Contractors working for the Florida firm Cyber Ninjas, which was hired by the Arizona Senate, audit ballots at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix on May 6, 2021.
Recently, the state of Arizona made a new development in its Maricopa County ballot audit. The state Senate and Maricopa County officials clashed again over the audit of the subpoenas. County officials have refused to hand over their routers, claiming they do not have the password to access the control system inside the voting machines.
On May 7, the Arizona Senate reportedly notified Maricopa County that it would issue a subpoena for live testimony from the county’s Board of Supervisors unless it received those withheld election materials.
In an email to county officials, the Senate attorney said, “We would like to convey that the Senate believes the county’s explanation of the router and password issues is inadequate and probably incorrect.”
The Arizona Senate has issued subpoenas for ballots, voting machines, passwords and other technology in Maricopa County after the 2020 U.S. election. But Maricopa County officials said the Senate’s requirements for election materials were too broad and would threaten voter privacy. A judge later ruled that the Senate’s request was “tantamount to a court order. Still, county officials said they would not turn over routers or router images, arguing that doing so “would pose a serious security risk to law enforcement.
County officials also told Senate audit liaison Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state, that they did not have the password to access the Dominion voting machines, which are used to scan ballots during elections.
“They told us there was no second password, or that they had given us all the passwords,” Bennett told the media at the audit site in Phoenix, “and they also told us that they could not now, as they had promised two weeks ago, provide access to the Maricopa County tabulation and election center routers and hubs and other things that were part of the subpoena (given to them).”
John Brakey, who serves as Bennett’s assistant, told the media that he was shocked by the conflict surrounding the passwords. He said, “It’s like renting a car and they refuse to give you the keys. They should know it’s an election and it’s wrong to do that. Sometimes these voting machine vendors have too much power. We vote with their secret software (and the stakes are high) and that’s why the recount (after the election) is so important.”
The Maricopa County Council held an emergency meeting May 7 to discuss legal advice and litigation over its non-compliance with Senate subpoenas.
In a response to Senate attorneys, county attorney Allister Adel said the county “has come up with security keys for every code and tabulator it has and nothing else.” The county is working to find secure ways to get the information the Senate wants from the routers without risking election data.
Dominion Voting Machines Inc. did not respond to this. which has previously said it supports audits of ballots by a federally recognized agency, was not endorsed by Dominion, the Cyber Ninjas company now leading the Arizona audit.
Both Dominion Voting Machines and Sellers pointed out that Maricopa County contracted for its own audits, one of the machines and the other of the ballots.
But Breckey, the assistant Senate liaison, called those audits misleading. He said, “The audits they’re talking about are, in my opinion, fatally flawed. The ballot batches were pre-selected, the auditors only analyzed a small percentage of the ballots in the election, and the machine audits could only determine if the machines were working well at the time of the review.”
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