OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
There is good news for those who want a fair resolution to the Maricopa County, Arizona audit of the 2020 presidential election.
The information that was alleged to have been deleted has been recovered, an auditor said on Tuesday, The Arizona Mirror reported.
At a hearing on Tuesday afternoon in the Senate, CyFIr founder Ben Cotton, a subcontractor on Senate President Karen Fann’s audit team, said that his team was able to recover data that the Senate’s election team had accused Maricopa County of deleting.
“I’ve been able to recover all of those deleted files, and I have access to that data,” he said at the hearing. “I have the information I need from the recovery efforts of the data.”
Maricopa County officials responded in a tweet after the hearing.
“Just want to underscore that AZ Senate’s @ArizonaAudit account accused Maricopa County of deleting files- which would be a crime- then a day after our technical letter explained they were just looking in the wrong place- all of a sudden ‘auditors’ have recovered the files,” it said.
Cotton’s explanation indicates that county officials were correct when they said no files had been deleted.
The audit’s official Twitter account explicitly claimed the county “deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle” shortly before turning over its ballot tabulation machines to the audit. To back up its claim, it posted a screenshot purporting to show a list of deleted files, all of which were shown as being modified on April 12, about a week and a half before the county delivered the machines to Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the audit is being conducted.
In a response letter to Fann on Monday, the county Board of Supervisors said the elections department shut down the servers on that date, and that the “modified” date only indicates changes the software made to the files’ metadata, which it said was a routine occurrence. Cotton said the audit team didn’t turn on the machines after receiving them.
Rather than examine the machines themselves, the audit team made digital copies of the equipment. The third-party software CyFIR used to analyze those digital copies gave the appearance that files were missing or deleted because the files were not in their original place, the county speculated.
Last week State Senate President Karen Fann asked for county officials to come and meet with her to “constructively resolve” issues with the audit, including the reported claim that a “main database” in the Election Management System was deleted, The Arizona Independent Journal reported.
“We have recently discovered that the entire ‘Database’ directory from the D drive of the machine ‘EMSPrimary’ has been deleted,” she said in a letter on Wednesday to Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Jack Sellers. “This removes election-related details that appear to have been covered by the subpoena.”
“This suggests that the main database for all election-related data for the November 2020 General Election has been removed,” she said. “Can you please advise as to why these folders were deleted, and whether there are any backups that may contain the deleted folders?”
Fann then proposed all the key parties sit down at the Arizona State Capitol on May 18 to address the EMS files as well as other issues “without recourse to additional subpoenas or other compulsory processes.” The meeting will be livestreamed so the public can watch, she noted.
Those other issues mentioned by Fann include concerns that many of the boxes which contain nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in the election were allegedly turned over by the county without tamper-evident seals or without the ballots first being sealed in bags. And there are questions about ballot batch counts, Fann noted.
“The audit team has encountered a significant number of instances in which there is a disparity between the actual number of ballots contained in a batch and the total denoted on the pink report slip accompanying the batch,” she said. “In most of these instances, the total on the pink report slip is greater than the number of ballots in the batch, although there are a few instances in which the total is lower.”
