I'd like to add some more:
I watched the audit hearing. Here is what I cleaned from it. Please go and watch for yourself if you have time as I will undoubtedly miss things.
The audit was of the computer equipment and paper ballots that were in possession Maricopa County. The audit was largely 3 pronged:
1.The presence of valid signatures and voter ID numbers were evaluated on envelopes (images of envelopes). This was not a full signature validation, just checking for presence of signatures, duplicates signatures, "scribbles" aka minor marks that weren't enough to be signatures, duplicate voter ID codes, and the like. Approximately 17,000 duplicate votes were found. 95% of these came in after election day. These were duplicates found in the ballots Maricopa County ruled as accepted and counted. (Note that as counting mail-in ballots proceeded, signature auditors were told to start reducing their verification methods due to lack of time. This reduction happened over many days, I have no information on when this started.) More questions than answers from this section of the audit.
The paper ballots were re-counted. No way to link envelopes to ballots. There were some inconsistencies in the ballot counts, but these were deemed within the margin of human error. For 1.9 million ballots, less than 2k swings in counts were deemed attributable to human error. Examples include a box of ballots (50 total) being run through the machine twice.
The computers were audited. Findings here were referred for criminal/legal action. Main points:
- The admin and multiple user accounts all had the same password making it impossible to verify who logged into anything.
- The security logs for the computers (in the Windows operating system) were scrubbed multiple times. The last time was one day before Maricopa County started their own audit. Who did this scrubbing is unknown because accounts were not linked to specific people (see above). Failure to keep these records for voting is a federal offense (not sure the level).
- Other election data was deleted, but they don't know what it was.
- The computers had the physical components needed to be connected to the internet.
- When going through access records and cross-referencing to the log deletions, the last time the logs were scrubbed (before the first audit), access was done remotely. This means someone accessed the system from outside the system to delete logs.
- One of the computers had a second hard drive in it with a second operating system. This basically makes it so you have 2 computers in the same "box" and can choose which one to start up. One drive was the actual drive that was supposed to be there. The other drive had records of the 2020 vote, plus non-voting data. (I couldn't read the slide showing the file names.) There was also voting data from multiple other states on it (I forget the states they said.)
- The antivirus/security programs were not updated since the computers were built, back in 2019. Maricopa stated to install or modify any programs would invalidate their voting program certification. The security auditor stated this was wrong.
- There were dozens of programs installed, and dozens more modified, after the computer build date. This invalidates the County's claims above that installing or modifying the security software wasn't done one purpose to maintain certification. Also, these programs should not have been installed or modified.
- More system files were modified or created since the computer was built (dll files, etc.) but I forget the specifics. This is akin to the severity of 8 above.
Summary:
Maricopa County acted in illegal ways before, during, and after the election. Maricopa County provided the computers, paper ballots, and images of ballot envelopes for audit and discrepancies were found in each, but only after months of fighting. The ballot envelopes show enough duplicate ballots (17,000) to affect the state-wide margin of victory (10,000 to Biden), but there is no way to link ballots to envelopes. The paper ballot recount showed some discrepancies that can mainly be attributed to human error. The computer system audit shows long term and widespread criminal conduct. Multiple records were deleted on multiple occasions, and remote access was used for some of it.
This got long, but I hope it still helps.
Edit: the formatting got screwed up, but you get the idea.
(post is archived)