Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Prepares to Sue The Arizona Senate For its GQP Sham ‘Fraudit’

The Arizona Mirror reports, Maricopa County demands Senate preserve election audit documents for litigation:

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors sent Senate President Karen Fann a “Litigation Hold and Preservation Notice” letter demanding that she preserve documents related to the Senate’s controversial audit of the 2020 general election, indicating that the county may sue her over what it says are defamatory allegations that it deleted files from a hard drive.

The supervisors “reserve their rights to seek redress of their grievances and to be made whole in a court of law.” So this is not yet the statutory Notice of Claim letter:

The Arizona Notice of Claim Statute was enacted in 1994, and it requires that anyone who wishes to make a claim against a public entity must first provide the entity with notice of the claim within 180 days after the claim has accrued.   The statute provides that a notice of claim is deemed denied if not accepted within 60 days after it is submitted, and, regardless of whether it is accepted or denied, a plaintiff has no more than one (1) year after the claim has accrued to sue.

Attorney Thomas Liddy, who represents the supervisors, told Fann that the county may have legal claims against her and her audit as a result of allegations the audit and one of its subcontractors made accusing the county of deleting files that she and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen subpoenaed. The supervisors have demanded a retraction, which Fann and the audit have not given.

“Our clients delivered the server exactly as it was kept by the Maricopa County Elections Department. Nothing was deleted, or added, from the server when we prepared it to be sent to the Senate pursuant to the Senate’s subpoena,” Liddy wrote on behalf of the supervisors, county Recorder Stephen Richer and unnamed county employees.

In a press release, Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers said it’s clear that the Senate and its contractors won’t retract their accusation, even after an audit contractor said he “recovered” the allegedly deleted files. He reiterated a comment that he made earlier in week that the Senate should be prepared to defend their actions and their findings in court.

“We demanded a retraction. But Senate President Fann’s letter and tweet from the official Senate audit Twitter account continues to spread the false allegation even after her own contractor admitted he found the files on the copy he made of the server,” Sellers said.

Among the records that Liddy asked Fann to preserve are written and electronic documents, emails, text messages, social media messages, voicemails, video and audio recordings and browsing histories, as well computers and tablet devices. Liddy’s letter notes that the county believes the audit “is not being done in accordance with Arizona law,” indicating that potential litigation may include the audit itself and not just the alleged defamatory statements.

The audit’s Twitter account claimed last week that the county “deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle, which it decried as “spoliation of evidence.” At a meeting on Monday, the supervisors vehemently denied the allegation, responding with a 13-page letter alleging that Fann’s audit team was simply unqualified and incompetent. The county speculated that the third-party software CyFIR used to analyze digital copies gave the appearance that files were missing or deleted because the files were not in their original place.

A day later, Ben Cotton, founder of the digital forensics company CyFIR, a subcontractor on the audit team, told Fann and Petersen at an ad hoc Senate hearing that he’d recovered the files from the digital copies he’d made of the server. Though Cotton continued to use the word “deleted,” he explained that the audit team hadn’t correctly configured the digital copy of the drive because the county, which has refused to cooperate with the audit, didn’t provide it with the system parameters.

Once the auditors properly configured the system, they found the files.

Fann, R-Prescott, did not respond to a request for comment about the litigation hold letter.

Fann and Petersen stood by Cotton’s claim that the files were deleted [clearly, they were not], though Fann told the Arizona Mirror that she hadn’t referred the issue to the Attorney General’s Office or other law enforcement entities because “we never said there was any wrongdoing.”

So a refusal to apologize for falsely claiming wrongdoing, but an admission that they’ve go nothing. “Krazy Karen” Fann is 66 years old, but she sounds like a three year old denying she was caught red-handed in the coolie jar.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors needs to sue soon because “Arizona Crazy” (you can’t spell crazy without R-AZ) is spreading like a prion disease to other states, at the behest of the Florida Man promoting his Big Lie.

