Replies to post #45264 on Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

Election conspiracies live on with audit by Arizona GOP

By JONATHAN J. COOPER and BOB CHRISTIE
31 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/elections-election-2020-business-government-and-politics-arizona-a56ee7c8214ecc876424ee3428e3ab72

PHOENIX (AP) — Months after former President Donald Trump’s election defeat, legislative Republicans in Arizona are challenging the outcome as they embark on an unprecedented effort to audit the results in the state’s most populous county.

The state Senate used its subpoena power to take possession of all 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County and the machines that counted them, along with computer hard drives full of data. They’ve handed the materials over to Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based consultancy with no election experience run by a man who has shared unfounded conspiracy theories claiming the official 2020 presidential election results are illegitimate.

The process is alarming election professionals who fear the auditors are not up to the complex task and will severely undermine faith in democracy.

“I think the activities that are taking place here are reckless and they in no way, shape or form resemble an audit,” said Jennifer Morrell, a partner at Elections Group, a consulting firm advising state and local election officials, which has not worked in Arizona.

Conspiracy theories about the election have proliferated across the country even before President Joe Biden’s victory but have had particular staying power in Arizona, which flipped to the Democratic column for just the second time in 72 years.

Trump on Friday predicted the audit would reveal fraud and would prompt similar reviews in other states he lost.

“Thank you State Senators and others in Arizona for commencing this full forensic audit,” the former president said in a statement. “I predict the results will be startling!”

Cyber Ninjas began a manual recount of ballots Friday, a day after Democrats asked a judge to put an end to the audit. The judge ordered the company to follow ballot and voter secrecy laws and demanded they turn over written procedures and training manuals before a hearing Monday on the Democrats’ request. He offered to pause the count over the weekend if Democrats posted a $1 million bond to cover added expenses, but the party declined.

On a since-deleted Twitter account, Cyber Ninjas owner Doug Logan used hashtags and shared memes popular with people promoting unsupported allegations casting doubt on Biden’s victory.

Logan insists that his personal views are irrelevant because he’s running a transparent audit with video streamed online.

“There’s a lot of Americans here, myself included, that are really bothered by the way our country is being ripped apart right now,” Logan told reporters Thursday night. “We want a transparent audit to be in place so that people can trust the results and can get everyone on the same page.”

But Logan refuses to disclose who’s paying him or who’s counting the ballots, and he won’t commit to using bipartisan teams for the process. The GOP-dominated Senate refuses to let media members observe the count. Reporters can accept a six-hour shift as an official observer, but photography and notetaking are prohibited. It would be a violation of journalistic ethics for reporters to participate in an event they’re covering.

The Senate has put up $150,000 for the audit, but Logan acknowledged that’s not enough to cover his expenses. The right-wing cable channel One America News Network has raised money from unknown contributors for the project, and the money goes directly to Cyber Ninjas. Logan would not commit to disclosing the donors and would not provide an estimate for the total cost of his audit.

Cyber Ninjas plans to have teams of three people manually count each ballot, looking only at the presidential and U.S. Senate contests, which were won by Democrats.

Logan said the counters are members of law enforcement and the military as well as retirees. He would not say how many are Democrats or Republicans and would not commit to ensuring the counting teams are bipartisan.

The process is overseen by volunteer observers. As of a week ago, 70% of observers were Republicans, according to Ken Bennett, a Republican former secretary of state who is serving as a liaison between the Senate and the auditors.

Cyber Ninjas also plans to review ballot counting machines and their data, and to scan the composition of fibers in the paper ballots in search of fakes. It plans to go door-to-door in select precincts to ask people whether they voted. Logan was vague about how the precincts were chosen but said a statistical analysis was done “based on voter histories.”

The audit has been beset by amateur mistakes that critics view as evidence the auditors are not up to the task. Hand counters began the day using blue pens, which are banned in ballot counting rooms because they can be read by ballot machines. For days leading up to the audit, a crew from a group of Phoenix television stations, azfamily, had unfettered access to the supposedly secure facility as auditors were setting up equipment and receiving ballots and counting machines.

