Aug. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
15:55
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| Good evening. | |
| Even though the Arizona election audit is in the home stretch, that does not mean that it's out of the woods just yet. | |
| For instance, over the weekend, the audit liaison revealed that they have only, just now, obtained documents related to ballot duplication, which is something that's critical to completing the audit. | |
| Likewise, the Arizona Senate president, she said that to this day, to this very day, she is still waiting for several missing items that were subpoenaed from Maricopa County, but were never handed over. | |
| She also said that they have extended their contract with the state fairgrounds for another two weeks. | |
| And as all of this is happening, the largest newspaper in all of Arizona, they have just filed a lawsuit against the Arizona Senate over the election audit. | |
| Why? | |
| Well, let's go through that 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, just as a quick aside, before we do, I wanted to mention that at the very top of the description box is a link to Epoch TV, which is our brand new no-censorship video platform where you can find all of the Epoch Times awesome video programs, like The Larry Elder Show, Crossroads with Joshua Phillip, Concert Punch with Trevor Loudon, China in Focus, Life and Times, and our show, Facts Matter. | |
| And on there, we'll publish exclusive episodes that you will not be finding here on YouTube, frankly, because the censorship is too rampant. | |
| Again, that link will be right there at the top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And now let's really move on over to Arizona. | |
| As we've already discussed in several previous episodes, the large-scale audit of the 2020 election out of Maricopa County has been underway for over two months now. | |
| And the audit is beginning to wrap up, since the auditors have now completed the hand recount and are currently conducting the forensic part of the process. | |
| They are checking the machinery for any possible tampering, and they are checking the ballots for authenticity. | |
| Now, over the weekend, Randy Pullen, who is a spokesperson for the audit, he said that they are still missing crucial items which might actually prevent them from completing the audit. | |
| He said that in order to complete the audit, The Arizona State Senate will have to, once again, go to Maricopa County officials and request the county routers as well as the election machine passwords. | |
| Here's what he said. | |
| We have none of that information has been provided to us, and it's something that the Senate will have to go back to the county and request those items. | |
| So again, it's very difficult to complete the audit without getting that information. | |
| Mr. | |
| Poland then went on to talk about some of the information that they received about duplicate ballots. | |
| Here's what he said. | |
| We got some additional information for the county. | |
| Apparently, there was a difference on how many duplicate ballots there were per batch. | |
| So they gave us a new list, and so we had to create software that took that data and compared it to our data to deal with the duplicate ballots. | |
| Now, to give you a bit of background on this issue, when the Arizona State Senate first decided to conduct the audit in the first place, all the way back in December of last year, they requested all the election-related materials from Maricopa County. | |
| However, Maricopa County officials, they not only refused to comply, but they even fought the Arizona Senate in court over this issue. | |
| And after several months of legal back and forth, the Arizona Senate eventually won, with the judge in the case saying that Maricopa County officials were legally obligated to turn over all election-related materials to the auditors. | |
| The Maricopa County officials agreed, and they turned over almost all of the materials. | |
| And I say almost all, because the auditors, they never received either the county routers or the administrative passwords to the election machines. | |
| Now, in regards to the routers, the county officials claim that since these routers are used by many different departments in the county, not just by the election department, they contain sensitive information that should not be shared with the auditors. | |
| Here's specifically how they explained their rationale in the letter. | |
| The county's routers were not used solely for election-related activities. | |
| They were used by the entire county. | |
| Providing them or their virtual images could jeopardize the security of law enforcement data and programs, as well as Maricopa County citizens' financial, health care, and other private information. | |
| We are working with knowledgeable personnel to determine if there is a safe manner to get the Senate the information about the November 3rd election without jeopardizing this other information. | |
| However, the Arizona State Senate, they did not buy this explanation. | |
| In fact, Karen Phan, who is the Arizona Senate president, she sent this letter as a response to Maricopa County officials who were refusing to comply, and it said this in part. | |
