ARIZONA: 74K Excess Votes Still In Doubt

 

CNN's expert fact checker's source was "some friends of mine" 

It bears repeating -- whenever the media claims something is false or it's a conspiracy theory, then the opposite is probably true.

When Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan announced that the audit found 74K absentee ballots that were not mailed to voters (among other serious issues with Maricopa's election), the media's reflex reaction was to scramble and say it was debunked.

As it stands right now, those votes are still of questionable origin because neither Maricopa County nor a media data analyst have answered the question by using the authoritative data source.

Garrett Archer of ABC-15 in Phoenix went to Twitter to announce that the Cyber Ninjas were wrong and that the 74K votes in question were those of early in-person voters.   See the image of his tweet at right.

Unlike the legacy media and the sheeple who follow it,  I took one look at his tweet and said:

"Gee, that graphic looks like something that he made in his mom's basement...and he didn't source his data."

As the headline graphic shows, Archer's source was "some friends of mine."

Archer later admitted that his "friends" file is NOT available to the public, but all three political parties have the file.  

Of course, that didn't stop CNN from using Archer as their expert source.

Here are some excerpts from CNN's fact check (my emphasis added):

Logan's suggestion of some sort of unsolved mystery was definitively debunked by Garrett Archer, an election analyst at ABC15 television in Phoenix and a former official in the Arizona secretary of state's office, who is known locally and on Twitter for his mastery of the state's elections data. 

Archer explained that the county stops updating the requested-ballots list, known as "EV32," after the last day people can request a mail ballot, October 23. So ballots cast in person after October 23, Archer said, were included on the submitted-ballots list, known as "EV33," but did not have a corresponding item on the "EV32" requested-ballots list.

Oh, really?

Archer had to correct himself on the files, later tweeting:

Maricopa County election officials. --- who in November claimed that Sharpies couldn't bleed through the ballot paper and were proven wrong by Cyber Ninjas' audit — chimed in on the matter:

 “the EV32 Returns & EV33 files are not the proper files to refer to for a complete accumulating of all early ballots sent and received.”

And:

“That information is obtained from the Voted File, not a GOTV tool for the political parties and candidates.” 

Therefore, CNN's fact check based on Archer's rebuttal of Logan's claim is not even based on the correct file.

The only thing "definitively debunked" right now is that CNN is a real news network.  

By the way, even Archer knew it was not the correct file but that didn't stop him from using it to bash the Cyber Ninjas.

This CNN fact check is right up there with Rathergate, in which disgraced, former CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, accepted bogus national guard documents about George W. Bush's service records.  When pressed, Rather couldn't name the original source.  

CBS's own investigation found a number of failures, including, but not limited to: failure to identify the sources; chain of custody failures; and failure to authenticate the document.

Data Security/Integrity

I wasn't the only person to question the source of the data.  

Some of the other non-sheeple on Twitter asked Archer some excellent questions, especially question 4,  to which the so-called "expert" had no response.

Hermes Logios tweet above asked the very important question about the source, then followed up with the even more important question "Has it been secure since 11/3?"

To be clear, if the Voted File was not secure, an individual could have accessed it immediately after the Cyber Ninjas announced the vote discrepancy and changed the numbers.   In Pennsylvania, a number of election workers and THIRD PARTIES have access to a similar file (SURE) that contains the same data regarding when voters requested and received a ballot.

An actual server log or similar data would be needed to determine when the updates to Arizona's Voted File occurred and what totals existed in the relevant fields on the days surrounding the election.

What is listed in the Voted File on July 16, 2021 may not be the same as the listings in the days leading up to November 3rd.

Maricopa Dodges the 74K Discrepancy

In an effort to debunk the Cyber Ninjas discrepancy, Maricopa County provided completely irrelevant data to the media (who accepted it at face value) and also may have “incriminated” itself.

First off, the Cyber Ninjas want to know specifically if there is a one-to-one match between the absentee/early ballot it examined and if there is a REQUEST for that ballot in the Voted File. 

Gross numbers of ballots requested and returned don't answer that question.

This lame tweet was the best Maricopa County could muster as detailed information.  The question remains unanswered regarding how those votes are tracked in the Voted File.

Calculated?

Next, Maricopa states that @maricopavote "calculated" the true number of requests and returns. 

When did they do this calculation?  

I'm betting just recently (more on that later).

Maricopa County should have been able to pull or publish those numbers from an existing report.

But it needs to do more than that.

Maricopa County needs to provide day by day reports of absentee ballot requests and returns in the timeframe leading up to the November 2020 election.   

It hasn't done that for the 2020 election --- at least not publicly.

As I wrote in Maricopa County Caught Red Handed,  Maricopa was the ONLY county in Arizona that failed to provide complete data for the number of ballots requested (see below).  I referred to this lack of disclosure this a "blank checkbook" for absentee votes.  

To make matters worse, Arizona, through its contractor, dataorbital.com, never publicly posted the ballots requested and returned from each county.   If you look up Early/Absentee Voting for Arizona, this is what you see:

I contacted the owner of the Early Voting website, University of Florida professor, Michael McDonald who also did not have the county level data.  McDonald angrily referred me to data orbital.com.

I contacted dataorbital.com two times in an attempt to obtain the county level data.  

I never got a response. 

This lack of disclosure about mail-in ballot requests by the state of Arizona and dataorbital.com certainly is suspicious.  Note that these data could be used to determine which counties could receive excess (Biden) votes from Maricopa. 

As I noted in Maricopa Caught Red Handed, Biden received 1.16 million (1,161,582) votes by 8PM MST on election night.   That was 120,000 more votes that he received in Maricopa for the entire election that stopped counting on November 30th, 2020.  

What happened to those excess votes?

The routers will likely tell the story. 

Unfortunately, Maricopa County's unwillingness to engage in this audit and provide data has prolonged the process and forced the Cyber Ninjas to ask questions at public hearings instead of the normal process of the auditors working with the county to resolve discrepancies in private.

At this stage, neither the county nor Archer have not provided authoritative data to resolve the issue with the discrepant absentee ballots...

...and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

-- Ray Blehar, July 20, 2021, 4:43 PM EDT

(Note:  I was formerly an assistant inspector general and oversaw audits for a large Defense/Intelligence Agency.  I was also served as my agency's audit liaison to the Department of Defense.)

Next:  Excess votes in Arizona

          Fact checkers also wrong about provisional votes