Speaking of failing to comply... Arizona audit contractor misses congressional deadline to provide information https://thehill.com/homenews/campai...ctor-misses-congressional-deadline-to-provide The contractor that is conducting the Republican-led audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Ariz. has missed a deadline to provide a Congressional panel with information about the audit, the Arizona Republic reported. Cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas had until July 28 to provide the House Oversight and Reform Committee with information as part of a probe it announced a few weeks prior. Reps. Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.) and Jamie Raskin (Md.), the panel’s top Democrats, asked Cyber Ninjas CEO Douglas Logan for documents and communications related to the company’s audit procedures, funding sources and other issues. But according to The Arizona Republic, it was unclear if Cyber Ninjas had provided any information to the panel. News of the missed deadline was first reported by Slate last week, citing a committee staffer involved in the inquiry. Maloney’s office told the news outlet in a statement that Cyber Ninjas must “provide complete transparency over its questionable activities and sources of funding, and answer Congress’s questions without further delay.” “If it does not, we will use all tools available to ensure we get the answers we need to protect the integrity of federal elections,” the statement said. The Hill has reached out to the Oversight panel for comment. The Arizona state Senate approved the audit in April despite previous audits confirming that the ballots were counted properly. President Biden won the Grand Canyon State by roughly 11,000 votes over former President Trump, making Biden the first Democrat to carry the state since former President Clinton in 1996. Cyber Ninjas was hired to oversee the audit despite having no prior experience in election audits. Around the same time the Oversight panel announced its investigation, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved nearly $3 million for new vote-counting machines. This came after Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs warned that Cyber Ninjas’s work may have compromised the “security and integrity” of the machines.
More evidence of cheating. If the Democrats will cheat in local elections, what more national elections with more power and opportunities to enrich themselves? This happened in Commiefornia. Surprise, surprise! https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-city-councilman-among-six-165900872.html
So, another publicity stunt by Maricopa officials to replace the voting machines with new ones? Question: Was the election machines tampered with and by whom? Looks like they have a lot to hide with the way the County Board of Supervisors are acting. https://www.yahoo.com/news/maricopa-approves-financial-claim-against-205400721.html
The election machines were tampered with by the CyberNinjas "audit" team. They provided no documentation or traceability of the changes or work they did with the machines -- as required by law. Due to this the state ordered these Maricopa county voting machines to be decertified and required that new machines to be purchased. It is quite rightful that the county should seek financial compensation against those who caused the voting machines to be decertified.
Arizona ‘bracing for impact’ of Trump-driven election report Two prominent Arizona officials, one Democrat and one Republican, released lengthy prebuttals on the eve of the Cyber Ninjas’ report to the GOP-controlled state Senate. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/19/arizona-audit-elections-trump-report-506324 The controversial Arizona 2020 election review is almost over, but top officials in the state’s largest county and secretary of state's office aren’t waiting for the conclusions, launching a pair of preemptive strikes against a report that could land as soon as next week. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, released a prebuttal laying out all of her office’s criticisms of the so-called election “audit.” She detailed the pre- and post-election testing election equipment underwent in Maricopa County and called the state Senate-led effort “secretive and disorganized” that routinely discarded best practices of an actual audit. “All credible audits are characterized by controls, access, and transparency that allow for the processes and procedures to be replicated, if necessary,” Hobbs’ office wrote. “As this report has described, the review conducted by the Senate’s contractors has consistently lacked all three of these factors.” And Stephen Richer, the Republican county recorder in Maricopa County, on Thursday issued a lengthy report of his own, in the form of an open letter to state Republicans, challenging the credentials of the reviewers and defending his own Republican bona fides. “I will keep fighting for conservatism, and there are many things I would do for the Republican candidate for President, but I won’t lie about the election, and I will not unjustifiably turn my back on the employees of the Board of Supervisors, Recorder’s Office, and Elections Department — my colleagues and friends,” he wrote. Since late April, contractors hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate have been reviewing all the ballots cast in Maricopa County, which President Joe Biden won en route to flipping the state, along with examining election equipment. The process was initially supposed to take 60 days, but has stretched on well past that. Julie Fischer, a “deputy Senate liaison” for the effort, told POLITICO that the contractors’ report — the firm leading the effort is called Cyber Ninjas — is expected to be submitted to the state Senate on Monday, and a hearing will be scheduled after that. Election officials in the state have opposed it nearly every step of the way, including Richer, Hobbs and the GOP-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. “The only thing that has