Grand Canyon Times

Maricopa County supervisors told U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) that files were deleted from the hard drives before they were turned over to the Cyber Ninja auditors who were performing a forensic investigation into the results of the 2020 general election.

The audit added about 400 votes to Joe Biden's 45,000-vote plurality in Maricopa County.

During a hearing into the audit by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Biggs asked the supervisors if it were standard procedure to delete files after an election.

“It’s appropriate to maintain files,” Bill Gates, vice chairman of the county board, told Biggs. “The deleted files have been discussed and they were archived.”

Biggs then confirmed that the auditors did not have access to the deleted files at first.

Gates defended their actions by saying they “responded to the subpoenas [issued by Arizona Senate Republicans].”

Senate liaison to the audit, Ken Bennett, called Gates’ response “laughable.”

Bennett said that the subpoenas were clear about turning over “all records related to the election.”

County officials also resisted complying with a second round of subpoenas issued in late July by Senate Republicans, seeking routers and other election materials not released after the first round of subpoenas was issued.

A compromise was announced days before Cyber Ninjas released its findings to Senate President Karen Fann (R-Prescott) and Judiciary Chairman Warren Petersen (R-Gilbert).

A recount portion of the audit confirmed that Biden won the county. But the auditors also found numerous irregularities in the management of the elections, and Bennett said during the hearing that chain-of-custody problems existed in the turning over of 2.1 million ballots cast in the to the Senate for the audit.

Bennett said that out of "1,691 boxes, there were some 40 boxes of errors." He also said that “two boxes were on the manifests but not present on the pallets. And then we found three boxes that were on different pallets, and they were listed."