election wasn't a fraud.

As usual, you don't even know what you are reading.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/04/25/cyber-ninjas-wants-to-keep-its-arizona-election-recount-secret/7379117002/

Cyber Ninjas wants to keep their methods of their audit SECRET. That's right, they're auditing, but they don't want to let anybody know HOW they are auditing. Some "Secret"

Old guy, GIVE UP. It's a lost cause. It's a debacle just like Trump and Guiliani, and 4-seasons landscaping, and the hair dye dripping down Guiliani's face. Fail fail fail. What more do you want to see?

Get over it, all the left is now doing is trying to pull every trick they can to hide the truth!

uh, no. The audit does not show significant voting issues. Biden's margin of victory was 10,457 votes. Even if all 182 bballot irregularities were resolved in favor of Trump, they change nothing in that election- Biden won.

Trump is flinging feces at all the walls. Where it sticks is not important to him. Creating a stink that presents himself as not part of 'the establishment' is what works with his base. Whter or not it's factual, productive is irrelevent- it keps his mob stirred up. 

Arizona election audit has come up with few potential cases of voter fraud in 2020 election, AP investigation finds

Fri, July 16, 2021, 10:41 PM
An investigation by the Associated Press has found that out of 3 million ballots cast in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election, only 182 cases of potential voter fraud have been discovered. Meanwhile, in Washington, rising inflation and COVID misinformation are taking center stage on the Biden Administration's agenda. 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson is moderating this Sunday's Face The Nation. He joined CBSN's Lana Zak to discuss these topics and what to look forward to on Face the Nation.

You are aware that the AG of Arizona has asked for Secretary of Sate voter fraud criminal referrals.

Cite the source of your numbers.

County officials have issued what they said is a point-by-point knockdown of the most serious charges so far that have been leveled by Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired by Senate President Karen Fann, and Ben Cotton founder of CyFir, which bills itself as a digital forensics investigative company.

AP Photo, Matt York, File

 

Howard Fischer

PHOENIX — Claims made about the election audit in Maricopa County that some have labeled a "bombshell" are really a dud, Maricopa County officials say.

County officials have issued what they said is a point-by-point knockdown of the most serious charges leveled by Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired by Senate President Karen Fann, and Ben Cotton founder of CyFir which bills itself as a digital forensics investigative company.

But the county was not allowed to provide a response at Thursday's hearing at the state Senate as they were not invited and public testimony was not allowed.

All of this means that the issue is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. In fact, Jack Sellers, who chairs the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said he is prepared for a future legal fight.

 

"Finish your audit, release the report, and be prepared to defend it in court," he said in a prepared statement.

On Thursday, Logan and Cotton presented their findings to date to Fann and Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, who chairs the Judiciary Committee. Democrats on the panel were not allowed to participate or ask questions.

 

The two contractors said they are likely months away from a final report. Logan said it could even mean a door-to-door canvass to find certain voters.

And they also claim they have not been provided with all the materials the Senate had subpoenaed, a claim that Sellers disputed.

 

"Stop accusing us of not cooperating when we have given you everything qualified auditors would need to do this job," Sellers said, taking a slap at the firms the Senate has retained.

But Sellers and county officials also felt it necessary to dispute much of what the contractors told Fann and Petersen they had found.

"The Senate's uncertified contractors asked a lot of open-ended questions, portraying as suspicious what is actually normal and well known to people who work in elections," the supervisors chairman said. "In some cases, they dropped bombshell numbers that are simply not accurate."

Potentially the biggest claim by Logan is that the county logged what he said were 74,232 more early ballots than the number of requests sent out.

 

 

County spokesman Fields Moseley, whose staff worked with the county recorder to research the claims, said there are two problems with that.

First, he said the records show there were 2,364,426 requests for early ballots, with 1,918,024 returned.

"So the claim is not just wrong but completely wrong," he said.

Aside from that, Moseley pointed out that there are two ways to vote early: with a mail-in ballot or going directly to one of the early voting locations. And in the latter case, people are handed ballots that are prepared there but lumped into the early ballot category.

"So it's not unusual that we would have more early votes than mail-in ballots sent," Moseley said.

 

 

Then there's the claim that were were 11,326 more people listed on a Dec. 4 voter registration list as having voted than on the Nov. 7 list.

"It sounds confusing," Fann said when told.

