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July 22, 2021 - Epoch Times

17:47

Audit Team Discover '3 serious issues' With Maricopa County Ballots | Facts Matter

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	Good evening.
	Over in Arizona, the audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County has been underway for three full weeks now.
	However, according to this new letter from the President of the Arizona State Senate, not only have local officials been refusing to hand over routers, but the audit team has allegedly discovered numerous omissions, inconsistencies, as well as anomalies in the way that Maricopa County officials stored, organized, and handled the ballots.
	Now, there's a lot of back and forth to go through here, so strap yourselves in and let's go through it together.
	This is your daily Facts Matter update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times.
	Now, let's begin today's discussion over in Arizona.
	But actually, right before we do, as a quick aside, I wanted to mention that at the top of the description box, there is a link to Epoch TV, our brand new no-censorship video platform where you can find all of the awesome Epoch Times programs, like the Larry Elder Show, Crossroads with Joshua Phillips, American Thought Leaders, China in Focus, Life and Crossroads with Joshua Phillips, American Thought Leaders, China in Focus, Life and Times, as well as my show, And on there, we will be publishing exclusive episodes which will only be available over on Epoch TV.
	In fact, we already have our first exclusive episode up there right now.
	It's an awesome interview between myself and Joshua Phillips on the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to America.
	Again, that link is in the description box below.
	I hope you check it out and subscribe.
	And now let's move on over to Arizona.
	Now, as we've already discussed in several previous episodes, the large scale audit of the 2020 election over in Maricopa County has been underway for the last three weeks now.
	And as a part of that audit, the Arizona State Senate is doing a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots, they're looking for any possible IT breaches that might have occurred, and they are also examining close to 400 tabulation machines which were used during the election.
	Now, over the last several days, there have been pretty significant developments.
	To start with, it was just revealed via this letter right here from the president of the Arizona State Senate that the election auditors have discovered numerous omissions, inconsistencies, as well as anomalies in regards to the way that Maricopa County officials stored, organized, and handled the election ballots.
	Now, before we actually dive into this letter itself, I want to give you a bit of background surrounding it.
	So about a week ago, it was revealed that the officials over in Maricopa County have actually been refusing to turn over the county's routers to the election auditors.
	Now, we discussed this in more detail in a previous episode, but the gist of that is even though the Arizona State Senate subpoenaed those routers, and then subsequently a state judge over in Arizona ordered that they must be turned over, the officials over in Maricopa County have been refusing to do so.
	And they are refusing to hand over the routers at all.
	Their reasoning is that those routers are not only used by the election department, but instead they are used by various departments throughout the entire county.
	And so, because of that, these officials claim that handing over these routers would jeopardize law enforcement, it would jeopardize people's health information, people's financial records, as well as other private information.
	That's their reasoning, at least, for not handing over the routers.
	Now, even though you might agree with their logic, it is still the case that these officials are defying the law by not handing over the routers.
	And so, on Monday, so five days ago, the Arizona State Senate threatened to subpoena these officials if they continue to refuse delivering these routers.
	However, two days ago, the Senate actually backtracked on that threat.
	They backed away from threatening the officials, and instead, they issued this letter right here.
	Let's go through it together.
	Now, to start with, this letter is from Karen Phan, who is the Senate president out in Arizona, and it's addressed to Mr.
	Jack Sellers, who is the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
	And it begins, I am writing to seek your assistance and cooperation in the resolution of three serious issues that have arisen in the course of the Senate's ongoing audit.
	The first issue concerns Maricopa County's apparent intent to renege on its previous commitment to comply fully with the legislative subpoenas issued on January 13th, which, as you know, Judge Thomason found were valid and enforceable.
	I'd like to pause here for a quick moment and mention that what happened was that the Arizona State Senate issued these subpoenas late last year.
	That was when the Senate decided to conduct this audit and they subpoenaed all of the election materials from these local officials.
	However, back then, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, they refused to hand anything over.
	They flatly just refused to hand over any election materials.
	And then this conflict between the Senate and the officials, then it went to court.
	And after two full months of back and forth, the judge in the case, he ruled that the county officials must comply with the Senate's subpoenas.
	And after the judge's ruling, the county officials said that they would hand everything over.
	However, let's continue with this letter.
	To date, attorneys for Maricopa County have refused to produce virtual images of routers used in connection with the general election, relying on a conclusory and unsupported assertion that providing the routers would somehow endanger the lives of law enforcement officers, their operations, or the protected health information and personal relying on a conclusory and unsupported assertion that providing the routers would somehow endanger the
	If true, the fact that Maricopa County stores on its routers substantial quantities of citizens and employees' highly sensitive personal information is an alarming indictment of the county's lax data security practices.