Election experts said hand counts are prone to errors and questioned a lack of transparent procedures for adjudicating voter intent when it’s not obvious.

Maricopa County conducted a host of pre- and post-election reviews to check the accuracy of voting machines, including a hand count of a representative sample of ballots as required by state law. The county also hired two auditing firms that reported no malicious software or incorrect counting equipment and concluded that none of the computers or equipment were connected to the internet

“We’re going to set up a new norm where we don’t accept the outcome of elections in a free and fair and just democracy, and that is the core of what is at stake here,” said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa County elections official. “I think that is incredibly, incredibly problematic.”

https://apnews.com/article/elections-election-2020-business-government-and-politics-arizona-a56ee7c8214ecc876424ee3428e3ab72

[scion]

Goofy AZ Republican vote 'audit' examining ballots for bamboo because... China?

Rachel Maddow looks at what is happening with the pro-Trump ballot-examining spectacle in Maricopa County, Arizona that state senate Republicans are calling an "audit," where observers are reportedly not allowed to share their observations, and a special (?) camera is being used on ballots to look for traces of bamboo to confirm a theory that 40,000 fake ballots were flown in from China.

May 6, 2021
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/goofy-az-republican-vote-audit-examining-ballots-for-bamboo-because-china-111419461691

Arizona’s Republican-Run Election Audit Is Now Looking for Bamboo-Laced “China Ballots”

BY JEREMY STAHL
MAY 05, 20216:04 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/arizona-republican-audit-bamboo-ballots-china.html

On Wednesday, a member of the Arizona election audit team that has been heavily touted by former President Donald Trump revealed that its examination of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County will include a “forensic” analysis of ballots to determine if the paper is made of bamboo—in order to determine whether or not China delivered tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots to tip the state to Joe Biden.

If that sounds much too crazy for an audit that was initiated by the Republican-led Arizona legislature and whose communications are being spearheaded by Republican former secretary of state, Ken Bennett, it very much is not.

On Wednesday, audit liaison John Brakey told a reporter from the local CBS affiliate in Phoenix that the audit team was checking to see if 40,000 Biden ballots were smuggled into Arizona from Asia by checking the paper’s fiber to try to detect bamboo:

Dennis Welch @dennis_welch · 13h

John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit of the 2020 Arizona election, says auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40K ballots from Asia were smuggled here. #AzAuditPool

VIDEO

Dennis Welch
@dennis_welch
·
13h

Here’s the rest of the interview #AzAuditPool

VIDEO

Here’s the rest of the interview #AzAuditPool pic.twitter.com/crdMzmSkeg

— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) May 5, 2021

7:44 PM · May 5, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD

John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit of the 2020 Arizona election, says auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40K ballots from Asia were smuggled here. #AzAuditPool pic.twitter.com/57UOBYIehg

— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) May 5, 2021

John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit of the 2020 Arizona election, says auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40K ballots from Asia were smuggled here. #AzAuditPool pic.twitter.com/57UOBYIehg

— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) May 5, 2021

“There’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in and stuffed into the box and it came from the Southeast part of the world, Asia. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper,” Brakey told Dennis Welch of CBS5 News.

Welch asked Brakey a series of follow-ups, such as “Why do you check for bamboo?” and “This is part of what you’re looking for?” and he answered that others were searching for the bamboo ballots because “people in Southeast Asia…use bamboo in their paper processing” and “this is part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about.”

Again, is the bamboo analysis truly part of the audit effort? Apparently, it has been from the beginning.

During a press conference for the audit last week, Brakey said what auditors were “looking for is folds in pieces of paper, because there’s a guy who came out and said certain things, that the ballots were stuffed, that we’re going to find bamboo in the paper.”

Bennett, the spokesman for the audit, then confirmed, “we’re evaluating the paper. We’re evaluating the paper.”

