Arizona Senate President Karen Fann continues to be met with resistance to the subpoenas requesting critical missing information for the Maricopa County forensic audit. Fann set August 2 as the deadline for routers, passwords, hardware keys from Maricopa County Boards of Supervisors (MCBOS), and access to information from Dominion Voting Systems (DVS). However, letters and statements from the parties involved show almost complete non-compliance with her requests.
The MCBOS letter Chairman Jack Sellers sent stated "there was no fraud," and the Senate audit has been "an adventure in never-never land."
The Maricopa County attorney, Allister Adel, wrote a more fulsome response on behalf of the county. The response can be summarized as follows:
- They do not acknowledge a breach of the voter registration server but, rather, state that "an individual programmatically accessed the County Recorder's website.
- One week's notice is not sufficient time to produce information consistent with that breach, and their workers were too busy complying with the retrieval of ballots and tabulators on short notice from the auditors.
- Requested ballot images were already provided on April 22 on pallet 46, and "if Cyber Ninjas have misplaced them, please direct them to the 5-terabyte Lacie hard drive that includes the subfolder named AFFIDAVITS."
- The Recorder is "prepared to deliver to the Senate the nearly two million ballot envelopes," but the proper security must be put in place.
- They continue to say the passwords requested are the "sole custody and control of Dominion Voting Systems, and the County has no right to 'access' them."
- They cannot supply voter records with change history. The Recorder has those and will work to secure the records.
- They hold firm on their position on routers—they will not comply because of sensitive information on them. They also continue to deny connections to the internet of the Tabulators.
- The Maricopa County Election Management System is not connected to the internet.
- No Splunk logs will be provided.
- They rejected the subpoenas because the state legislature is out of session.
Letter from Maricopa County Attorney on behalf of MCBOS
2019 Work Group Report for Maricopa County Elections
An investigation of who owns the voter registration records brings some confusion over the response from Adel and the MCBOS. It seems a report from the Maricopa County Elections Workgroup in May of 2019 indicates the County and the Recorder have shared resources and "real-time access to updated voter registration information," among other things. An excerpt from the 2019 report states:
"As the workgroup members learned more about the operations, they determined it would be important to highlight the Voter Registration Access System (VRAS). This is the central database that is utilized by both the Recorder’s Office and the Elections Department throughout each election cycle. The VRAS is central to several critical functions that involve both offices, i.e., real-time access to updated voter registration information, the creation of polling maps, candidate filing for quarterly financial reports, ballot preparation, polling location management with facility agreement forms, as well as the database needed to generate various reports and lists that include: the bilingual poll worker report, early voter information, military voter information, and the data needed by the third-party vendor Runbeck. This vendor performs printing, distribution, packing, and tracking of official election ballots for both the Recorder’s Office and Elections Department."
The report further states the Maricopa elections department does report to the County Recorder, as do Coconino, Navajo, and Yuma counties.
Comparison of County Elections Information/2019 Report
The report also makes some critical recommendations for the custom-developed VRAS database—custom-developed internally by the Recorder's IT department. In several places, the report states that a database that is custom-developed and has some "inherent risks."
As mentioned by the Gateway Pundit, there is no mention of what to do if a data breach occurs. "Unfettered access to VRAS would be “the keys to the kingdom” for those wanting to manipulate Maricopa elections." The full recommendations are below:
Work Group Report 2019/VRAS recommendations
Dominion Responds
The Dominion Voting Systems CEO, John Poulos, essentially told the Arizona Senate that the law doesn't apply to Dominion and the information the Senate requested. Poulos stated that Dominion "is not a public officer or public body and, therefore, has no obligation to make its records available for public inspection."
Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers seemed to be unhappy with the responses from MCBOS and Dominion in her tweet on Monday. She has been a consistent supporter of the push for election integrity:
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Timothy Thomason ruled in February that the Legislature has the right to issue subpoenas. In February, the Senate attempted to hold the MCBOS in contempt. Still, Sen. Paul Boyer broke with the Republican Caucus to cast a critical vote against the measure, contending he wanted to give it more time "for us to work together charitably and amicably as friends."
Fann's response on Monday seems to lead with a positive outlook—stating that progress is being made because "it appears we will soon secure copies of ballot envelopes and critical voter registration information." She voiced disappointment in the "slow-walk of Senate public records request" but will "remain committed to ensuring election integrity as voter confidence is at the heart of what we set out to achieve in this endeavor."