The Washington Post reports, Inspired by Arizona recount, Trump loyalists push to revisit election results in communities around the country (excerpt):

The ramifications of Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the 2020 election are increasingly visible throughout the country: In emails, phone calls and public meetings, his supporters are questioning how their elections are administered and pressing public officials to revisit the vote count — wrongly insisting that Trump won the presidential race.

The most prominent example is playing out in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where Republican state lawmakers have forced a widely pilloried audit of the 2020 vote. That recount is being touted as an inspiration by small but vocal cohorts of angry residents in communities in multiple states.

[B]ehind the scenes, a loose network of lawyers, self-styled election experts [conspiracy theorists] and political groups is bolstering community efforts by demanding audits, filing lawsuits and pushing unsubstantiated claims that residents are echoing in public meetings. Much of it is playing out in largely Republican communities, where Trump supporters hope to find officials willing to support their inquiries.

The increasingly vocal protests seven months after Trump lost the White House show how deeply the former president has undermined confidence in the nation’s elections, an attack he began early in the 2020 campaign as state and local officials expanded mail voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Even as national Republican leaders say they want to move on from the last election — a rationale they used to expel Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a Trump critic, from her leadership post last week — the widespread echoes of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen show how his supporters are keeping that narrative alive.

Cheering them on is Trump himself, who has been issuing near-daily statements from his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, claiming that a cascade of findings that the election was rigged will appear any day.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump recently told a crowd attending a party at Mar-a-Lago, according to a video posted online by an attendee. “So we’re going to watch that very closely. And after that, you’ll watch Pennsylvania and you’ll watch Georgia and you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin. You’re watching New Hampshire. Because this was a rigged election. Everybody knows it.”

Trump has become a wedding crasher at Mar-a-Lago during the season. Whatever it takes to get his hands on a microphone and to rant about his grievances how he was done wrong. Of Course Donald Trump Crashed A Wedding And Gave A Rambling, Incoherent Speech About Biden, Iran, And China. Worst wedding toast evah!

So far, other than in Maricopa County, no major post-election audits are underway. But the clamor for them by Trump supporters has renewed pressure on beleaguered local officials — and led many to fear these fights will be a permanent feature of future elections.

On this unhappy note, a Republican appointed state judge in Georgia has opened the door to the circus act in Arizona taking its circus act on the road. The Post follows up, In echo of Arizona, Georgia state judge orders Fulton County to allow local voters to inspect mailed ballots cast last fall:

A Georgia state judge on Friday ordered Fulton County to allow a group of local voters to inspect all 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 election in response to a lawsuit alleging that officials accepted thousands of counterfeit ballots.

The decision marks the latest instance of a local government being forced to undergo a third-party inspection of its election practices amid baseless accusations promoted by President Donald Trump that fraud flipped the 2020 contest for President Biden.

The inspection in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, is likely to proceed differently than an audit underway in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Republican state senators ordered county election officials to hand over equipment and ballots to a private company called Cyber Ninjas for examination.

Reminder: Georgia counted its ballots three times, including a hand recount of ballots stemmimg from an audit required by a new state law, not in response to any suspected problems with the state’s results or an official recount request. Georgia hand tally of votes is complete, affirms Biden lead. So what, the fourth time is the charm? Only if MAGA/QAnon cult members are allowed to corrupt the ballots, like they have in Arizona, hoping to “prove” their QAnon conspiracy theories.

In Georgia, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ruled on Friday that the nine plaintiffs and their experts could examine copies of the ballots but never touch the originals, which will remain in the possession of Fulton election officials. Further details of how the inspection will proceed are expected next week, said one of the plaintiffs, Garland Favorito.

The order for the new ballot inspection comes after Georgia officials did three separate audits of the vote last year, including a hand recount, which produced no evidence of widespread fraud.

Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts said it was “outrageous” that the county “continues to be a target of those who cannot accept the results from last year’s election.”

“The fact remains that Fulton County safely and securely carried out an election in the midst of a public health pandemic,” Pitts said in a statement. “It’s a shame to see that the ‘Big Lie’ lives on and could cost the hardworking taxpayers of this county.”

A spokesman for Pitts said he plans to meet with the Fulton County attorney to “review all legal options” to block “this waste of taxpayer resources.”

