Grand Canyon Times

The forensics audit of the Maricopa County November 2020 elections results continues while Senate President Karen Fann (R-Prescott) said she has received only a partial answer to concerns she raised in a May 12 letter to the county board of supervisors.  

At a meeting on Tuesday conducted by Fann and Senate Judiciary Chairman Warren Petersen (R-Gilbert), audit subcontractor Ben Cotton of CyFIR told the lawmaker he found the deleted files Fann referred to in her letter to the supervisors. Cotton also said he found duplicates in the system, NBC News reported.

NBC News reported that Cotton’s statements show the files were there all along and never deleted as Fann argued, but Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward said in a videotaped statement sent out on Twitter that uncovering the files was a testament to the expertise of the auditors.

“The auditors confirmed that a results and tally database is missing from the system, but the experts have been able to use their skills to recover it,” she said

Left unanswered was access to passwords that would allow the auditors to determine if any of the tabulators in the systems had the capability of being connected to the internet and why auditors have not be given access to routers, the equipment that directs message between the computers, even though they were promised them earlier.

The county has said that turning over the routers will expose sensitive information about law enforcement. Cotton said if that’s the case then that means the routers were exposed to the internet, and should be investigated.

In her May 12 letter, Fann invited county officials to the meeting but none attended.

The audit, which is expected to last at least until mid-June, covers nearly 2.1 million ballots and 400 election machines.

County officials have demanded that the audit be stopped, citing prior audits that found nothing amiss. The Grand Canyon Times previously reported the audit of the November returns, headed by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, began April 23 and is expected to go into at least June.

President Joe Biden was the first Democrat to win the county since Harry Truman in 1948 and the first Democrat to carry Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996.