Moseley said what's missing from that analysis is that there were 18,310 "provisional'' ballots cast in the general election. These are ballots given to people who show up at polling places but are not listed as registered. They are counted only if a later examination shows they were eligible.

 

"It is possible for a voter to not be on the voter rolls, vote a provisional ballot, receive credit for voting (but) that ballot not actually be counted because they voted provisionally, and then later show up on the voter rolls," he said. Moseley said 7,605 provisional ballots were rejected in the general election due to the person not being registered.

 

Then there's the claim of "bleed through" on ballots. Logan said this was particularly problematic with ballots cast at polling places, where he said marks made intentionally for a candidate on one side of the ballot produced dark spots on the other side that could be mistaken for votes for a candidate there.

Moseley said that the ballots are designed so that the fill-in ovals on one side are "offset" from ovals on the reverse side. That, he said, ensures that there are not incorrect votes being cast.

 

Logan countered with photos of what he said were not just images of bleed through but that the front and back sides of ballots had not been properly aligned, allowing for possible confusion when the tallying machine reads the votes.

 

 

But Moseley said that ignores an important fact: Arizona law requires an actual hand count of a random sample of ballots, with the precincts and the individual races within them by chosen representatives of both political parties, and then compare the total with what the machine recorded.

If the hand count comes in within a certain margin, then everything is fine.

But if one or more races are outside that margin, then the process is repeated with ever-larger batches. And at a certain point if discrepancies persist, there even are provisions for a judge to order the source code for the computer software to be reviewed by a special master.

In the case of Maricopa County, the hand count matched the machine count, regardless of any claim of ink bleeding through.

 

There actually was a lawsuit on a related issue of whether the machines were properly recording votes when ballots which had been damaged or ballots with extra marks had to be redone by hand so they could be fed through counting machines.

 

In that case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said that a random check of 1,626 of these ballots ordered by a trial court did find an error rate of as little as 0.37% or as much as 0.55%.

But the justice said that extrapolating that out to the 27,869 ballots that had to be duplicated would have gained Donald Trump just 103 votes or, at best, 153 votes, "neither of which is sufficient to call the election results into question."

 

Moseley said the county categorically denies allegations that Logan presented — allegations that came from a woman, not publicly named, who Fann said worked reviewing early ballots — that people were told to not fully compare signatures on envelopes with signatures on file.

"Maricopa County follows rigorous state signature verification guidelines," he said, with all full-time staff that perform that function having completed a certification course offered by the Associated Forensic Laboratory.

And he disputed allegations that election equipment was subject to possible tampering or hacking.

 

"Maricopa County uses an air-gapped system, meaning its tabulation equipment is never connected to the internet and is completely separated from the Maricopa County network," Moseley said. He said that is why an issue last year of someone accessing the voter registration system could not have affected or accessed the system used to count votes.

 

Tags

• State-politics

Old guy doesn't want to hear the facts. They confuse him and annoy him. He wants and he needs deception to help his belief that Trump actually won. 

I repeat, Old guy does not want to hear the truth. All in all, there were 86 Cases thrown out for election fraud (filed by or on Trump's behalf). 

Even his own conservative judges tossed the cases out.

So, look at the logic of Old guy. He's dismissing 86 cases, but is latching onto "Cyber Ninjas", funded by dark money, partisan, never done anythign with a recount, refusing to answer anything about how they do their work.

That's who he puts his faith in. ...

It is a lie to say 86 cases thrown out for election fraud, that is a LIE, no facts to back that up!

Itis a flat out lie to say "cyberNinjas" refused to answer anything about how they do their work.  Everything they did was videoed, during the hearing lots of questions about the process was answered?  That point of your is a lie!

Did Trump lose 86 cases, Yes!  None of them directly about election fraud, all about process.

Has CibberNinjas tried to keep company secrets, secret, yes!  But they are very open about the audit process.

You are not truthful in any point you made in that post!