[I]n this case, filed in December, the plaintiffs are seeking a declaratory judgment that counterfeit balloting occurred in the county. The judge’s ruling Friday was part of the suit’s discovery process and allows the plaintiffs to examine the ballots for evidence of their claim.

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said the lawsuit is another attempt to sow doubt about the 2020 election results — and raise “lots of money” in the process. She suggested that the examination would be used to try to justify more voting restrictions in the state after the GOP-majority legislature passed a sweeping voting law earlier this spring.

“It’s a cynical strategy,” she said in a statement. “Create artificial ‘doubt’ about our election processes, and then use that doubt to make voting harder for the voters you don’t think will vote for you.”

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1395892177310470149

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) submitted an amicus brief in the lawsuit, urging the judge not to hand over ballots directly to the plaintiffs because of provisions in state law requiring election officials to protect the confidentiality, security and integrity of ballots after an election. But he took no position on the underlying case.

Favorito, one of the plaintiffs, said his organization, Voter GA, is a nonpartisan group promoting election integrity. He said the lawsuit has been paid for with small-dollar donations from grass-roots supporters, not by large national groups.

“Our cause is to have honest elections,” he said in an interview Friday. “You cannot have that when people tell you what the results are and you can’t prove it and they can’t prove it.”

He said he voted for Don Blankenship, the Constitutional Party candidate, not Trump, in last year’s presidential election. But he also noted that some experts who have worked on similar efforts on behalf of pro-Trump groups may also participate in the examination in Georgia — including J. Hutton Pulitzer, who has served as a consultant in Maricopa and who some Trump supporters pushed to conduct an audit in Windham, N.H.

Favorito said he expects to rely on paper experts to examine the ballot paper itself, as well as image-analysis experts and experienced auditors — including one, David Sawyer, who testified Friday that the state-run audit last year was flawed.

Returning to the earlier Post report:

Michigan

Dominion Voting Systems also has been at the center of a long-running fight in Antrim County, Michigan, which Trump won with 61 percent of the vote, where a local resident filed suit last year claiming that the election was marred by “material fraud or error.”

The accusations began when the county initially reported on election night that Biden held an unlikely 3,000-vote lead in the conservative jurisdiction; local election officials attributed that figure to human error. The error was quickly corrected, and a hand recount of ballots in December confirmed the corrected outcome — and proved that the scanners had accurately tallied the paper ballots.

But the case caught the attention of Trump, who said in a statement last week: “The number of votes is MASSIVE and determinative. This will prove true in numerous other States.”

On Tuesday, a state judge dismissed the lawsuit seeking a new audit of the vote. But like dozens of legal losses for Trump allies before it, the dismissal is unlikely to tamp down fervor in Antrim, where more than a hundred Trump supporters held a rally earlier in the week that included a float festooned with the words “TRUMP UNITY.”

Discussion of the November election dominated the last meeting of the county’s local board of commissioners, on May 6, including when one commissioner made a new proposal that the board seek a “third-party complete forensic audit” of the voter registration rolls of towns within the county, to hunt for possible instances in which people voted twice.

“If you’re listening to these people, you’ll never learn the truth,” said Sheryl Guy, the Republican county clerk in Antrim, who has said since November that the Antrim error did not result from fraud. “It’s very frustrating and exhausting, and there have been moments of being fearful.”

Meanwhile, Trump allies have been pushing similar claims in other Michigan counties.

[E]ven after the dismissal of the Antrim County case, one of the Cheboygan commissioners, Republican Steve Warfield, said he was contemplating voting for the outside audit.

“We’re in the process of learning new things every day,” Warfield said in an interview. “There certainly are questions around the election.”

But Cheboygan County election chief Karen Brewster said no irregularities were reported during or immediately after the November election.

“My canvass board certified my November election,” she said. “There weren’t any problems at all. I think it just had to do with the allegations from Antrim County. That’s what sparked this.”