	So to pause here for a moment, what they are essentially saying is that the fact that handing over these routers would jeopardize private information to the extent that these officials claim that it will is actually evidence that this information is not being stored securely to begin with.
	And then the letter goes on to say that the $6 million price tag that the local officials say this inspection will wind up costing doesn't make much sense.
	Then, at the end of this first section, the Senate president offers a possible solution to the problem.
	She says that a subcontractor for the Cyber Ninjas could actually go to the Maricopa County facility where these routers are being kept, meaning that the routers wouldn't have to be moved anywhere, and they can conduct the audit right there on site.
	In that scenario, in the scenario that she's proposing, the county officials would actually be able to retain custody of the routers as well as monitor the audit as it's taking place in real time.
	That's her suggestion at least.
	So that was the first part of the letter.
	Then the second part of the letter discussed how, as the audit has been progressing over the past three weeks, the auditors have discovered what appears to be omissions, inconsistencies, as well as anomalies related to the way that Maricopa County officials organized, handled, and stored the election ballots.
	Let's go through this second part together.
	The county has not provided any chain of custody documentation for the ballots.
	The bags in which the ballots were stored are not sealed.
	Batches within a box are frequently separated by only a divider without any indication of the corresponding batch numbers.
	In some cases, the batch numbers are missing altogether.
	Most of the ballot boxes were sealed merely with regular tape and not secured by any kind of tamper evidence seal.
	And lastly, the audit team has encountered a significant number of instances in which there is a disparity between the actual number of ballots contained in a batch and the total denoted on the pink report slip which accompanies the batch.
	She then gave some examples of these discrepancies in a chart, which you can see right here on this page.
	And then furthermore, as it relates to these issues that she laid out, she said that this lack of organization significantly complicated as well as delayed the processing of ballots.
	Might be one of the reasons why the recount has been taking as long as it has.
	So that was the second point.
	The third point in this letter relates to databases which, according to the Senate president, appear to have been deleted.
	Here's what the letter writes.
	We have recently discovered that the entire database directory from the D drive of the machine EMS primary has been deleted.
	This removes election-related details that appear to have been covered by the subpoena.
	In addition, the main database for the election management system software, called Rally's Tally and Reporting, is not located anywhere on the EMS primary 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.
	They then included this screenshot of what appears to be the deleted files.
	And the letter then ends with an invitation to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to meet with the Senate on May 18th, which is this upcoming Tuesday, in order to discuss these issues.
	Now this meeting, it's mentioned here, is not mandatory, but she did mention that further subpoenas or other further compulsory processes will be issued if these issues are not resolved.
	However, it looks like this meeting will not be taking place.
	That's because yesterday, Jack Sellers, who is the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, he was the one this letter was addressed to, he came out and he indicated that he will not be attending this meeting, and he also disputed the allegations in this letter.
	Here's what he said as a part of his statement.
	Deleting files off the server would be a crime, and it is not true.
	After reviewing the letter with county election and IT experts, I can say that the allegations are false and ill-informed.
	Moreover, the claim that our employees deleted election files and destroyed evidence is outrageous, completely baseless, and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate.
	Furthermore, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is planning on holding a public meeting on Monday in order to address these matters.
	Now, we here at the Epoch Times, we reached out to the Arizona Senate president for comment on these new developments, but we have yet to hear back.
	Regardless, it looks like on Monday, so in about two days, we will get an update on this matter from county officials.
	Maybe they'll give us more details.
	Now, outside of all of this, outside of everything that we just discussed, let's examine another issue that is plaguing this audit.
	We already discussed in a previous episode how the Arizona Senate recently revealed that they could not access the administrative control panels in the election machines because they did not have the passwords.
	Now, to give you a bit of background on that front, the election machines that Maricopa County used during the 2020 election have a system in place that requires two passwords.
	The first password is used to just unlock the machine, and then the second password unlocks the administrative control functions.
	Earlier this week, the Arizona State Senate revealed the fact that they were never given the second set of passwords to the election machines.
	That means that even though they do have the machines in hand, they have no way to access the administrative control functions and therefore no way to really examine what's going on in there.
	Now, when the Arizona State Senate brought this problem up over in Maricopa County to the officials there, they demanded that they hand over the passwords.
	However, the officials said that they don't have them.
	They said, in fact, that they never had them.
	Here's what part of a letter from the lawyers representing the officials had to say.
	The county has already produced every password and security key for the tabulators that is within the county's possession.
	It does not have any others.
	And so, in order to actually examine these machines, the Arizona State Senate reached out to Dominion, which is the company that manufactured them, in order to get the passwords.
	However, just yesterday, Dominion released a statement saying that while they will comply with the audit, they will not be handing over the passwords to the Cyber Ninjas, which is the firm that's leading this audit, because according to them, the Cyber Ninjas are not accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
	Here's what part of their statement said: Now we here at the Epoch Times, we reached out to the Cyber Ninjas for comment on this matter, but we have yet to hear back.