These are teh facts:

Trump Lost the Popular vote (Biggly) (74 million to 81 million)

Trump lost every single indepdent recount 

Trump lost every single court case - The judges threw every one out and said "No merit"

Trump lost court cases with federal judges he put in himself

Trump lost at the supreme court

Trump lost his tax case at the supreme court

Trump's recount in Wisconsin netted Biden even more votes

Some of Trump's lawyers are now being challenged in court or have been suspended from practicing law for overtly lying in court about the "stop the steal" campaign

Here's some more reading material:

• • In Pennsylvania, US District Judge Matthew Brann, a former senior Republican official, denied the Trump campaign's request to invalidate millions of Pennsylvania mail ballots, issuing a blistering opinion comparing the lawsuit to "Frankenstein's monster."A Pennsylvania appeals court panel in a 3-0 vote rejected the campaign's request to reverse Brann's decision. "Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so," Judge Stephanos Bibas, another Trump appointee, wrote in a sharply-worded opinion that was joined by the panel's two other judges, both of whom are Republican appointees. "Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here. The Campaign's claims have no merit." Bibas added: "Voters, not lawyers, choose the President."
    • Brann criticized the Trump legal team, led by Giuliani, for presenting the court with "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpaid in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence," and said he would not "disenfranchise" 7 million Pennsylvania voters as a result.
  • In Georgia, US District Judge Steven Grimberg, another Trump appointee, rejected the Republican lawyer Lin Wood's request to halt the certification of votes in the state, alleging that Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, hurt him as a voter by agreeing to a settlement over signature matching on ballots in March.In Wisconsin, yet another Trump judicial appointee, US District Judge Brett Ludwig, threw out the president's lawsuit seeking to void Biden's victory in the state. "A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred," he wrote. "This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits."
    • When dismissing Wood's suit, Grimberg wrote, "To halt the certification at literally the eleventh hour would breed confusion and disenfranchisement that I find have no basis in fact and law."
• On Friday, the Supreme Court handed Trump his biggest defeat yet when it issued a terse order declining to hear a case brought by Texas that sought to throw out the election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia over unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Trump repeatedly hyped the case as being "the big one."
• Texas' Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed the lawsuit and was backed by 18 other GOP attorneys general as well as a majority of House Republicans. It was the most brazen and far-fetched attempt yet by the party to ignore the will of the voters, overturn the results of a free and fair election, and reinstall Trump as president.
• In a one-page opinion, the Supreme Court said that "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections."
• Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas disagreed with the other seven justices on whether the Supreme Court should have allowed Texas to file its complaint, based on their long-held view that as a matter of judicial procedure, the Supreme Court should always hear cases in which states sue each other. But Alito noted that even if he had heard the case, he "would not grant other relief," meaning he would have denied Texas' request to invalidate Biden's victory in four other states.
• ---

So, everybody is wrong. All the court cases, all the judges, all the indepedent recounts (Have many did we have?)

And SOMEHOW, SOMEHOW, a company, who is being funded by dark money, who has never done an work on election recounts, somehow you have your faith in them that they know what they're doing.

You know how ridiculous you look and sound? Do you know how foolish that argument sounds? 

It's really time to back off of it before you just sink to a level where you cannot come back from ever again. 

First of all over 40% of the people think the election was stolen,  it does appear that information about the election being fair is not believable by many.

Your last post "Not So" again twisted the facts so much that anyone in question ends up not believing any of your post.  Posting the truth would help your point of view.  If your really think Biden won, why lie!

I have heard it said by incredibly knowledgeable people "that if the people knew just how crooked some elections are that it would end our government as we know it".  I believe many will just ignore the truth because they do not want to open Pandora's Box.  Even many republicans just want this to go way!  Example is the  "no merit" ruling,   that way they could just ignore any issues that would be really distructive to the country.  Look at issues that the election violated the constitution and you know they did, everybody knows they did.   But NO ONE wants to rule on that, what do you do to states for noncompliance with the constitution.

Then, you on the left will believe anything the left pushes, NO questions asked and there are thousands of questions and thousands not answered with a realistic answer.  Like the 70,000 votes in Arizona the audit found that had NO record of being sent out.  Arizona election officials claim that is because they quit recording them a few days before the election, so they were good votes, just not recorded.  AND YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT!  Many things I know and many things I don't Know, BUT I DO KNOW THAT THE US MAIL CAN NOT SEND BALLOTS, OUT TO GET VOTED ON AND BACK TO GET COUNTED IN A FEW  DAYS (AND TWO OF THOSE DAYS, THE WEEKEND).  They will have to come up with a new story.  Don't worry you will believe the new lie!

useful idiots 

"First of all over 40% of the people think the election was stolen,  it does appear that information about the election being fair is not believable by many."

About a third of Americans believe the Earth is flat; and America faked the Moon landings.