A few audit updates unrelated to Ken Bennett regaining control of the audit's Twitter account ...
Bennett said the audit team has counted between 350k to 400k ballots. They've counted all or part of 16 of the 46 pallets of ballots they received from the county, and broke into the first of the remaining 30 pallets yesterday.
The latest pallet they opened included duplicated ballots -- ballots that couldn't be read because they're damaged, large print, overseas format, Braille or other reasons, and had to be copied onto new ballots.
While they've counted between 350k-400k ballots, Bennett said not all of those have gone through paper evaluation. Bennett said there's a little bit of a lag in that department.
At the rate they're going, Bennett says the audit team is counting a pallet a day. The team is looking to hire more ballot counters and more people for the paper evaluation stations.
Bennett says the WiFi wasn't enabled on the router attached to a server that @SecretaryHobbs's observers noticed yesterday. He said he didn't know why the router was there in the first place.
Bennett didn't have a timeline for how much longer the audit is expected to take, though his pallet-a-day estimate provides at least a rough outline of how long the count might last.
The audit, of course, will go on hiatus next week during a bunch of graduations scheduled at the coliseum, then resume the week of May 24. Bennett said they'll keep counting as usual on Thursday, then start packing things up Thursday night and finish packing on Friday.
Though @FannKfann told DOJ that the audit indefinitely suspended plans to knock on voters' doors to confirm voter registration info, Bennett said the audit team will still do "spot checks" of some addresses, such as places where large numbers of votes were reported cast.
The Senate and audit team's settlement with the @azdemparty prohibits them from verifying voter signatures on early ballot envelopes, but Bennett said they'll still be checking images of the envelopes to confirm that they at least have signatures on them.
Bennett described the “spot checks” of addresses as in-person checks designed to ensure that an address where several dozen people are listed as voting isn’t a two-bedroom house or a vacant lot. Door-knocking is still suspended indefinitely by Fann.
Audit official @JohnBrakey said there are plans to break down ballot hand count results by precinct when they’re finished and allow skeptics of the results to download a program so they can check the final tally themselves.
Brakey said treasure hunter Jovan Pulitzer, whose tech is being used to search for counterfeit ballots by examining folds and ink marks, is a fake and a fraud. Brakey doesn’t know what Pulitzer is being paid for this, but said, “He found treasure here.”
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Defendants are being arraigned at Maricopa County Superior Court in the fake electors case. Kelli Ward, Michael Ward, Nancy Cottle, Samuel Moorhead, Greg Safsten and Anthony Kern have all pleaded not guilty so far.
When the judge asked Kern to state his name, he added his legislative title and identified himself as Senator Anthony Kern
Safsten told the judge he couldn’t afford counsel, and a public defender was appointed to represent him
Here we go. @MatthewGress stands to make a motion to force a vote on the abortion ban repeal bill. @electjacqparker says he's in violation of House rules and shouldn't be permitted to make his motion.
.@TravisGrantham shoots it down, says Gress hasn't been found in violation of any rules
@TravisGrantham Gress motions again, Parker again tries to block it, says he's in violation of Rule 31, which requires the speaker's support to amend or suspend House rules.
House Speaker @RepBenToma spoke with @JamesTHarris today to talk about yesterday's push in the Legislature to repeal Arizona's pre-Roe abortion ban in the wake of the state Supreme Court ruling that reinstated it. iheart.com/podcast/1248-t…
Toma said he's consider a legislative ballot referral that would compete with the @azforaccess abortion initiative.
@azforaccess Toma is considering "if there is a way to update the 1864 law in a way that can get signed" but doesn't see a way to make that happen with Hobbs as governor. But they can go around her with a ballot referral.
A grand jury indicted two state tax commissioners based on Bolles' reporting about them taking kickbacks in exchange for state printing contracts. The charges were dismissed, but one was defeated in his re-election while the other chose not to run again.
Bolles' reported that Corporation Commission employees were being coerced into donated part of each paycheck into a fund used for their bosses' reelections, and that one commissioner was a partner in a company that got a sweet contract from the commission.
Maricopa County's official rebuttal of the Cyber Ninjas "audit" of the 2020 election will begin in a few minutes, at 1:30pm. You can tune in on the county's YouTube channel.
In short, the county says basically every claim the audit team made is either false or misleading. The county found 38 instances where a voter might have cast multiple ballots, which they forwarded to the AG's Office, and 50 ballots that might have been double counted.
Candidates who filed to run for the legislature or Congress with their new district numbers can't collect signatures online yet, a problem that may persist for more than two months in some counties azmirror.com/2022/01/05/sec…
.@SecretaryHobbs's office says there's no way to update the system with the new districts until counties update their voter registration systems and send the info to the secretary of state. In counties that have March elections, like Maricopa, that won't happen for a while.
The counties can't actually begin that work until the @ArizonaIRC transmits the new districts to the Secretary of State's Office, which is expected to happen on Jan. 18.