Tag Archive for: Maricopa

Arizona audit: Maricopa County denies claims staff deleted data


Ben Cotton, founder of the firm CyFIR, alleged there is evidence of general election results getting purged in February before the Senate GOP’s audit started.

PHOENIX — The founder of a digital forensics firm accused Maricopa County of intentionally deleting data during a presentation Friday on the results of a partisan, GOP-led audit into the county’s 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election.

Ben Cotton is the founder of the firm CyFIR. He alleged there is evidence of general election results getting purged in February before the Senate GOP’s audit started. 

The county, however, repudiated those claims in a tweet: 

Cotton, a member of Senate President Karen Fann’s audit team, is best known for having driven copies of the county’s voting system data to a lab at his home in Montana.

Fann authorized the unprecedented election review without a vote of the full Senate after unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona’s largest county – the first in more than 70 years by a Democrat – delivered the state to the now president.

The vote was certified in late November by Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey. Nothing that is presented Friday will change the outcome of the vote, although there is a movement among Trump…

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Arizona election audit: Draft report confirms Biden defeated Trump in Maricopa County last November


The state Senate Republicans who seized on former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud and ordered up the report and Cyber Ninjas, the inexperienced company hired to conduct it, are set to detail their findings in a public presentation Friday.

The draft report emerged Thursday night, and audit spokesman Randy Pullen confirmed its validity to KJZZ Phoenix. “It’s not the final report, but it’s close,” he said.

The draft report shows that the hand recount found that President Joe Biden received 99 more votes than Maricopa County had reported after November’s election, while former President Donald Trump received 261 fewer votes than the county reported.

Maricopa County’s Republican-led board of supervisors pointed to the draft Thursday night, saying that it underscores the reality that the county ran an accurate election.

“You don’t have to dig deep into the draft copy of the Arizona Senate/Cyber Ninja audit report to confirm what I already knew — the candidates certified by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General — did, in fact, win,” board chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican, said in a statement.

“This means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters,” he said. “That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.”

Elections experts in both parties, looking at the manner and the methods of the so-called “audit,” have said for months that its results will not be credible. It was conducted by the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, which had no experience auditing election results and is led by a man who has repeated wild conspiracy theories about election fraud. The company and its volunteers and subcontractors did not follow standard auditing procedures, and observers from Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ office repeatedly noted instances in which those conducting the review broke their own rules.

No matter the outcome of Cyber Ninjas’ examination, the reality that Biden is president and won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes last year will not change.

Still, former President Donald Trump and those who have…

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Election security experts say giving Maricopa County routers to Arizona Senate’s election auditors would be concerning


Routers serve as the mail carrier of a computer network: They deliver messages using maps of networks and computer addresses.

Senate liaison Ken Bennett on the latest with the Arizona Senate audit of ballots

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Think of it like a mail carrier who relies on maps and addresses to get mail to the right place.

Given access to the mail carriers’ or routers’ information, it would be easier for a bad actor to get access to a person’s mail, or to target the information inside the network.

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That’s an analogy one tech expert – Matt Bernhard, a research engineer at Voting Works, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for open source election technology — gave while explaining the importance of keeping Maricopa County’s routers secure.

Arizona Senate Republicans are trying to get access to the county’s routers and administrative passwords to the county’s voting machines, and to provide that to private contractors they’ve hired to audit the county’s 2020 election results, which began April 23.



a group of people sitting in chairs: Maricopa County ballots from the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors hired by the Arizona Senate in an audit at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix on May 11, 2021.


© David Wallace/The Republic
Maricopa County ballots from the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors hired by the Arizona Senate in an audit at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix on May 11, 2021.

Bernhard said providing access to the routers is a “pretty specific risk” to the county. Also, he and other election security consultants across the country are unsure why exactly the auditors would need the routers to audit the election results.

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Senate liaison Ken Bennett has said they are needed to check whether the county’s voting machines were connected to the internet during the election. But a county spokesperson said that the auditors already have the information and machines to perform that check, and a previous independent audit commissioned by the county proved they were not.

County Attorney Allister Adel has said that giving…

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