People really don’t understand how audits work, and the media likes it that way

If you were reading my blog back around the election you know I’m a big fan of audits. They keep things honest. Auditing internal systems and looking for fraud and getting companies through 3rd party and government audits was a big part of my old career.

So like most of you I was really interested in seeing how this Arizona audit shook out. Leading up to it the democrats fought this audit every step of the way, in court, logistically, and by just being noncompliant pains in the asses (as companies which have nothing to hide often do!) My favorite part was when the democrats were freaking out about how the auditors weren’t certified by the governing body which doesn’t provide certifications to do this process there’s no certifications for. Good times.

When I googled the results on Friday, there were literally hundreds of news articles all sharing the same exact message. “Biden won. Cope losers. The audit was a sham put on by grifters, but simultaneously its recount proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that Biden totally won. If you ever thought there was any fraud in the election you are a stupid gullible idiot who believes conspiracy theories, and now shut up forever. Also it cost 6 million whole dollars and for the first time ever democrats care about fiscal responsibility. Orange Man Bad. etc.”

As I scrolled through dozens of these, I realized that none of them actually said what was in the audit report. Nor were there any links to the actual audit report. As a guy who used to write audit reports I’d rather read the actual document than take some journalism major’s take on it.

https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/cyber-ninjas-report

And sure enough, as usual, the narrative was designed for maximum spin.

It turns out the audit findings are a lot more complicated that portrayed by the narrative. Shocker. Basically the headlines are all coming off of the executive summary, section 2. And note, they’re only taking the very first part, and then quit reporting as soon as they get to “based on our other findings, however” –

https://c692f527-da75-4c86-b5d1-8b3d5d4d5b43.filesusr.com/ugd/2f3470_a91b5cd3655445b498f9acc63db35afd.pdf

To break this down, the first part, the recount/canvass matches what was there before, and the only differences are statistically insignificant. News media goes Yay! Biden won by even more votes! Cope! Cope! Cope!

Except, the second part they aren’t talking about is… are those votes all actual legal votes? And the answer is possibly not (why possibly? I’ll get to that). Then see all those bullet points of problems, weirdness, and fuckery. Which comes down to there being about five times as many questionable votes as Biden’s margin of victory (for the state, in this one county).

This is where it gets sticky. Here is the breakdown of the findings.

https://c692f527-da75-4c86-b5d1-8b3d5d4d5b43.filesusr.com/ugd/2f3470_d36cb5eaca56435d84171b4fe7ee6919.pdf

Section 4 is the tally results. That’s what the media is talking about. Section 5 is the problems. That’s what they are studiously avoiding talking about.

They are divided into 13 types of problems, ranging from critical to inconsequential. Statistically, it’s the first few that are the big ones, and each of those gets their own breakdown in 5.3 and 5.4. Go read through those.

On some of these types you’ll be thinking, why didn’t the auditors take these problematic ballots and track them back even further to see if the signatures match the actual human being who supposedly cast the vote? Sorry. I believe the democrats blocked them from doing that in court. (which is totally not suspicious at all from people who have absolutely nothing to hide!)

Auditors go through the available data looking for problems. They can only take it as far as they are allowed by the system they are working in. In this kind of case, to go beyond these steps would require the law to step in. Will that happen? Beats me. I don’t know jack about Arizona politics.

Auditors aren’t cops (usually, unless you’re getting audited by certain government agencies, but you get my drift). They simply investigate and then provide a report to the body which makes actual decisions based upon their recommendations.

The rest of the report is about the systems and controls, and how they should be improved. This part is really telling. Basically the Arizona election system is easily manipulated trash, with crap controls, and if any private company I ever worked at got caught with this many holes in it, they’d fire all the accountants and half the managers.

Now, for the idiot brigade that is crowing about how this proves whatever they want it to prove about the election and how everybody else should shut up forever, here’s some stuff that’s not in this report to think about.

This was the audit of one county, in one of the questionable states. Back in the aftermath of the election, I found Arizona to be the least interesting of those questionable states. Other counties had way more fuckery afoot. Atlanta and Detroit were way crazier than Phoenix on election night. No audits there.

And even in Arizona, this is one county. I don’t know the area that well so I’m just going off of what friends of mine who live there say, but Maricopa is usually the red county. Pima (2nd biggest) is the blue county. And they still found 5x the margin of victory in questionable votes in the red county. I’m sure next door was totally clean.

