Maricopa County: ‘This Board Is Done Explaining Anything To These People,’ End The ‘Fraudit’

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The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and other county elected officials, held a preemptive meeting on Monday to discuss the letter from Senator “Krazy Karen” Fann demanding more information from the county for her Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit,” and inviting supervisors to meet with GQP senators on Tuesday.

The response from Maricopa County to “Krazy Karen” Fann was “go pound sand.” OK, not quite that direct, but essentially the same drift.

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Here is the press conference held after this meeting.

The Arizona Mirror reports, Supervisors deny allegations, call for end to “sham” audit:

After Senate President Karen Fann’s audit team accused Maricopa County election officials of illegally deleting files and other improprieties, the Board of Supervisors responded with a full-blown denunciation, denying the allegations and decrying the audit as a sham that should be put to rest.

For 45 minutes during a special meeting on Monday, and for nearly an hour at a press conference afterward, the supervisors, along with Recorder Stephen Richer and Sheriff Paul Penzone, derided Fann’s audit team as unqualified and biased and refuted the allegations the Senate president and the audit team, through its Twitter account, have leveled at the county.

Relations between Fann and the supervisors had been tense since the Senate president issued subpoenas to the supervisors in December for ballots, tabulation machines and other election materials so the Senate could conduct an audit in response to baseless conspiracy theories claiming the election was rigged against former President Donald Trump. The county fought those subpoenas in court, and a judge ruled that the supervisors had to comply.

But Monday marked an apparent turning point in the months-long dispute between the Senate and the county.

The board, which has a 4-1 GOP majority, along with recently elected county Recorder Stephen Richer, also a Republican, began waging a rhetorical war against Fann and the Senate on Friday, and continued that on Monday as they pushed back against allegations from auditors that they deleted files from a database before turning over equipment, that they failed to document chain of custody for the nearly 2.1 million ballots for the election, and that the number of ballots in batches turned over by the county doesn’t match the numbers cited in documentation.

Over the weekend: Republican Arizona election official says Trump ‘unhinged’:

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.

“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.

The [Florida Man’s] statement came as Republican Senate President Karen Fann has demanded the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors come to the Senate to answer questions raised by the private auditors she has hired. … Trump’s statement said, in part, that “the entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the Forensic Audit, is up in arms.”

Richer and the board say that statement is just plain wrong. In recent days, both he and the board have begun aggressively pushing back at what they see as continuing falsehoods from Republicans who question Trump’s loss.

“Enough with the defamation. Enough with the unfounded allegations,” Richer tweeted Thursday. “I came to this office to competently, fairly, and lawfully administer the duties of the office. Not to be accused by own party of shredding ballots and deleting files for an election I didn’t run. Enough.”

The board, led by Republican Chairman Jack Sellers, have been aggressively using Twitter in recent days to push back, firing off a series of messages slamming the private company doing the audit. The board plans to hold a public hearing Monday to further to refute lies and lay out facts about these issues.”

“I know you all have grown weary of lies and half-truths six months after 2020 General Elections,” Sellers said Friday in announcing Monday’s meeting.

The Arizona Mirror continues:

The supervisors sent a blistering 14-page letter responding to Fann and the audit team’s recent accusations. The letter will serve as the board’s only response, Chairman Jack Sellers said during the special meeting on Monday. He referred to the audit as “a grift disguised as an audit,” a reference to undisclosed contributors who are funding the overwhelming majority of the work.

The audit’s official Twitter account initially broadcast allegations that the audit team had discovered that county officials had “deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle. Fann, R-Prescott, asked the supervisors and other county officials to attend a hearing at the Senate on Tuesday to discuss the allegedly deleted files, along with the other allegations.

Sellers made it clear on Monday that he and his colleagues will not attend.

“This board is done explaining anything to these people who are playing investigator with our constituents’ ballots and equipment, paid for with peoples’ tax dollars,” Sellers said. “It’s time to be done with this craziness and get on with our county’s critical business.”

Supervisor Bill Gates called the meeting “political theater broadcast by OAN” — a reference to the ardently pro-Trump One American News Network, which has gotten special access to the audit despite a documented history of spreading falsehoods about the election in Arizona — while Richer called it a “show trial.”

Supervisor Bill Gates also authored an op-ed in The Arizona Republic, I’m an elected Republican warning you about the Big Lie.

In their letter to Fann, the supervisors denied deleting any files, and attributed the allegation to ineptitude on the part of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based cybersecurity firm that Fann hired to lead her audit team.

