A letter from state Senate Republicans in Arizona, who are auditing the 2020 election results from Maricopa County because of suspicions of election fraud, calling for a public meeting for election officials there to answer questions about apparent problems has triggered a gusher of response.
The company that provided the voting machines, Dominion, has said it won’t cooperate, and county election officials posted a statement demanding “an immediate retraction of any public statements…”
It was a letter from Senate President Karen Fann to the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, and its chairman, Jack Sellers, that triggered the responses.
The Senate is conducting an audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County and revealed this week county officials apparently erased an election database from a computer just before turning it over, under subpoena, for the audit.
“We have recently discovered that the entire ‘Database’ directory from the D drive of the machine ‘EMSPrimary’ has been deleted,” the letter said.
“This removes election related details that appear to have been covered by the subpoena. In addition, the main database for the Election Management System (EMS) Software, ‘Results Tally and Reporting,’ is not located anywhere on the EMSPrimary machine, even though all of the EMS Clients reference that machine as the location of the database,” the letter says.
“This suggests that the main database for all election related data for the November 2020 General Election has been removed. Can you please advise as to why these folders were deleted, and whether there are any backups that may contain the deleted folders?”
Fann has scheduled a meeting at the Arizona Capitol on Tuesday, May 18, to discuss this and several other issues, an event that she said “will be live-streamed to the public.”
But Sellers denied there was any problem. “I can say the allegations are false and ill-informed. Moreover, the claim that our employees deleted election files and destroyed evidence is outrageous, completely baseless and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate. I demand an immediate retraction of any public statements…”
He said the board of supervisors would hold a public meeting Monday to “refute lies.” There was no indication in the response statement whether officials would meet with the audit team to answer the questions that were raised.
‘THIS IS NOT FUNNY. THIS IS DANGEROUS’ Maricopa County Board chair demands immediate retraction of Arizona Senate Republicans’ allegations of wrongdoing in election. Board will hold own public meeting Monday ‘to refute lies.’ https://t.co/ms4JiQsiXx pic.twitter.com/yrkiUmjvMA
— Brahm Resnik (@brahmresnik) May 14, 2021
Dominion also rejected the letter, claiming in a statement, “This is not funny; this is dangerous.”
The company claimed the contractors hired by the Senate president are not auditors and they are not certified by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission. “No company should be compelled to cooperate,” it said.
County officials previously have said they do not have passwords to the voting machines, which were subpoenaed by the state senate for the audit. It would be likely that the company would have those, raising questions about exactly who ran the audit, the county or the private company.
NEW “No company should be compelled to participate in such an irresponsible act”: Dominion Voting Systems responds to Arizona Senate Republicans’ demand for passwords to ballot tabulators. pic.twitter.com/wjKI8ztwIj
— Brahm Resnik (@brahmresnik) May 13, 2021
The Gateway Pundit reported last November, an elections witness, Jan Bryant, testified to lawmakers that county officials didn’t run the election, but “two Dominion employees in the audit center ran the election.”
“This explains why Maricopa County officials do not have Admin passwords or access to the Dominion voting machines. They never had them!” the Gateway Pundit wrote.
Audit chief Ken Bennett told One America News earlier in the week Dominion was refusing to comply with a court-approved subpoena and turn over the passwords.
The GOP members of the Senate announced the full audit of the county’s results in 2020 because the state was one of six where the results raised objections from lawmakers based on evidence of fraud.
Democrats fought vigorously to prevent any review of the count, which narrowly gave the victory to Joe Biden. In fact, multiple disputes continue in various states where a total of only about 43,000 votes across the different jurisdictions gave the presidency to Biden.
That happened as multiple situations developed raising concern about the integrity of the election. Leftist Mark Zuckerberg gave $400 million to a special interest group to hand out to officials running the election, and in at least some cases those outside groups insisted on taking control of election procedures. There were anomalous vote result reports, where suddenly, after a halt in the counting with President Trump in the lead, counting was resumed with Biden in the lead.
What’s not even at issue is that in several states officials arbitrarily changed state laws regarding voting – in their attempts to accommodate the COVID-19 pandemic, even though the Constitution requires state lawmakers to set those practices.
Experts have said the audit in Maricopa County could trigger demands for audits in those other states that were battlegrounds.
Fann’s letter cited several issues to be discussed, including the county’s decision to renege on a commitment to comply with the court-approved subpoena, an issue involve access to routers used in the election and questions over chain of custody.
The Senate letter charged that bags containing ballots were not sealed, sometimes batches within a box are separated by only a divider and sometimes those are entirely missing. And “the audit team has encountered a significant number of instances in which there is a disparity between the actual number of ballots contained in a batch and the total denoted on the ink report slip,” she pointed out.
“What are the reasons for these discrepancies?”
Breaking Update: Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit. This is spoliation of evidence! pic.twitter.com/mY0fmmFXAm
— Maricopa Arizona Audit (@ArizonaAudit) May 13, 2021
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