| To date, attorneys from 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 data of Maricopa County's citizens. | |
| 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. | |
| Now, what she is essentially saying here is that the fact that handing over these routers would jeopardize private information to the extent that officials claim that it will is actually evidence that this information is not being stored securely to begin with. | |
| Now, this letter was written on May 12th, which is almost two months ago now, and to this day, to this very day, no routers have been turned over. | |
| And besides the routers, there's another issue that is hampering the forensic audit, something that we mentioned earlier, and that's the issue of the administrative passwords to the election machines. | |
| Now, we already discussed in a previous episode how the auditors, they found that they were not able to access the administrative control panels on the election machines because they did not have the passwords. | |
| Now, to give you a bit of background on this front, the election machines that Maricopa County used during the 2020 contest, they were manufactured by Dominion Voting. | |
| And they have a system in place that requires two separate passwords. | |
| The first password, it unlocks the machine. | |
| And then the second password, it unlocks the administrative control functions. | |
| And the Arizona State Senate was never given the second set of passwords to the election machines, meaning that even though they do physically have the machines in hand, they have no way to access the administrative control functions, and therefore, they have no real way to audit the machinery. | |
| Now, when the Arizona State Senate brought this problem up to the officials over in Maricopa County and demanded that they hand over these passwords, the officials said that they don't have them, that they can't do anything about them. | |
| They said that they were never in possession of these passwords in the first place. | |
| Here's part of a letter from their lawyer. | |
| 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, they reached out to Dominion, which is again the company that manufactured these machines, in order to get the passwords. | |
| However, Dominion, they released a statement saying that while they are willing to comply with the audit, they will not be handing over the passwords to the Cyber Ninjas, which is the firm that's leading the audit, because according to them, according to Dominion, the Cyber Ninjas are not accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. | |
| Here's part of their statement. | |
| Releasing Dominion's intellectual property to an unaccredited, biased, and plainly unreliable actor such as Cyber Ninjas would be reckless, causing irreparable damage to the commercial interests of the company and the election security interests of the country. | |
| No company should be compelled to participate in such an irresponsible act. | |
| Now, over the weekend, the July 4th weekend, we here at the Epoch Times, we reached out to Karen Phan, who is again the Arizona Senate president, and we asked her what she plans to do about these missing routers and missing passwords. | |
| Specifically, since Randy Pullen said that not having them is an obstacle to completing the audit. | |
| And she told us that her office is... | |
| However, in that email, she did not elaborate. | |
| And likely, if she wants to pursue the routers as well as the passwords, the Arizona State Senate, they will have to issue two new subpoenas. | |
| One will be aimed at Maricopa County for the routers, and the other subpoena would have to be for Dominion in order to get the passwords. | |
| And thus far, publicly at least, she has not stated whether that is the route that she's going to be taking. | |
| Only time will tell. | |
| However, there has been another development which might bring these routers as well as these passwords back into the spotlight. | |
| That's because several days ago... | |
| Sorry. | |
| Yeah, hey Roman, it's me. | |
| No, I'm just kidding. | |
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| Thanks, Roman. | |
| Now again, several days ago, there was another development which might bring these routers as well as these passwords back into the spotlight. | |
| That's because Ken Bennett, who is another audit liaison, he said that the audit team has just obtained new documents which are crucial to the process. | |
| Which documents exactly? | |
| Well, he said that these are records from Maricopa County that track ballot duplications after a ballot was either damaged or found to be unreadable by an election machine. | |
| Here's what he said. | |
| Those documents are critical to understanding how many ballots were taken out of almost every batch and sent to duplication and therefore have to be accounted for in accounting for all of the ballots. | |
| Now, what's interesting to note here is that these documents about duplications were not handed over to the Arizona County Senate by Maricopa County officials in the first place. | |
| Instead, Ken Bennett said that these records were obtained by Audit USA, which is an outside group not connected to the Cyber Ninjas, which are supporting the audit as a third party, meaning that county officials did not turn these documents over initially, and a third party group had to go in and find a way to get them. | |
