| NEWS | Pants on Fire Maricopa County rebuts Arizona voting audit falsehoods. BY KATYA SCHWENK M ore than three months after the conclusion of the months-long, $9 million spectacle that was Arizo- na’s partisan election audit, Maricopa County published an extensive rebuttal of the contractors’ insinuations of voter fraud. The county’s 93-page report counters, in painstaking detail, the Cyber Ninjas’ original, 96-page report, which the con- tractor issued in September, months after being commissioned by the Arizona Senate to audit the November 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County. The Senate’s muddled report claimed that Joe Biden won by an additional 99 votes, dashing the hopes of those who ex- pected confirmation of a stolen election. But the report did do plenty to stoke dis- trust in Maricopa County’s election pro- cess. It falsely claimed, according to the county and independent experts, that tens of thousands of ballots were suspect and that the election process was riddled with insecurities. Over the past year, the county has been on the defensive, as its once-obscure elec- tion bureaucrats received waves of hate mail, and the partisan audit, for months, lingered in national headlines. Maricopa County’s new report, which draws from the findings of three separate firms the county has contracted to review its election process, says it did identify some ballots with issues — but fewer than 100 of them, out of 2 million. “I hope it’s going to be the last word on this issue,” said Bill Gates, the chairman of the board of supervisors, at a three-hour hearing to present the report January 5. Still, some of Arizona’s most ardent election fraud evangelists don’t seem to want to let go. “Don’t count on it,” Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward tweeted in reply to Gates. For the record, here is how the county debunked the Cyber Ninjas’ most flagrant claims. Claim: Maricopa County deleted election files and “purged” data from its election manage- ment system before handing it over. Response: Full archives remained intact throughout the audit. Maricopa County has repeatedly denied that any data was deleted from its election servers in order to hide it from auditors — though the claims still made it into the Cyber Ninjas’ final report. In January, the Arizona Senate subpoe- naed the county for its election manage- ment system, which the county eventually handed over. What the Senate did not ask for, however, were the election file ar- chives, which were backed up daily in No- vember. Because these election files were already backed up, the county says that it had begun to archive files from its main election man- agement system, in order to free up space — which is routine. It also cleared some data from the election management system in or- der for the system to be tested for accuracy by one of the firms hired by the county in February. That was so the firm could prop- erly test the election management system, not to hide data from the auditor. Regardless of the data cleared or re- stored from the main election management system, the county still has complete ar- chives of the system from November. And, officials say, the Cyber Ninjas should have known this. “They have all the records that they need to confirm that we didn’t delete files,” Scott Jarrett, the elections director for the county, told the Board of Supervisors last week. Claim: Ballots were printed on improper pa- per, possibly impacting tabulation. Response: Ballots were only counted on stan- dard, approved paper stock. Although the Senate report did not claim that any ballots used bamboo paper — despite absurd claims by some involved over the summer that thousands of bam- boo ballots had been imported from Asia — it did say that ballots were printed on 10 different kinds of paper, and experienced improper “bleed-through” from pens, all of which threatened election integrity. But in its report, the county says it could not find any tabulated ballots printed on anything other than the recommended 80- pound Vote Secure paper. The auditors might have been confused by ballots sent overseas, which are printed on different paper in order to be mailed, but are later converted into ballots on stan- dard paper before they can be tabulated. Furthermore, officials said, had the au- ditors checked with the paper manufac- turer, they would have been told that bleed-through was perfectly normal. “A simple query with the manufacturer themselves would confirm that,” Jarrett said. Claim: Maricopa County’s election system is connected to the internet, potentially com- promising its security. Response: Servers with sensitive election ma- terial were never in jeopardy. This claim, too, has resurfaced again and again for months, although Maricopa County has always maintained that the system that tabulates votes is completely cut off from the internet. The Cyber Ninjas’ report claims that the election management system was not, in fact, an isolated network, instead of saying that its analysis had “definitively proven” that the system had access to the internet. The county says that this is all smoke and mirrors. Some of the systems that the report says accessed the internet did in- deed connect to the internet, the county says — because they are separate from the election system. They are, in fact, servers that support the county website, and thus by definition need to access the internet. As for the other servers, the county says that the auditors were picking up attempts to connect to the internet — which were not successful. YouTube Maricopa County election director Scott Jarrett testifies in a hearing before the county Board of Supervisors. For instance, typos entered into the Mi- crosoft browser would trigger a search function to bing.com, which was logged, but never actually completed. Packet- Watch, an independent Scottsdale firm contracted by the county, reviewed the sys- tem in October and confirmed it does not access the internet. “They did not attempt to explain obvi- ous and legitimate reasons why the EMS server may attempt to reach the internet,” the county’s report says. Claim: Tens of thousands of voters may have voted illegitimately, either by sending dupli- cate ballots or voting after they had changed addresses. Response: The analysis is riddled with errors and bad data. The Cyber Ninjas claimed that they found 23,000 ballots that were cast from a prior address and 9,000 ballots that were cast by an individual more than once. The auditors also identified individuals, supposedly, that voted in multiple coun- ties. These were the biggest “impacts” to election integrity, in terms of the number of ballots, that the contractor identified. But their analysis was based on poor data and riddled with errors, Maricopa County’s report says. For one, the firm used commercial data- bases to identify individuals — and used “soft matching” techniques to identify them, which is likely to produce false posi- tives, according to the county. For instance, only three data points were used in many cases to identify individuals: birth year, first, and last name. These are attributes that are likely shared by different people in a county of millions, leading to potential false flags. >> p 16 13 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES JAN 13TH– JAN 19TH, 2022