So basically, of the handful of problematic places, we took a sample of one of the least problematic ones, and still found a bunch of problems… ergo, the narrative is that everything everywhere is fine, and you are stupid if you question it.

The media is just as smart and honest about how audits work as they are about how to ride horses.

Both sides are claiming victory based on what the report says. Only one side owns the media and big tech, so that’s going to be the prevailing narrative (and interestingly enough, that narrative was determined before the final report was given). What it says is what it actually says. So I’d recommend reading it for yourself to draw your own conclusions, rather than letting some pundit decide for you.

WriterDojo S1 Ep7: Building Characters
WriterDojo S1 Ep6: genre

187 thoughts on “People really don’t understand how audits work, and the media likes it that way”

  1. So, if I’m reading this right, there were over 20,000 ballots that were from someone who didn’t live at that address any more, 9,000 where more ballots were received than sent out, 5,000 where it appears that someone may have voted in multiple jurisdictions, and about 2,000 where the voters had moved out of state.

    And the final take that we’re going with is “everything was fine.”

    I don’t want to be the sort of conspiracy theorist who assumes everything everyone tells me is a lie, but these people are making it really hard.

    1. …and that’s leaving out the Democrats’ core constituency — the voting dead.

      Maybe in a future Monster Hunter book there can be an incident in Chicago? Some bureaucratic functionary racing into City Hall in a panic:

      “Our dead voters have risen from the grave, they’re on their way here, and they’re pissed!

      Checking signatures on mail-in ballots is a simple and obvious step, like checking ID…oh wait that’s Eeevul Racist, too.

      They’re like a bratty kid making up excuses why you shouldn’t search his closet for his little sister’s missing toys.
      ———————————
      My grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.

      1. The dead are angry they voted democrat and have come alive to exact revenge on thise that have wronged their memory. They seek out the flesh of politicians, election officials, of those that have wronged them.

        I will buy a pre order of that now if I could, though I’d settle for a short al a the Christmas noun.

        Elections, they never change

      2. I recall a comic book where a politician had been elected on the strength of the graveyard vote. Then one day he was walking through the graveyard and he was dragged under the ground by the undead. They just wanted him to join them.
        “After all, we elected you, didn’t we?”

    2. I don’t have a problem with the government and/or anybody on the left labeling me as a conspiracy theorist. They’re all liars and cheaters so what they say doesn’t mean a hill of beans. Conspiracy theorist is just a term coined by the CIA to make someone not question them. We need to start accepting that term as our own and redefining it as who we are. Take what the enemy meant for evil and use it for good rather than shun the term. It’s like when Hillary called us Deplorables. We took the term an ran with it and now it’s one word/term that defines who we Trump supporters are.

      1. No, I don’t want to call myself -everything- that the enemy calls me. Words mean things, and some words demoralize people who pick them up and try to use them.

        “Deplorable” is funny. “Two dollar prostitute” would not be funny.

        We all know that there are conspiracists who are mentally ill or hateful. I am not embracing the label for people who want me dead, mmkay?

        1. You have a point, but it is an proud American tradition since Yankee doodle dandy to use the most ridiculous insult hurled, for your nom de plume.

    3. It’s not that clear cut and @MaricopaCounty has responded to many of these allegations already because the misinformation is strong. In short there are tally forms used to track mailed out ballots vs returned for organizational purposes (his is the EV32/33 references in the report). However in some cases (such as a mail in return without signature) the election team reaches out and voter is allowed to cure the ballot, which also goes on into the return tally, but the vote is still only counted once. This is how the procedure is designed (procedures are publicly available and approved by AZ Gov and AG), but to someone looking for ‘gotcha’ moments it easy to cloud the truth

      1. And all of that should be recorded, yes? Easily accessible to the auditing team? Yes? So where does the misinformation come from? The limits the Democrats put on the audit? The destroyed digital files?

        It’s not possible that an election official can offer the chance to “cure” the ballot without a record existing.

    4. Yet Xiden won by 10Kish. Which shows how bad the margin of cheat had to be for him to squeak by.

      That’s not counting the mail-in votes where the signature is unverifiable (that came in after the election closed) or the ballots that seem to have been scanned 2-3-4 times, or or or.