The screenshot the audit’s Twitter account included with its allegation doesn’t actually indicate that files were deleted, the supervisors said. It shows a “modified” date for the files, which the supervisors said could have been the result of the software updating the files’ metadata. X-marks next to the file names show only that the auditors were unable to locate them from the digital copies they made of the machines, which the supervisors said could have a number of explanations.

“That the Senate would launch such a grave accusation via Twitter not only before waiting for an answer to your questions, but also before your so-called ‘audit’ demonstrates to the world that the Arizona Senate is not acting in good faith, has no intention of learning anything about the November 2020 General Election, but is only interested in feeding the various festering conspiracy theories that fuel the fundraising schemes of those pulling your strings,” the supervisors wrote to Fann.

Sellers said during Monday’s meeting that it’s concerning “the ninjas can’t even find files that were given to them by Maricopa County.”

“They can’t find the files because they don’t know what they’re doing, and we wouldn’t be asked to do this on-the-job training if qualified auditors had been hired to do this work,” he said.

The Senate is also demanding that the county turn over computer routers that were part of the original subpoenas. The supervisors say handing over the routers would cost the county about $6 million to replace, and that they would severely disrupt the operations of county government because other agencies outside of the recorder’s office and elections department use them.

Furthermore, Penzone said it would also put confidential law enforcement information that could jeopardize the safety of his deputies in the hands of “a private, uncertified hacking company, based on a hunch, without any factual basis, legitimate evidence or detailed justification.”

Richer said there is no election-related information on the routers, and that the Senate has not explained why the routers would be needed for the audit. Fann told KTAR’s Mike Broomhead last week that the auditors want to examine the routers to ensure that tabulation machines weren’t connected to the internet. A separate audit commissioned by the county earlier this year by federally accredited companies concluded that the machines had never been connected to the internet.

The supervisors and Richer also addressed another unfulfilled request from the subpoenas.

The Senate has demanded passwords to the county’s ballot tabulation machines that would allow them to access the source code of the software they use. The county says it doesn’t have the passwords because they’re not needed to run elections, and that Dominion Voting Systems, the company that makes the machines, would only provide those passwords to accredited companies, such as the two firms the county hired earlier this year to inspect the machines, both of which have accreditation from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission.

The supervisors said they were “stunned” by the allegation that the county didn’t properly document chain-of-custody for the nearly 2.1 million ballots, and listed 11 bullet points detailing how chain-of-custody was documented for the Senate’s audit liaison, Ken Bennett, and for the Senate’s attorneys.

“It demonstrates a spectacular lack of understanding on your part of what occurred during the County’s transfer of its material to your custody,” the letter said of the claim.

In response to Fann’s question asking why bags that were used to store ballots weren’t sealed, the supervisors said the broken seals that the audit team found in the bottom of the ballot boxes came from the tamper-proof bags used to transport ballots from voting centers to the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center. The contents of those bags are transferred to long-term storage boxes after a statutory five-day period for contesting election results concludes.

And as to allegations that the number of ballots in some batches provided by the county didn’t match numbers listed in documentation that was included, the supervisors said the Senate’s contractors simply don’t understand the way duplicated ballots — ballots that must be recopied by hand because they machines won’t read them — affect such counts, along with other issues.

“This is the result of enlisting auditors who have no experience or background in elections and … failing to understand how to read election transmission slips,” Richer said at the meeting.

The supervisors ended their letter with a call for Fann to end the “fraudit“. They noted, for example, that the audit teams is investigating far-fetched conspiracy theories, such as searching for bamboo fibers in the ballots in response to baseless claims that counterfeit ballots from Asia were inserted into the count; that the audit team originally gave blue pens to workers in violation of election department rules, which bar blue and black pens around ballots because stray markings could be read by the tabulation machines; and that the audit team has lost control of its Twitter account, which Bennett only reclaimed last week.

“None of this is inspiring confidence. None of this will cause our citizens to trust elections. In fact, it is having the opposite effect. You certainly must recognize that things are not going well at the Coliseum,” the letter read, referencing Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit is taking place.

The auditors don’t know the laws, procedures or best practices for elections, the letter read, and, “It is inevitable that they will arrive at questionable conclusions.” Sellers said at the press conference after the meeting that if the audit report reaches erroneous conclusions about what happened in the election, the county will challenge those assertions in court.

