Thread by @jeremyduda

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.

Here's the county's 93-page report responding to the myriad claims made by @FannKfann's audit team in September: recorder.maricopa.gov/justthefacts/p…

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.

The hearing has begun. @billgatesaz: “I wish that we were not still here discussing the 2020 election, but unfortunately the state Senate, working with their contractors, have decided to go through with a detailed process to come up with certain conclusions."

Gates says Cyber Ninjas concluded that there were 53k questionable ballots cast in Maricopa County in the November 2020 election. “You’re going to hear something different today, and it’s going to be based in fact."

Gates: “Now it’s my hope that this is going to be the last word on the 2020 election because you’re going to hear the facts in detail.”

Scott Jarrett, Maricopa County’s director of Election Day voting, says they'll go over 3 documents from the audit. Cyber Ninjas Vol III report, the Echomail report on ballot envelope signatures, and the report on the Senate's machine count of ballots.

Jarrett explains that central count tabulators counted about 92% of ballots cast in Maricopa County in Nov 2020 election. Those tabulators are certified by US Election Assistance Commission to ensure they're 99.999% accurate, he says.

Jarrett and @stephen_richer are now going over the details of logic-and-accuracy testing, in which ballots for which election officials already know the results are fed into machines before and after the election to ensure accuracy.

Jarrett says he's heard misinformation that the county chooses the ballots to be counted. Not true, he says. The political parties that participated in the tests chose them. Before and after the Nov 2020 election, there was a 100% match.

Jarrett is now detailing the county's audit (conducted by qualified professionals) that determined the tabulation machines weren't connected to internet, weren't hacked, and that they were still using the software that was certified as 99.999% accurate.

The audit team claimed six machines were connected to the internet. The report says four of those claims are outright false, while the other two were web servers that are supposed to be connected to the internet and which aren't connected to the Election Management System (EMS).

Richer emphasizes that the audit of the machines, which he oversaw shortly after taking office, was conducted by the companies accredited by the EAC to certify the equipment. “They didn’t just go to their donors or to names on lists on their cell phones.”

On to the main event: the review of the audit findings.

The county reviewed 75 claims made by the audit team, Jarrett says. “We found that nearly every one of those claims was inaccurate.”

Jarrett says there were 38 inaccurate claims, 25 misleading claims and 11 claims that were simply false

"Inaccurate" means the audit team either used incorrect or faulty methodology or lacked understanding of pertinent federal or state laws

"Misleading" the claim was technically accurate but presented in a way that would lead people to a false conclusions, such as saying the two web servers were connected to the internet

False claims are claims that the audit team should've been able to conclude were false without any actual election expertise. Jarrett cites the allegations about ink bleed-through on the ballots ("Sharpiegate").

The audit team claimed the county didn't use the proper kind of paper they claimed because there was bleed-through. Jarrett says they could've contacted the manufacturer, who would've explained that wasn't accurate.

One of the reasons these claims were all wrong, Jarrett says, was faulty methodologies, like using "soft data matching" to claim 23k voters cast ballots from wrong address. They only used first name, last name and birth year, combined with commercial databases.

Those databases are used, for example, to market magazines to people, or by super PACs to send out mail. Jarrett says every election official knows these aren't always accurate. Those databases combined with soft data matching creates a lot of false positives, he says.

Another example of faulty methodology Jarrett cites is Doug Logan's famously false claim that 74k more early ballots were cast than were sent out. @Garrett_Archer and I dismantled this absurdly false claim last year. azmirror.com/2021/08/03/cyb…

Logan later admitted that he made this error because he was in a hurry to find info that would justify the door-to-door canvass they wanted to do.

The final reason for all these false conclusions, Jarrett says, is based on "a lack of independence and objectivity.”

Jarrett: “If you are biased and not using an objective process, you are likely to come to a faulty conclusion.”

For example, Jarrett points to the audit team's claims they caught county officials on camera deleting files, which some members of the Senate were "cheering" about. In reality, he says, they were packing up equipment and preparing to turn over materials for the Senate subpoena.

On a side note, I'll point out that Cyber Ninjas has consistently refused to comment on the many occasions when the media has found glaring problems with their "audit." It'll be interesting to see if they'll be willing to respond to this.

Doug Logan has spent a lot of time lately speaking with media outlets that were openly supportive of him. He hasn't had the guts to speak with any journalists who would ask him critical questions about the problems with his work.

Gates says the Board of Supervisors sent the Senate a public records request for information on the methods the audit team used. Jarrett confirms that the Senate has not provided any information.

Fann and the Senate haven't been answering any of my questions about the audit findings over the past few months either. Good to know I'm not alone.

Richer notes that they couldn't find a single instance where bleed-through from Sharpies was close enough to an oval to be counted, and found no correlation between bleed-through to ballot adjudication. “Can we bury Sharpiegate three times over now?”