      Anyone who thinks the bad ballots were the actions of just a few scattered people need to wake up. This was wide-spread organized action. Just like Biden promised before the election.

    5. If you assume that everything any newspaper or other media outlet had ever put before the public was spun to either A) suit a political position or B) cause a sensation and sell the media you won’t be wrong often enough to matter. It isn’t even a matter of Progressive establishment control; it’s the way the news media have ALWAYS been.

    6. I’ve been a poll-watcher in Maricopa County, and I’ve seen for myself that “questionable” ballots get thrown in the “provisional” hopper, where they aren’t counted — let alone examined — until days later. I’ve also heard that the number of questionable ballots in Maricopa alone was closer to 67,000 — while Biden “carried” the state with only 10,000 votes.

    7. I live in Surprise, which is in Maricopa County, about a 20 minute drive to downtown Phoenix. I can absolutely tell you the media is lying through its teeth in regards to some of the addresses that had hundreds or even thousands of mail-in ballots. They keep pointing to this one lot that had over 800 ballots cast from it, and keep staring that it was a trailer park. Only problem is, this is demonstrably false. I have driven past the area multiple times because I worked down the road, and the whole place has veen an open field from the spring of 2020. They tore the whole damned trailer park down SIX+ MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION. There were no voters, because nobody lives there. I personally drove past some of the other problematic addresses, because they had thousands of votes where that was the home address, and they range from single-family house with dozens of “registered voters” to commercial addresses, which are illegal to claim as a home address for voting purposes. Can also attest to multiple out if staters who were casting ballots in Surprise. They are snowbirds with license plates running the gamut, and only a couple were refused. The level of fraud here was ridiculous, and the media is lying through their fucking teeth about all of it.

  2. That is why recounts rarely change the outcome. The recount will determine whether the ballot was tallied correctly, not whether the ballot was cast legally. Here’s a stack of votes for Biden, here is a stack for Trump. After a recount, the size of the stacks will not change measurably.

    But… start considering whether the ballot was cast legally. Is it a duplicate? Was the chain of custody intact? And, you might find out that tens of thousands of votes are questionable, if not outright illegal.

    And, that will change the outcome of an election.

    1. Recounts can shift vote totals. Remember Jill Stein’s crowd-funded recount in 2016? The one that stopped abruptly when the recounts in the first few districts ended up giving more votes to Trump? They work best when the cause of the discrepancy is either sloppy vote tallies, or “creative” reading of the ballots by the initial tabulators.

      But they won’t do much if the problems are caused earlier on.

  3. Anybody notice that you really didn’t hear the term “conspiracy theorist” until the Clinton Administration? Then of course we had that stupid movie with Mel Gibson.

    My Mother lived with me several years before she passed away. We voted at the same polling place. Her name was five down in the registration book from mine. When I went to vote in the 2012 Presidential election I noticed that she had already voted. I found it funny since I was the second person in the door when the poll opened. I also found it funny that she voted in the 2012 election when she had died in 2010.

    In the 2016 election I was asked to sign a statement that I witnessed a poll worker assist a woman in changing her ballot because she had selected a straight Republican ticket but her Presidential vote had Clinton selected. That happened several times in the area where I live. A local Democrat Judge called it a “calibration error”. I’ve programmed touchscreens. If it was a true “calibration error” the opposite should have happened. It didn’t because the media would have been all over it. I saw that Judge a few weeks later and said to him “calibration error my ass”. I’m just one person and I’ve seen this. How many other times and places have things like this happened and not been caught. Every “error” I’ve seen has favored the same Party. Once happenstance, twice coincidence, three times is enemy action.

      1. It was a standard charge against the John Birch Society, and anyone who didn’t buy that “Republican hate” killed JFK

    1. Even in ‘that stupid movie with Mel Gibson’ he was RIGHT! There WAS a conspiracy.

      And, never forget: when you get to ‘three times is enemy action’ so were the first and second. You just didn’t recognize them as such when they happened. How many enemy actions have been dismissed over the years?
      ———————————
      Elections are far too important to be left up to a bunch of uncontrolled voters. The Party MUST exercise oversight and management to prevent mere voters from electing the wrong candidates!

      1. They realize it, or at least the less-stupid ones do.

        That’s why they push gun control, because they think [sic] that gun control means only the government has guns.