	In terms of the next steps, it's not exactly clear yet what the Arizona State Senate will do.
	One possible option is that they could hire another firm, one that is accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, but thus far we don't know whether that's something that they will actually do.
	However, there is something that we do know.
	It seems like the Arizona State Senate is not entirely convinced that county officials are telling the truth in regards to these passwords.
	That's because in this letter here that we discussed earlier, the one from the Arizona state president, here's what it says in regards to these passwords.
	Maricopa County has refused to provide the passwords necessary to access vote tabulation devices.
	Its attorney's insistence that the county does not have custody or control of this information is bellied by the county's conduct of its own audits.
	...
	they purported to be, almost certainly would have entailed use of the passwords to examine the tabulation devices and its strange credulity to posit that the county has no contractual right to obtain control of password information from Dominion.
	Now, whether that's actually the case or not, we'll just have to wait and see.
	Maybe this press conference on Monday will shed more light on these passwords as well.
	Now, in regards to the audit itself, as we already mentioned in a previous episode, there is a scheduled pause in the recount process.
	And so, at 7pm last night, which was on Thursday, the audit team, they stopped counting, they began to pack up the tables, as well as to get the ballots ready to be moved to a secure location for storage.
	This pause is due to a scheduling conflict with the venue.
	As we mentioned previously, starting this Saturday, the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the audit is taking place, will be used for several high school graduation ceremonies.
	Now, we here at the Epoch Times, we actually obtained this contract right here, which is a renewal between the Arizona State Senate as well as the venue.
	And it looks like starting on May 23rd, which is not this Sunday, but the next Sunday, they can restart the audit, and the contract appears to go through June the 30th, so it looks like they have it booked for over a month.
	Now, in terms of how many ballots have been recounted thus far, before this audit was paused, according to Ken Bennett, who is the audit liaison, close to 500,000 ballots have now been audited.
	So that is just under a quarter of the total ballots.
	It's, in fact, about 23%.
	And so once the audit starts up again, they will have over a month between May 23rd and June 30th to count the remaining 1.6 million ballots.
	However, it's also worth noting that while the hand recount is now on hold, according to the original work document from the Cyber Ninjas, they said that reviewing the voter registrations can actually be done remotely.
	And so while the hand recount is on hold, there are other things being audited in the meanwhile in the background.
	And so that's where we're at right now.
	In terms of the Maricopa County judge who released the security plans of the Cyber Ninjas to the public, that, unbelievably, there has been nothing made public on that front as of yet.
	So thus far, we've been following up, but nothing thus far to report on that front.
	If you'd like to read the full letter from the Arizona State Senate for yourself, it's quite interesting it has been a long time.
	It has quite a bit of specific examples in it.
	Or if you'd like to read the response letter from the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, everything will be in the description box below this video for you to check out.
	And now lastly, if you want to check out something quite interesting, as I was doing research for this article, I googled Arizona audit into Google, and then I hit the News tab, and then take a look at there.
	Scroll through the headlines for yourself and see how the mainstream media in this country is reporting on this audit.
	They seem to be discrediting the entire affair before it's even been concluded.
	However, if you've been following our program, you know that we here at the Epoch Times and on this show on Facts Matter, we report things honestly, we report things factually.
	In fact, we just present you with the facts, we present you with both sides of the arguments, we source all of our materials, and we let you make up your own mind as to what's going on.
	However, as I already mentioned in several other episodes, on the very same day that Joe Biden was sworn into office, YouTube, they made the unilateral decision to demonetize our program.
	We can now no longer run any ads before, during, or after our episodes, and the Super Chat feature has just been disabled.
	They're essentially snuffing out our independent journalism.
	However, we here at The Epoch Times created something very cool.
	It's called Epic TV. It's our brand new, no-censorship video platform where you can find all of The Epoch Times' video channels, such as The Larry Elder Show, Crossroads with Joshua Phillips, China in Focus, Life and Times, American Thought Leaders, as well as my show, Facts Matter.
	And over there, you will find exclusive episodes that are only available on Epic TV. In fact, we already have our first exclusive episode on there right now, And here's a trailer for it.
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	Stay informed and stay free.
	If you want to check out that exclusive episode, as well as all the other awesome content over on Epic TV, the link to it is right there at the top of the description box.
	I hope you click on it, I hope you subscribe, and I hope that you join us on this journey of exploring this world through honest journalism based in truth and tradition.
	Now, if you haven't already, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm, subscribe to this YouTube channel if you want honest content like this delivered directly into your YouTube feed while you still can.
	And until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times.
	Stay informed.

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