Thursday, May 13, 2021

"Today In Election Audit Legal News": State Senate's Version of De-Escalation - Send Letter Instead Of Subpoena

The political action surrounding the recount/audit by the Arizona State Senate/Cyber Ninjas continues to swirl. Check back for updates as we post updates and filings.

5) 7pm: Supervisors and Recorder/Elections Department will hold preemptive meeting on Monday to address the Senate's/Ninjas' allegations. Probably won't show up for Senate's "meeting" on Tuesday. Following their Emergency Meeting this afternoon, Supervisors' Chair Jack Sellers (R-Dist. 1) issued the statement below.

And, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (Repub.) made a rare public statement on the matter tonight, tweeting "Enough." The full comment: "Enough with the defamation.  Enough with the unfounded allegations. I came to this office to competently, fairly, and lawfully administer the duties of the office. Not to be accused by own party of shredding ballots and deleting files for an election I didn’t run. Enough."

1) The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors has called an emergency meeting for 4pm today, in order to discuss and decide how to respond to last night's letter from State Senate President Karen Fann. The letter is below.

2) The letter sent by State Senate President Karen Fann to the Board represents a bit of a de-escalation. Rather than the subpoenas that were previously promised, Fann sets out the issues from her perspective and requests that the Board appear at "a meeting" next Tuesday. The meeting will be livestreamed, but it would apparently not be an under oath hearing with threats of contempt for not appearing. (As had been threatened in the past.)


3) Analysis and Commentary: Even with a less threatening tack, it would appear that these are all questions/issues that the Republicans in the State Senate and the Cyber Ninjas would already know answers to IF they had proceeded in a civil/orderly manner from the get-go, and that it was irresponsible for them to NOT have tried to gain an understanding of the process beforehand. 

As my colleague and friend Tom Ryan puts it, "(c)ivility by the AZGOP was never going to happen because this effort was never about the truth of the results of the 2020 election. It has always been about three things: sycophancy, red meat and punishment. I say sycophancy because the ring leaders of this operation want the approval of Donald Trump. They live for his Mar-a-Lago messages affirming that he approves of this fraudulent audit. It is all about the advancement of their political careers. I say it’s about “red meat” because that is what the hard-right base of the AZGOP wants. The AZGOP base want to see anything not Republican get destroyed. This false narrative about a stolen election feeds the maw of the angry red GOP masses. And lastly, I say this is about punishment because the base wants those Republicans who did their constitutional duty and verified the results punished. The GOP base wants their party to win, even if it means creating a false narrative about the election being stolen. Nope. There was never going to be any civility in this process."

4) Dominion Voting Systems - the company that owns the Maricopa County voting machines, and the company that has been at the center of unsupported conspiracy theories about the November election nationwide - spoke out on the demands made by the Cyber Ninjas. Channel 12's Brahm Resnik published this statement from Dominion today:



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1 comment:

  1. Add this to your "analysis".




    >On Monday December 7th, the trial court allowed a sample of 100 “duplicate” ballots, which was conducted on Tuesday, December 8th. Of the initial sample of 100, two (2) were found to have been miscounted to Trump’s prejudice, and none to Biden’s prejudice (with one vote being erroneously “flipped” from Trump to Biden, and the other simply uncounted). This was a two percent (2%) error in the sample.

    On December 9th, the county agreed in open court to sample an additional 2,500 “duplicate” ballots; and 1,525 were sampled that same day. Of the 1,525 ballots that were sampled that day, seven were found to have been erroneously counted – with five to the prejudice of Trump, and two to the prejudice of Biden. This brought the total rate of error to just over half a percentile (0.5%) – which is still a material rate of error, given that the candidates’ total vote counts were less than half a percentile apart (0.3%).

    A quick note on the numbers: the ratio of errors to the prejudice of Trump vs. er-rors to the prejudice of Biden would at first appear to be 7 to 2 (or 3.5 to 1); but since one of the uncounted votes for Trump was actually “flipped” to Biden, then the rate of “prejudice” is actually eight to one (8 to 1), based on this sample. Final-ly, the total number of “duplicated” ballots in Maricopa County appears to be around 27,859 – and so based on these samples, at least several hundred votes for Trump went uncounted or were “flipped” to Biden (in just the “duplicated” ballots in Maricopa county alone).

    7 Petitioner sought discovery into both “duplicated” ballots, as well as “adjudicated” ballots—both of which the discovery and trial testimony had shown were subject to substantial rates of “human error” of between two percent (2%) and half a per-centile (0.5%). Given that the race was less than half a percentile apart statewide, and that there were approximately 450,000 duplicated or adjudicated ballots in the State, these rates are significant.

    https://election.conservative.org/files/2020/12/Petition-for-Writ-Ward-v.-Jackson-et-al-1.pdf

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