been consistent about this endeavor has been missed deadlines and having to walk back statements,” Richer said at a Thursday press briefing organized by the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with election administrators. “Please look into it before taking whatever the Cyber Ninjas produce as gospel.” The state Senate calls the Cyber Ninjas’ work an “audit,” a label almost universally rejected by election officials and experts because the Arizona effort has poorly defined processes and an embrace of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. From the jump, the review in Arizona has been plagued by disorganization and in-fighting. Cyber Ninjas’ owner is a supporter of former President Donald Trump and has promoted conspiracy theories about the election. Officials have said they were checking for bamboo fibers in ballots, a nod to a fringe theory that ballots were smuggled in from Asia. It has been funded by a nonprofit run by a correspondent for the far-right One America News Network and a former tech CEO who has poured millions into promoting Trump’s lies about the election. Hobbs, who is also running for governor next year, was critical of the Cyber Ninjas-led effort in an interview earlier this week. “This isn’t a real audit,” Hobbs said, noting that the schedule for the Arizona review has constantly shifted. “We’re sort of just bracing for impact” for the Cyber Ninjas’ conclusions. In her prebuttal, her office wrote that “any ‘outcomes’ or ‘conclusions’ that are reported” from the state Senate’s process must be disregarded, and called on the state’s political leaders to “proclaim that the 2020 General Election was fair and accurate.” Other election experts have previously torn into the Arizona review as unprofessionally run, including a report from former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, and Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The Cyber Ninjas review suffers from a variety of maladies: uncompetitive contracting, a lack of impartiality and partisan balance, a faulty ballot review process, inconsistency in procedures, an unacceptably high level of error built into the process, and insufficient security,” Grayson and Burden wrote in their June report. “Because it lacks the essential elements of a bona fide post-election analysis, the review currently underway in Maricopa County will not produce findings that should be trusted.” The Republican-controlled county board has also been engaged in a protracted battle with the state Senate. The board — and Dominion Voting Systems, the election vendor for the county — has refused to comply with recent subpoenas from the legislature, effectively daring the state Senate to find the board in contempt, with some Republicans in the closely-divided chamber saying they don’t support the Cyber Ninjas-led review. The county board said this week it wants the state Senate to pay $2.8 million to replace voting machines the Senate subpoenaed. The county leased new machines after Hobbs said the old machines would be decertified because of chain of custody issues. It also comes amid significant national pushback against the post-election audit movement. At a meeting of the nation’s secretaries of state last weekend, election officials overwhelmingly approved a set of guidelines for post-election audits. Many of the guidelines read as implicit rebukes of the Arizona process, including definitive timelines and only allowing “a federally or a state accredited test lab to perform any audit of voting machine hardware or software.” The Justice Department also issued guidance late last month saying some post-election audits could run afoul of federal law. Trump and his supporters have eagerly been awaiting the conclusion of the review in Arizona, and will likely use whatever the findings are to advance his baseless claims the election was stolen from him. During a July speech in the state, Trump said the process in the state would ultimately reveal that “we won by a lot,” and “this is only the beginning of the irregularities the Arizona audit is uncovering.” (There’s no legal process to transfer the state’s 11 electoral votes to his tally.) Trump has encouraged his followers to try to export the Maricopa review to other states. Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have tried to launch their own, but neither has gotten the traction of Arizona. Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican elections lawyer who has spoken out about the efforts to undermine faith in American democracy following the 2020 election, said he hoped the Cyber Ninjas report would land without making much noise and could quell the movement. “Once they can't be backed up, then that will be an object lesson to other states, not to go down that perilous path of basically losing your credibility,” he said at the briefing. And Richer concurred: “The Cyber Ninjas have been out there in common parlance now for about four months, and we haven't seen this in other states,” the county elections official responded, praising the work of Arizona journalists and election officials in the states. “If we can pat ourselves on the back a little bit here.” At least one of those efforts outside of Arizona appears to be withering. Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, an ally of Trump who is considering a gubernatorial run next year, sought to launch his own investigation. But on Thursday, Mastriano sounded discouraged about the effort on a since-deleted Facebook livestream, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported. “We’re not in a very good spot right now,” he said. “I put my name out there to get it done, and I’ve been stopped for the time being.” Even so, some election security experts said this is likely not the end of questionable reviews of the 2020 election. “I'm a little less sanguine about that, as I see ongoing efforts” across the country, said the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s David Becker. “I think we're going to need to be continually vigilant.”