| Now, in terms of the next steps in the audit process itself, Karen Phan, over the weekend, she told us that, The Arizona Senate has extended our contract with the state fairgrounds for two weeks at the Wesley Boland Building. | |
| Our vendor is finishing the aggregation process, which is double and triple checking the tallies of the hand counts, spreadsheet, tally sheets, image scanning, etc. | |
| This is a critical step to ensure the tallies can be accurately verified, which will give us a path forward in completing the audit. | |
| Now, both from our discussion, as well as if you've been following this audit over the past several months, you can see that it has been facing challenges from the Democrat Party, from the federal government, from the corporate media, as well as from local county officials since it began. | |
| And that trouble seems to be continuing. | |
| That's because just four days ago, a local newspaper out in Arizona, they filed a lawsuit against the Arizona Senate, as well as against the Cyber Ninjas, in order to obtain information related to the audit. | |
| So the newspaper in question is Arizona's largest paper. | |
| It's the Arizona Republic. | |
| And for your reference, by the way, they are owned by the Gannett Corporation, which also owns USA Today. | |
| And here's how they described their actions in an editorial that was published within their own newspaper. | |
| We filed a special action in Maricopa County Superior Court seeking financial records and communications about the audit from the Arizona Senate and Cyber Ninjas. | |
| And so why exactly is this newspaper suing both the Arizona State Senate as well as the Cyber Ninjas? | |
| Well, this is what their editorial says as it continues. | |
| How the audit is being conducted, the businesses doing the work, where the money is coming from, and what officials are saying to each other about it are for the most part not publicly known. | |
| Documents related to the audit are public records because the audit is conducted under the direction of the Senate, a public body, and the Senate is required to make available records that are in the custody or control of Cyber Ninjas. | |
| In that same editorial, they then wrote that they had earlier requested these documents through the Arizona Public Records Law, but they were denied access, which prompted them to file this legal complaint. | |
| However, the Arizona Senate might not agree that this information must be handed over. | |
| That's because in a similar case earlier this year, lawyers for the Arizona State Senate argued that these type of records do not need to be provided in a public records request, and here was their reasoning: "Private corporations that serve as vendors to the state government are not public bodies. | |
| It follows that any documents in their possession, custody, or control are outside the scope of the Arizona Public Records Act." However, the lawyer who is representing the newspaper in this new lawsuit is not buying He's saying that essentially, that if the documents that are currently in the possession of the Cyber Ninjas are not subject to transparency, that would create something like a loophole. | |
| Here's specifically what he said. | |
| Arizona law entitles the public to know how this audit is being conducted and funded. | |
| And the Arizona public records law does not permit the Senate to play hide-the-ball by delegating core responsibilities to a third party like Cyber Ninjas and concealing records of government activities and public expenditures in Cyber Ninjas' files. | |
| Now, in terms of which way the judge will ultimately rule, we'll just have to wait and see. | |
| Although, there is a bit of a precedent to which we can look. | |
| You might remember that back in April, April of this year, April of 2021, the Democrat Party, as well as a Maricopa County official, they filed a lawsuit against the Arizona State Senate In order to prevent the audit from taking place at all. | |
| And during that lawsuit, during that earlier lawsuit, the Cyber Ninjas, they asked the judge to keep their procedures secret, to not release them to the public. | |
| Their reasoning was that if their security procedures were released to the public, then they wouldn't be so secure. | |
| It would be like releasing the blueprints to a bank in order to prove that it's safe. | |
| It wouldn't necessarily make sense. | |
| However, the judge in that earlier case, he did not agree. | |
| And instead, he ruled that the cyber ninjas cannot hide either their procedures or their policies from either the media or from members of the public. | |
| Thus far, it's not clear whether it's going to be the same judge who's handling this new case as that earlier case. | |
| And so we'll just have to wait and see how it ultimately turns out. | |
| Now, if you'd like to go deeper into anything that we've discussed thus far about Arizona, if you'd like to read any of the documentation, or if you would like to read more about these routers and the passwords to the election machines, all that will be down there in the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
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