Richer: “If you care about improving election confidence, Sharpiegate is not a thing.”

Next up is Nate Young, who is the director of information technology at the Maricopa County Recorder's Office. Richer notes that he joined the office after the election, so he would have no incentive to cover up alleged wrongdoing in the election.

Young calls CyFIR's claims that they deleted data "wildly inaccurate," says they archive info in accordance with state law because equipment is used for many elections. ”These systems can’t maintain all of this data from all of these different elections in perpetuity.”

Richer: So I asked you to bring up every elections file in the Elections Management Server from Oct or Nov 2020, you could do that?

Young: Yes.

Young addresses the claims that parts of the Election Management System were connected to the internet: “There were no connections to the outside world within this EMS system.”

Young notes that the audit team criticized the county for not updating its election software, explains that updates require internet connections, which the machines can't have, and would alter EAC-approved software.

Richer: “What I found to be quite remarkable is we were simultaneously criticized for not having the most up-to-date software … while simultaneously being accused of having machines that were connected to the internet.”

Young: “I also found that accusation … unfathomable.”

In response to Young's explanation that the two machines that were connected to the internet were web servers that aren't part of the EMS system, Richer asks, “So the two smoking guns of internet connectivity were what I use every day to get onto the internet?"

Had the county updated the software on its tabulation machines like CyFIR claims they should've, Young explains that their equipment likely would've been decertified. “This shows a shocking disregard for election laws and election procedures," Richer says.

Next up is Janine Petty, the county's senior director of Voter Registration

Petty says there's no real-time database that tracks the movement of registered voters. The county cannot deny someone the right to vote based on a commercial database, she says.

Cyber Ninjas used 3 points of data to identify voters: first name, last name and birth year. Petty says the county used 7 points of data.

Petty notes that Cyber Ninjas claimed some voters were ineligible because they changed their address to a PO box, which can't be used as an address for voter registration. She confirms for Richer that those voters would continue to be registered at their old addresses.

Richer says that's emblematic of the flaws in the Cyber Ninjas analysis. “That seems like something that anybody with any grounding in elections would know, is that correct?”

"That is correct," Petty says.

Richer has been a big fan today of the call-and-response where he asks a question he knows the answer to so he can highlight the audit team's total ignorance of election laws and procedures.

Next up is Celia Nabor, the assistant director for early voting at the Recorder's Office. She'll be going over claims about early ballot signatures and "misunderstanding" of election reports.

Nabor says it's completely false that the elections department told people to stop verifying early ballot signatures at one point.

Nabor explains that there were fewer rejected early ballot signatures because of a changed law giving voters five days after the election to "cure" their signatures, and because the county hired additional staff to cure signatures after Election Day.

Gates says, “It’s an example of great customer service” by the county.

Richer says the audit team's claim is "shocking in its laziness."

I outlined how horrendously faulty Dr. Shiva's examination of the county's early ballot envelopes was in a story a few months ago azmirror.com/2021/10/01/aud…

At several points, Shiva Ayyaduria flat out lied to @FannKfann's face when he claimed some envelopes were approved despite not having signatures. You could literally see parts of the signatures sticking out from behind redaction blocks labeled "phone number."

That caught Richer's attention too. “It was staring us right there in the face behind the phone number box... And yet they presented this as, ‘Aha, we found one that didn’t have a signature.’”

.@Garrett_Archer and I get a shout out for debunking Doug Logan's negligently false claim about 74k allegedly questionable early ballots. Richer notes that Trump himself unfortunately repeated this false claim during a speech in Phoenix.

Nabor says this is just one example of Cyber Ninjas reaching faulty conclusions because they simply didn't understand the various election reports the county provided, such as the EV32 and EV33 reports that Logan used to make his bogus claim.

Hickman described Shiva Ayadurrai as "the only PhD from MIT that ever got his butt kicked by a triangle.”

To wrap things up, Jarrett says they found 74 of the Cyber Ninjas' 75 claims were bogus. Only one had merit. They found 50 ballots that were duplicated and then accidentally scanned and counted twice. Jarrett calls it an honest mistake.

Closing statements

.@ThomasGalvin says this report is about the Maricopa County Elections Department, not Cyber Ninjas, CyFIR or Echomail. He hopes to never hear those names again. “I hope we run them to the ash heap of history.”

.@billgatesaz: “I think it’s important that our legislators not create new election law based on the Cyber Ninjas report. It’s been debunked. It was not written by people who were experts in the field.”

Gates: “We’re done. This is the end of the 2020 election. We have addressed the issues. We have debunked them. If there are laws, we will respond to those lies. But otherwise, we’re moving on.”

That's a wrap, folks. Meeting adjourned.