Another huge proof that the November 3, 2020 elections was full of massive election fraud. Millions of ballots missing and unaccounted for? That is why we need audits in mulitple states, run by partisan, extreme liberal election officials. We cannot trust anyone of them. https://teamtuckercarlson.com/news/...unaccounted-for-in-2020-election-report-says/
Appeals court orders release of Arizona Senate audit records https://ktar.com/story/4645664/appeals-court-orders-release-of-arizona-senate-audit-records/ An appeals court on Thursday rejected an effort by the Arizona Senate to keep secret records of its ongoing review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County that are in the possession of the contractors conducting the recount. The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that the documents sought by the watchdog group American Oversight detailing how the recount and audit are being conducted are public and must be turned over. Republicans who control the Senate argued that because the records are maintained by its contractors, they were not subject to public records law and that legislative immunity applies. But the court said that was not the case. The court said the main contractor, Florida company Cyber Ninjas, was subject to the records law because it was performing a core government function that the Senate farmed out. “Allowing the legislature to disregard the clear mandate of the (public records law) would undermine the integrity of the legislative process and discourage transparency, which contradicts the purpose of both the immunity doctrine and the (law),” acting presiding Judge Maria Elena Cruz wrote for the three-judge panel. “The requested records are no less public records simply because they are in the possession of a third party, Cyber Ninjas,” Cruz wrote later in the ruling. The ruling upholds a decision by a Maricopa County Superior Court judge, who has ordered the Senate to turn over the records by Aug. 31. “The Senate has taken radical positions to obstruct basic public access to information about its so-called audit,” Austin Evers, American Oversight’s executive director, said in a statement. “It has tried to get away with outsourcing the audit to a third party and argued that the public has no right to enforce transparency laws against them.” Kory Langhofer, the Senate’s lawyer, said they planned to appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court. The unprecedented partisan recount and review of election results in the state’s most populous county was prompted by former President Donald Trump’s loss in the state and his contention without evidence that he lost in Arizona and other battleground states because of fraud. Senate Republicans issued subpoenas to Maricopa County for all 2020 ballots, the machines that counted them and other data in the state’s most populated county. The materials were given to contractors with little to no election experience for what Senate President Karen Fann calls a “forensic audit.” Election experts say the 2020 election was secure and well-run, and the contractors are using bizarre and unreliable procedures. Maricopa County has refused further participation. The results of the audit and hand recount are expected to be handed over to the Senate next week. A date for public release has not been announced.
Why in the hell would Cyber Ninjas be seeking "legislative immunity" to prevent being transparent about what they were doing and how they were doing it in the audit ??? Strange considering they are supposed to be doing the audit to make the vote more secure and transparent the next time. I think it's time for Cyber Ninjas to cough up the documents and then commit suicide to prevent future clown show fiascos... wrbtrader