Where did this theory—apparently of major concern for the Arizona auditors—that someone in Asia had sent 40,000 ballots to Maricopa County in order to sway the election for Joe Biden and against Donald Trump come from? It appears to have come from an election fraud gadfly named Jovan Pulitzer, who Slate’s Aaron Mak reported earlier this week is supporting the work of Maricopa audit firm “Cyber Ninjas.”

In addition to Pulitzer having claimed to invent a technology that would detect whether a ballot’s ink and folds might indicate forgery, Mak flags that back in December Pulitzer began to espouse a theory that China had imported ballots to tip the election to Biden and that he could detect such malfeasance by uncovering bamboo particles via “a forensic analysis.”

Here’s footage of Pulitzer making that claim, in a video that was circulated on Dec. 23:

VOTE VERIFICATION!!

"China 🇨🇳 use Bamboo 🎍 to make Paper 🗳️.
Is VERY Detectable."

Jovan Hutton Pulitzer with Saul Montes-Bradley@realDonaldTrump@DonaldJTrumpJr@SidneyPowell1@GenFlynn@LLinWood @PatrickByrne@CodeMonkeyZ @JovanHPulitzer pic.twitter.com/hCXthgFDL0

— Giulio Barbonari (@GiulioAnselmo) December 24, 2020

Pulitzer claimed at the time:

The ballots are supposed to be printed here in the United States of America and, in some cases, the ballots have to be printed in that exact state. American paper has a signature in it. And with forensics, you can look at that paper and see if it is the constituents of that paper is what we use to make paper. Now let’s say there was an influx of China ballots. China does not have the tree and lumber population we have because it got deforested primarily a long time ago. They use bamboo—and they do use wood pulps—they use bamboo in their paper and they use about 27 different mixes of grasses that we don’t have here in the United States. And even though you can’t look at it and see it, it’s very detectable. And so I can ensure you that outside of a catastrophic failing this will be plugged.

In another video published on Dec. 29, Pulitzer further explained his theory.

“Well did you know from a forensic level that you can tell absolutely the difference between paper here in the United States, or paper that was made in China,” he said. “There’s different formulations, different inks, even different fibers, and our systems were able to tell every one of these.”

Now, Pulitzer—the inventor of one of the worst gadgets of all-time and a former professional treasure hunter—is assisting Cyber Ninjas in conducting this audit, complete with checking for bamboo fibers from “China ballots.” Bennett told the Arizona Mirror last month that Pulitzer had consulted with “Cyber Ninjas” CEO Doug Logan to design the process for testing the ballots.

As Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman said during a press briefing about the audit on Tuesday, the reality is that with Pulitzer and Logan now in total—and secret—control of those ballots, the “chain of custody” for Maricopa’s election documentation has been completely compromised.

“Arizona and Maricopa County has opened up a lot of questions because, like I said, how do you know those ballots weren’t altered?” Wyman said. “And it doesn’t even matter if they were at this point, because I don’t think you can guarantee that they weren’t and that’s all you have to do is cast doubt on this process.”

“From a legal standpoint, chain of custody, ballot integrity has been so destroyed by a lack of procedures that moved into evolving procedures” Matthew Masterson, a former senior cybersecurity advisor at the Department of Homeland Security, said in the same briefing. “You can’t reestablish that chain of custody and integrity after the fact. So, from just a legal standpoint, I don’t know how you can establish proper chain of custody, evidence standards, anything for a court, or otherwise, it’s gone.”

Wyman added that the Department of Justice ought to be observing the audit going forward.

Giulio Barbonari
@GiulioAnselmo
·
Dec 24, 2020
VOTE VERIFICATION!!

"China ???? use Bamboo ?? to make Paper ???.
Is VERY Detectable."

Jovan Hutton Pulitzer with Saul Montes-Bradley

@realDonaldTrump

@DonaldJTrumpJr

@SidneyPowell1

@GenFlynn

@LLinWood

@PatrickByrne

@CodeMonkeyZ

@JovanHPulitzer


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/arizona-republican-audit-bamboo-ballots-china.html