The supervisors called on other Republican senators to pressure Fann to put an end to the audit.

“Krazy Karen” Fann declined to comment, saying the Senate’s response will come during Tuesday’s 1 p.m. meeting with herself, Bennett, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, which she said will take place, even if the county doesn’t participate.

Another Big Lie: “This is about election integrity and nothing more. Our constituents deserve answers to their questions.”

Howard Fischer adds, Vote recount a ‘mockery’ and ‘sham process,’ Maricopa supervisors say:

[County] officials also lashed out at Fann, R-Prescott, and the Senate for perpetuating what several said amounts to a hoax on the public. They said she has effectively given over the Senate’s powers to Cyber Ninjas, an outside firm that not only has no election audit experience but is now using the audit to raise money.

[B]oard members will not show up at the Senate Tuesday, as requested by Fann, for a televised question-and-answer session with her, Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Ken Bennett, a former secretary of state whom Fann tapped to be her liaison with the outside contractors.

In fact, Republican Supervisor Bill Gates said there’s good reason to stay away.

“This board was going to be part of a political theater broadcast on livestream on OAN,’’ he said, a reference to One America News Network. The pro-Trump cable news outlet not only has fueled the theories that the former president did not actually lose the election, but also is helping to raise money to pay for what is supposed to be an official, government-conducted audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 votes.

Fann’s next move unclear

The Senate has gone to court before to force the supervisors to surrender the 2.1 million ballots and the election equipment. But a maneuver to hold the supervisors in contempt failed when Sen. Paul Boyer, R-Glendale, declined to go along with his other 15 GOP colleagues.

Boyer in recent days has indicated even more hesitancy about pursuing the issue.

Richer, a Republican like Fann and the majority of the Senate, said he thinks the tide is turning. “I guarantee you, there are Republicans in the state Senate … that do not believe a word of it,’’ the county recorder said.

And with Democrats firmly against the whole process, that could leave Fann with few options to force further compliance.

There was no immediate response from the Senate president as to what, if anything, she intends to do now.

‘Time to push back on big lie’

Gates said “outside forces’’ have taken control. He said that has become obvious because everyone admits the audit can’t be completed for the $150,000 the Senate allocated.

“Tell us where the money is coming from,’’ Gates said. So far, though, neither Cyber Ninjas nor Bennett has provided details. And Fann, who is supposed to be in charge, said she doesn’t know.

Gates acknowledged that he and his GOP colleagues are in some ways bucking the partisan tide.

“We recognize … that a large percentage of Republicans believe that the election was stolen in 2020 and that Donald Trump actually won,’’ he said. But Gates said he does not share that belief.

“And the reason that I feel confident in saying that, particularly in Maricopa County, is that we overturned every stone,’’ he said. “We asked the difficult questions.’’

Now, said Gates, is the time to say that enough is enough.

“It is time to push back on the big lie,’’ he said. “Otherwise we are not going to be able to move forward and have an election in 2022 that we can all believe the results, whatever they may be.’’

Richer said there’s another reason people should believe his assurances that the 2020 results are accurate.

He pointed out that he wasn’t even running the office at that time. Richer took over in January after defeating Democrat Adrian Fontes, who did run the election as recorder.

“Why would I stand here beside these gentlemen to say, ‘It was a good election’ if it wasn’t?’’ he asked. “Why wouldn’t I just throw the guy that I spent the past 12 months criticizing, Adrian Fontes, under the bus and say, ‘Don’t worry, there’s a new sheriff in town’ ? So it’s just facially asinine.’’

Richer has been making the rounds on the cable networks to make the same point. Here he is in an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Monday night.





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4 thoughts on “Maricopa County: ‘This Board Is Done Explaining Anything To These People,’ End The ‘Fraudit’”

  1. Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official and national expert on post-election audits, and a partner at The Elections Group, in an interview at the Washington Post says, “I watched the GOP’s Arizona election audit. It was worse than you think.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/05/19/gop-arizona-election-audit/

    When Arizona’s secretary of state asked me whether I would serve as an observer of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, I anticipated that I would see some unusual things. Post-election audits and recounts are almost always conducted under the authority of local election officials, who have years of knowledge and experience. The idea of a government handing over control of ballots to an outside group, as the state Senate did when hiring a Florida contractor with no elections experience, was bizarre. This firm, Cyber Ninjas, insisted that it would recount and examine all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county in the 2020 general election.