        (Most here are aware how much bad fantasy that is, but that’s another post entirely, and IIRC has been covered by Larry several times in various fora.)

      2. There’s a fifth box, for those who let the other 4 lapse.
        It’s pine, but they fit it for each person, individually.

    2. Mel Gibson’s comments when he was stopped on suspicion of drunk driving tell us perfectly well what he really thought of conspiracy theories.

    3. Karl Popper invented the term “conspiracy theory” in the 1950s. I first heard it used regarding the Kennedy assassination around 1965.

      Conspiracy theories are nothing new. My father, who served as an aviation engineer in the Second World War, believed until his dying day that FDR set up Pearl Harbor.

      1. It is unusual to see so many ‘conspiracy theories’ get proven true in such a short time. How many more ‘conspiracy theories’ will turn out to have been true all along?

        I wonder how the real tin-foil-hat wearers feel about all of this. Do they feel vindicated, or disgusted by all the fake ‘conspiracies’? Or should that be un-fake conspiracies? Some of them were actual conspiracies.
        ———————————
        Candidate Joe Biden, August 2020: “We have assembled the most extensive, comprehensive and inclusive election fraud organization in history.”

        1. Personal observation from my work with people who have paranoia-
          Paranoid conspiracy theories such as the moon landing was faked, or 9/11 truthers usually involve a huge, overly complicated plot with wide spread cooperation from disparate groups. It also generally kicks Occam’s Razor to the curb, then gang beats it.

          More realistic conspiracy theories do involve cooperation, but in smaller groups and have an overall command and control element to keep it tightly coordinated and/or a pervasive culture in and around the organization that enables it to keep functioning. Think some of the mafia control of the teamsters to defraud the pension (culture of the mafia and the union), or CIA has for decades deliberately fed stories to journalists to control narrative (tight command and control plus culture of journalists “needing an inside source” no matter the cost).

          I’m not an expert by any means, but it’s been an observation of mine on how these things work out.

          That’s why dismissing things like the Lab Origin Theory as a conspiracy theory stank. China has a culture that enables this behavior, and CCP has a VERY tight command and control. Who really would put it past them without an investigation?

      2. Your father wasn’t wrong. He may not have actively planned it or anything, but he was aware of what was going to happen weeks before it happened and did nothing, and he also helped cause the problems that led to it in the first place.

    1. Concur. My take: I have no idea who won this election in Maricopa county. Whomever certified it should be fired. Ballot Chain of responsibility MUST be tightened, or future elections will be just as ‘who the hell knows’.

      Anyone saying ANYTHING different is pushing an agenda and wants the process corrupted.

    1. Boss Tweed from gangs of New York:
      Remember the first rule of politics. The ballots don’t make the results, the counters make the results. The counters. Keep counting

  4. Had a long winded response but thought better of it.

    Lets just say that the goal of this “audit” was not to find any gaps or issues, it wasn’t even to show Trump won (we had two or three recounts already before this one started).

    This audit was about normalizing the act of challenging an election with zero credible evidence that something was wrong. We have never seen widespread voter fraud in the US( it’s alway small instances of a guy sending in his dead mother’s ballot or voting in two states.)

    This is about setting the stage for future changes to voter laws that make in difficult to vote in the future, or to allow state legislatures to overturn elections they disagree with.

    1. You’re adorable.

      All that pretending that “recount” and “audit” are the same thing.

      All that mind reading.

      (Now do the same thing for 2016.)

    2. “zero credible evidence ” There’s plenty of credible evidence, you just can’t see it because your head is so firmly and deeply lodged up your ass. If you were to pull your head out, you’d see it.

    3. Oh look. Somebody who didn’t read the report findings and is instead reflexively barfing up narrative.

      Also, at this point you’d have to be pretty stupid or purposefully dishonest to keep conflating recounts and audits as being the same things.

      But I do like the nice little catch 22 you set up there, where you can’t challenge elections without “credible evidence” while “credible evidence” is a term that shifts to mean whatever you want it to be. As I went back over during the election, if this was a private business in the regular business world, there’s not a industry in existence where this many red flags wouldn’t have auto triggered an audit by the appropriate government audit agency.

      But yeah, even though the government checks us constantly, checking them is a threat to democracy. So even though fraud happens in every other walk of life constantly, even in places with far better controls, it never happens in elections.

