A new week of Senate audit activities will start Monday morning, but most of the political action is expected to occur away from the floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum where volunteers and paid workers are hand counting nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County’s 2020 General Election.
Senate audit liaison Ken Bennett has confirmed he recently filed a report with the Phoenix Police Department concerning “a threat,” the details of which have not been shared with the public. News of his police report comes on the heels of a decision by Gov. Doug Ducey to arrange a security detail for Secretary of State Katie Hobbs after she heavily criticized the Senate’s audit and the officials running it.
There was also a recent incident in which an attorney for audit contractor Cyber Ninjas was a witness to vandalism believed directed at his involvement in the audit.
The rhetoric about audit activities even prompted an unusually politicized claim by Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, a Democrat, about the risk to public safety if the Senate obtains the Election Department’s routers that have been subpoenaed.
Penzone says he is worried about potential threats to public safety and to the local, state, and federal officers who protect the public. His comments simply echo similar statements put forth by other county officials who say its Election Department’s computer activity is interconnected via a router with all the Sheriff’s Office computer activity and other county departments.
Such unsubstantiated claims are incredulous, according to computer experts.
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office recently announced that even allowing auditors to look at the Elections Department’s routers “or virtual images” creates a risk of exposure of not only law enforcement but also confidential data about Maricopa County’s citizens, such as social security numbers and health data.
The router interconnectivity claim raises new questions about an “intrusion” or hack that county officials reported to the FBI last fall. At the time, a county spokesperson said a hacker or hackers “got into” the Elections Department website but were prevented from accessing any databases. It is unknown, however, if the intrusion allowed a hacker to gain access via the Elections Department to some other county department, such as the Sheriff’s Office.
Another question going into to the third full week of audit activities is whether Maricopa County officials will put aside their apparent irritation with the Senate’s audit and take a less obstructive attitude.
One example is Maricopa County’s public statements that no county official or employee has the usernames or passwords needed by auditors to access the 2020 General Election precinct count tabulators. However, the county has not mentioned in those statements who does have the information.
Presumably the “who” is Dominion Voting Systems which sold the machines to the county and provided on-site technicians throughout early voting and election day. A letter from the county to Dominion asking the company to honor a Senate subpoena for the tabulator access information would facilitate a faster resolution, Senate assistant audit liaison John Brakey said last week.
Brakey, a longtime elections advocate, received a reply last week from Maricopa County to his recent public records request seeking what he expected would be thousands of batch reports generated when the county tabulated ballots. But Rey Valenzuela, the county’s Director of Election Services & Early Voting, responded that “no such records exist.”
Valenzuela did acknowledge 52 batch reports were created in connection with a post-election hand count, although it was another of his comments to Brakey which has caught the attention of attorneys who specialize in public records.
According to Valenzuela, the 52 hand count batch reports are already in the possession of the Senate as per the subpoena. But the county has “nothing in our custody and control that is responsive to your (public records request)” because they failed to “retain a copy of them.”
It is not clear whether Valenzuela meant to suggest county officials turned over all subpoenaed documents to the Senate without first making copies.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by the Arizona Democratic Party over concerns with lax audit procedures is no longer hanging over Bennett’s head, after it was resolved last week by a settlement. And while the U.S. Department of Justice advised Fann of two “concerns” related to the audit, neither was anything unexpected and Fann has already replied to the DOJ.