Arizona ballot audit blocked last week by ballot data deletion has resumed.
Last week, Maricopa County, Arizona, faced significant resistance to an audit of the 2020 general election ballot – the ballot database was deleted. But on Tuesday, May 18, things took a turn for the worse: Ben Cotton, founder of the audit firm CyFIR, said they have successfully recovered the deleted data and the audit will continue.
The Arizona ballot audit has touched the hearts of many people who question the integrity of the 2020 election. Last Wednesday (May 12), Arizona Senate President Karen Fann sent a letter to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors asking officials to explain the “serious issues” that arose during the ballot audit, and hoping that the two sides could work together to resolve those issues at a May 18 hearing.
In his letter, Vann noted that auditors had found that a directory of a database of voting machines had been deleted, and election-related details had been removed. “And this suggests that the primary database of all election-related data for the November 2020 general election has been deleted.” Vann charged that this was a “criminal act of evidence destruction.”
However, CyFIR founder Cotton 18 said that after discovering that the database was deleted from the server, “we have recovered all those files that were deleted and have access to that data. We got all the information we needed from the data recovery effort.”
Later on the 18th, the audit team said in a message via its official Twitter account that the 2020 election ballot audit would continue on May 24. The team also said that the day’s ballot audit hearing, hosted by Vann and state Sen. Warren Petersen (D-Mich.), was “excellent.
At the 18th hearing, Cotton also said his audit firm would follow strict forensic procedures, removing hard drives from voting machines and using “write blocks” for forensic forensic imaging to prevent any changes to the drives before they are copied.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters have been very concerned about the vote audit in Arizona. Trump praised the Arizona Republicans for moving forward with the ballot audit and said, “The people of Arizona are very angry, and so are the people of our country. If we can’t have free and fair elections, we don’t have this country anymore.”
As the ballot audit was blocked last week, Trump supporters also questioned Democrats: Why are they trying to block the audit by any means, are they trying to hide something?
Last November, Arizona’s Republican governor certified the 2020 election results, declaring that Biden had won Arizona by a narrow margin of 10,500 votes. Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, had 2.1 million votes subject to this audit.
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