      Go gas light somebody else with that weak ass bullshit.

      If that was the highlights of your deep thoughts I’m glad you skipped the long winded version.

      1. I have done system security for a couple decades and watched the hearing where they presented their findings.
        I found the observations around security configurations of the systems very interesting.
        1-Security logs were set at default to overwrite at 20megs which resulted in no logs preserved from the pertinent time frame.
        2-Generic processIDs were used to both run the processes and for administrators to perform trouble shooting/configuration/regular system access and it appears that almost everyone knew the username/password for those credentials.
        2a-There is security video of who was at the console when the data base files were deleted.
        3-Auditors were not provided forensic images of the drives, they were provided simple file copies of the data.

        Even with this level of misconfiguration the auditors were able to establish that the systems were connected to the internet during the election (What idiot does not clear his internet cache?).

        Read the report, the technical part, and it becomes clear that we will never know what happened because they erased or destroyed any on the logs/evidence required to know what happened.
        What should come of this is strict requirements for system configurations, access controls, near real time streaming of activity logs to a protected SIEM… you know, like banks and hospitals and anyone who handles PCI or HIPAA or SOX data has to comply with, upon penalty of law.

    4. “We have never seen widespread voter fraud in the US( it’s alway small instances of a guy sending in his dead mother’s ballot or voting in two states.)”

      Boy, do you have your head buried in the sand. I’ve got a couple dozen links bookmarked of reported voter fraud cases in the US just from random perusal that I’ve saved over the years. Here’s just one, with 938 criminal convictions detailed.

      https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf

      (I’m sure the link will cause this to end up in moderation, so I would appreciate it getting passed through when you have the time Larry or Jack.)

      1. “We have never seen widespread voter fraud in the US( it’s alway small instances of a guy sending in his dead mother’s ballot or voting in two states.)” LBJ became president after becoming a senator fraudulently. Anyone on the thread old enough to remember why they called him landslide LBJ? If there ever WASN’T a crooked race in mayor Daley’s city it wasn’t his fault. etc.

    5. “We have never seen widespread voter fraud in the US”

      You lying sack of shit. The 1960 fraud in the Kennedy/Nixon election is legendary. It is well know that you have to beat the margin of fraud to beat the Democrats.

      We’ve all seen ballots come out of car trunks to give the Democrats victory in a recount, it NEVER works the other way.

      You and I will be on opposite sides in the coming Civil War and I don’t consider you my fellow countryman anymore.

      So with all due respect, go the fuck to hell.

      1. And then there’s the case where uncounted ballots in Kansas City mysteriously caught fire while they were stored overnight in a locked Jackson County jail cell.

    6. “We have never seen widespread voter fraud in the US . . . .”

      Bullshit. Four women were convicted of voter fraud in the 2018 election in Tarrant County, Texas. That election, Tarrant County — a Republican stronghold — went Blue.

      You speak from ignorance. I suspect your blindness is willful and deliberate.

      40% of Americans believe the presidential election of 2020 was stolen. When 23% of Americans disagreed with the results of the presidential election of 1860, we got a civil war.

      Fair ballots or fast bullets. What’s your choice, cowboy?

    7. *snort*

      Just random people using their dead mother’s registration?

      Then that guy that they caught passed out in his car with drugs a few weeks before the California recall must have had over one thousand dead grandmothers.

    8. Read up on the 1876 presidential race. Rutherford Hayes did the same thing to Tilden. Except that he only needed to introduce a total of 1,800 phony votes in three states. Funny how all those people showed up at poll-closing time and voted in alphabetical order for Hayes — if you believe the official verdict.

      Hayes was a Democrat, too. Things haven’t changed much.

      1. Amazing. Every word in that paragraph was wrong.

        1. Rutherford B. Hayes was a Republican, not a Democrat.

        2. The 1876 election was marked by massive amounts of voter fraud (by everyone) in the North, and massive amounts of voter fraud and intimidation (by Democrats) in the South.

        3. To simplify a long and complicated narrative, Congressional Democrats agreed to let Hayes have the electoral votes of the three disputed states, and the election, in return for Hayes ending Reconstruction. No additional vote-finding required.

      2. Mark Twain wrote that they had to bury Democrats inside a hill to stop them from climbing out of the grave to vote in elections. Dead people voting for Democrats has been a joke/not joke for decades, and yet the Republicans ignore it.