    So I expected it to be unconventional. But it was so much worse than that. In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged.

    [I] was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed up the process.

    Speed doesn’t necessarily pose a problem if the audit has a process for catching and correcting mistakes. But it didn’t. Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers only recounted if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether it was 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to go back and recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.

    I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it was marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to a conspiracy theory that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea.

    The fourth reason was folding. The auditors reasoned that only absentee voters would fold their ballots; an in-person, Election Day voter would take a flat ballot, mark it in the booth and submit it, perfectly pristine. I almost had to laugh: In my experience, voters will fold ballots every which way, no matter where they vote or what the ballot instructs them to do. Chalk it up to privacy concerns or individual quirks — but no experienced elections official would call that suspicious.

    At one point, I overheard some volunteers excitedly discussing a stain on a ballot. “It looks like a Cheeto finger,” one said. “Like someone’s touched it with cheese dust!” That had to be suspicious, their teammate agreed. Why would someone come to the polls with cheese powder on their hands? But I’ve seen ballots stained with almost anything you can imagine, including coffee, grease and, yes, cheese powder. Again, when you have experience working with hundreds of thousands of ballots, you see some messes: That’s evidence of humanity’s idiosyncrasies, not foul play.

    Their equipment worried me more than their wild theorizing. At the forensics tables, auditors took a photo of each ballot using a camera suspended by a frame, then passed the ballot to someone operating a lightbox with four microscope cameras attached. This was a huge deviation from the norm. Usually, all equipment that election officials use to handle a ballot — from creating to scanning to tallying it — has been federally tested and certified; often, states will conduct further tests before their jurisdictions accept the machines. It jarred me to see volunteers using this untested, uncertified equipment on ballots, claiming that the images would be used at some point in the future for an electronic re-tally.

    [P]rocedures should never change in the middle of an audit. Here, they did, and not just a couple of times, but almost daily. The training for volunteers also evolved. When I asked my designated auditor about these shifting guidelines, he called it “process improvement.”

    What I saw in Arizona shook me. If the process wraps up and Cyber Ninjas puts together some kind of report, that report will almost certainly claim that there were issues with Maricopa County’s ballots. After all, Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has publicly voiced his wild conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. But the real problem is the so-called audit itself.

    Audits are supposed to make us better. They are supposed to make our elections more secure and transparent — to strengthen the public’s trust in our democratic process. Maricopa County is known for having some of the best election practices in the country: Officials had already undertaken a hand-count audit and a forensic audit of their 2020 ballots and found no evidence of fraud. Now a group with no expertise, improvising procedures as they go, is sowing doubt about the outcome of a well-run election.

    This is not an audit, and I don’t see how this can have a good outcome.

  2. If the board of supervisors and the Democrats truly believe that the audit will show nothing new, then why are they so vehemently against it. Let’s wait to see what is discovered. It is all videotaped and anything found will be documented. The news outlets call it a scam and I am tired of their predisposed judgements. If it’s a fair election, the truth will show! So Mr Reporter, stop putting your twist on the information and tell the facts only. Remember? That’s what you are paid to do. Just the facts!!!

    • Dumbass. First, I am not a reporter, but a lawyer with years of experience in auditing elections. I know what is legit, and this Cyber Ninja shitshow is NOT legit. Second, these are QAnon conspiracy theorists chasing every crazy-ass conspiracy theory down the rabbit hole. The “fraudit’s” twitter account indicates that they are manufacturing new conspiracy theories, i.e., missing files that turned out not to be missing, just incompetent Cyber Ninjas who don’t know what the hell they are doing. There has already been multiple audits of this election done by professionals who know what they are doing, and they have confirmed that the election was both accurate and secure. Thirdly, this nonsense sets a dangerous precedent for all future elections, Every time a Republican doesn’t win an election, you Trump trolls are going to question the result of the election and try to manufacture a different result with a sham “fraudit”? This is anti-democratic and un-American. Finally, I get paid? That’s news to me. I have never been paid by this blog.

  3. Fann and Borrelli have put themselves in a black hole without a face saving way out. Fann acts offended when Maricopa County officials blast this “process”, which in truth,
    has none. They know they are making sh#t up now. There were at least three MAS*H episodes where “factfinding” yahoos get caught with their pants down, and then announce they has gathered all the “facts” necessary. Fann should declare they have all the facts necessary and call it “victory”. Otherwise it only gets worse and worse. No one is going to feel sorry for them.

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