Maricopa County Board Of Supervisors Holds Emergency Meeting Over Inability To Provide Routers, Passwords For Election Audit

May 9, 2021



Written by Carmine Sabia
OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion

The Maricopa County, Arizona Board of Supervisors declared an emergency meeting after the county was unable to provide routers and passwords to the auditors conducting an audit of the county’s 2020 election results.
The meeting was called after the Arizona State Senate indicated that it could take legal action over the county’s inability to “provide passwords it does not have, and routers that could allow access to sensitive law enforcement data, as well as protected health information and personal data of county citizens,” The Washington Post reported.

“What makes me angry are the allegations of corruption being thrown around — sometimes by elected officials who should know better — denigrating the good names of public servants who devoted the last two years of their lives to running quality elections in 2020,” Republican chairman of the Board of Supervisors, Jack Sellers said.

The auditors also postponed a plan to interview voters after the Biden Justice Department expressed concerns that it was a civil rights violation.
The Arizona Senate will hold off on a plan to contact voters as part of a Republican-commissioned election recount that raised concerns from the Justice Department about voter intimidation, state Senate President Karen Fann said Friday.

The head of the department’s civil rights division, Pamela S. Karlan, wrote to Fann (R) on Wednesday suggesting that the recount of nearly 2.1 million ballots in the state’s largest county by a private contractor may not comply with federal law, leaving ballots at “risk of damage or loss.” She also raised questions about the contractor’s stated plans to “identify voter registrations that did not make sense” and interview voters via phone and “physical canvassing.”
The ongoing audit run by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas has been widely criticized as fueling wild theories that fraud and other electoral problems led President Donald Trump to lose the presidential race. Officials in Maricopa County, which went for Joe Biden in November, say the results have been validated repeatedly.
Fann responded to the Justice Department’s concerns saying the Senate had “determined several weeks ago that it would indefinitely defer” voter interviews.
Regarding the Justice Department’s security concerns she said that “not a single ballot or other official election document has been destroyed, defaced, lost, or adulterated.”
“We are unaware of any significant security breach since the day the ballots were delivered; this is undoubtedly due to the thorough protocols implemented since that time,” she said.
The Biden Department of Justice had sent a letter to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann taking issue with Maricopa County’s forensic audit of the 2020 election.

The letter is from Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division.
Karlan writes to Fann that the DOJ is taking issue with two main parts of the forensic audit:
“I write regarding issues arising under federal statutes enforced by the United States Department of Justice that are related to the audit required by the Arizona State Senate for the November 2020 federal general election in Maricopa County,” the letter states. “News reports indicate that the Senate subpoenaed ballots, elections systems, and election materials from Maricopa County and required that they be turned over to private contractors, led by a firm known as Cyber Ninjas.”

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“The Department has reviewed available information, including news reports and complaints regarding the procedures being used for this audit,” the letter continued. “The information of which we are aware raises concerns regarding at least two issues of potential non-compliance with federal laws enforced by the Department.”
“The first issue relates to a number of reports suggesting that the ballots, elections systems, and election materials that are the subject of the Maricopa County audit are no longer under the ultimate control of state and local elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors at an insecure facility, and are at risk of being lost, stolen, altered, compromised or destroyed,” the letter added.
“Federal law creates a duty to safeguard and preserve federal election records,” the DOJ letter went on. “The Department is charged with enforcement of provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. This statute requires state and local election officials to maintain, for twenty-two months after the conduct of an election for federal office, “all records and papers” relating to any “act requisite to voting in such election…”
“The purpose of these federal preservation and retention requirements for elections records is to ‘secure a more effective protection of the right to vote,'” the DOJ continued.

Maricopa County Board Of Supervisors Holds Emergency Meeting Over Inability To Provide Routers, Passwords For Election Audit - Conservative Brief