Meanwhile, in Houghton County, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, commissioners decided this month to refer similar accusations of vote-switching by machines to their local state senator, Ed McBroom, who leads the Senate Oversight Committee. One commissioner cited a documentary produced by Trump ally and My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell called “Absolute Proof,” which lays out the false allegations.

Proof? Have you seen this agitprop disinformation? Lindell is certifiably nuts. This former crackhead (are we certain?) fried his brain years ago.

McBroom, a Republican, has said publicly he does not believe Dominion machines flipped votes in Michigan. His office did not respond to requests for comment.

New Hampshire

Allegations that there were problems with the election also have fueled heated debates in heavily Republican Windham, N.H., a town of about 14,000 that lies less than an hour north of Boston, where officials are contending with a vote-count discrepancy in a contest for state representative.
But Ross McLeod, the chairman of the local board of selectmen, said it appears some activists are more interested in discrediting the machines than in getting to the bottom of the counting irregularity.

Their goal, he said he realized: “If there’s an error found in the machines, you could extrapolate that to all the machines in New Hampshire. Then, it could go nationwide.”

The technology in the town’s voting machines dates to the 1980s, and the intellectual property rights are now held jointly by Dominion and another company, Election Systems & Software.

McLeod said that at least initially, there was broad agreement that some kind of audit of the race was necessary. After a Democrat who came in fifth in a race to seat four members of the state legislature lost narrowly and requested a hand recount in November, the margin of her loss grew substantially — from 24 votes to more than 400. Four Republicans who defeated her picked up 300 votes.

McLeod said the town reviewed presentations from various possible auditors — including Cyber Ninjas, which is heading the process in Maricopa County — and planned to choose Mark Lindeman, the co-director of Verified Voting, a company with experience auditing elections.

Activists questioning the election quickly found that Lindeman had signed a letter with other election experts questioning the need for the audit in Arizona’s Maricopa County. Spurred by reports by pro-Trump news organizations including the Gateway Pundit, they began flooding town email inboxes, urging officials to select a different auditor: J. Hutton Pulitzer, who has served as a consultant in Maricopa.

Pulitzer, who has said he has developed a technique to spot fake ballots by examining the paper on which they are printed, testified at a meeting for Georgia state legislators in December that was organized by Trump supporters and designed to showcase claims the election was stolen.

On May 3, nearly 500 people packed a meeting of the town selectmen to finalize the auditor selection, some holding signs backing Pulitzer’s selection. At times, the crowd tried to shout down the selectmen and broke out in chants of “Stop the Steal” and “Do the Right Thing.” McLeod said that when the town officials reconfirmed their selection of Lindeman, many in the audience stood and turned their backs.

The town’s audit and recount has been underway since May 11. Unlike in Maricopa, live-stream cameras offer a view of each ballot as it is counted, as well as audio so discussion of the process can be monitored online. Lists of the names of volunteers working the audit are posted on the Internet daily.

But Eyring, the local activist who had pushed for Pulitzer’s selection, said that the ballot images are not clear and that he believed there were not enough cameras to view every piece of the process. Unlike in Maricopa, he said, the live streams have not always been turned on and visible 24 hours a day. He said he also did not believe Windham’s auditors have the technical expertise of those in Maricopa. “This audit is turning into a sham,” he said.

A deeply confused individual as to what constitutes “technical expertise” and a sham “fraudit.” That would be Pulitzer and Cyber Ninjas. Eyring just wants a predetermined outcome to validate his conspiracy theory, in his mind.

[E]yring added that he has heard from people across the state — where there were no troubled state representative races — that they want audits in their towns, too.

“You’ve got people in other towns and cities who are in an uproar. They’re clamoring to have their elections audited,” he said.

Others supporting the effort have more openly said the goal is to help Trump. At a rally in Windham last week, Lewandowski — a town resident — told activists that he had discussed the town’s audit with Trump recently in Florida.

Days later, he noted, Trump issued a statement about the Windham effort offering congratulations to “the great Patriots of Windham” who Trump said are working to find “the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election.”

“This isn’t just about the town of Windham,” Lewandowski said at the rally, according to a video of the event posted on social media.” We’re seeing things take place across this entire country.”