        Based on what I saw watching election night, I’m guessing there was the original fraud they thought would be enough to win. When it became apparent there wasn’t, there was a 2nd round of really clumsy and obvious fraud, things like identical vote drops in WI and MI, and I believe Atlanta stopping counting for a burst pipe and kicking everyone out. Of course there was no record of a burst pipe being repaired in that building. Then there are the infamous ‘vote carriers’ that looked suspiciously like carry-on luggage, all pulled out from under tables at the same time. The amount of shady crap is too long to list and happened in a whole lot of places.

    9. “We have never seen widespread voter fraud in the US”
      my history book would like to disagree with you.

      first you have boss tweed and tamany hall, which was an organized election rigging machine.

      then the democrats created the k k k which was intended to rig election by using terrorist tactics to force republican voters (blacks) to stay home

      then after WW2 you had the battle of athens where democrats were just flat out rigging the vote count. they didn’t even bother stuffing the ballots with fake votes because they were in charge of counting the votes AND in charge of any “investigations”. This only came to an end after a flat out GUNFIGHT involving DYNAMITE.

      Then you had Lyndon B Johnson who paid an election judge to stuff fake votes into the ballot for him.

      so yes, everything you just said was a LIE. have a nice day moron.

      1. Don’t forget, Nixon won the 1960 election until fraud flipped Chicago, Chicago flipped Cook County, Cook County flipped Illinois, and Illinois flipped the Electoral College. Fortunately, Nixon wasn’t selfish and petty enough to invoke a Constitutional crisis during the Cold War, and John Kennedy was a staunch anti-communist. Which was why they had Oswald shoot him.
        ———————————
        The Democrats trust violent criminals and terrorists with guns more than they trust you.

        1. This particular myth really needs to be put to rest. In the 1960 election, Kennedy had 303 electoral votes, and Nixon had 219. Illinois only had 27. (Note: 15 electoral votes went to Harry Byrd, a hardline segregationist from Virginia.)
          IOTW, without the Chicago graveyard vote, while Kennedy loses Illinois (vote margin: less than 10,000) he still wins the election, with Nixon only getting 246 electoral votes to Kennedy’s 276.

          (Note: this does not dismiss the potential of voter fraud elsewhere. Kennedy won several states by similar margins.)

          1. If you look at the EV breakdown by state, JFK’s victory margin was in southern states where Jim Crow terrorism benefited the Democrat vote totals.

            IIRC, at least one of FDR’s elections is likewise so plausible.

            IIRC, the earliest discussion of the 1960 Illinois model that I recall seeing combined Illinois fraud with Texas. Because LBJ was a crook with deep connections to the Texas Democrat machine.

          2. You are leaving out the other horn of the 1960 fraud, Lyndon’s machine delivering Texas and the other 24 electors needed.

      2. Jason, and while not election fraud, since you mentioned the k k k, don’t forget the origins of gun control designed to prevent blacks from purchasing weapons to defend themselves from the k k k.

    10. “This audit was about normalizing the act of challenging an election with zero credible evidence that something was wrong.”

      If so, what was it when the 2016 election was accused of being hacked by the Russians by Hillary Clinton? What was it when the 2000 election results in Florida were challenged by Al Gore?

      The sole argument of the Left is to accuse the motives of their opponents. You have not a scintilla of proof that this audit was not prompted by the mountain of evidence that prompted it, nor that the suspicion of irregularity was not vindicated by the result.

      Worse, you do not even feel the need to offer any evidence to back your lunatic accusation. If asked, you will not produce it. You have nothing.

    11. Just curious….how could you see widespread fraud if you don’t look at the data to begin with? In other words audits have to be done to find evidence of voter fraud….democrats try to stop audits….what does that tell you. And by the way challenging elections has been around forever…..the democrats challenged in 2000 2004 and 2016. I wonder why they didnt in 2008 2012 and 2020. It is very telling that the same people that keep telling us that there is nothing to see here are also trying to stop people from looking….just sayin

  5. So…. why is it that an author in his spare time can explain the Arizona audit findings better than ANYONE in the media?
    Oh, right, he included the reason in the title.
    A pity we don’t have a functioning press.

    1. It also helpts that the Author is ALSO an Accountant, who knows how Audits work….As with MOST technical things, the only thing Most “Journalists” Know is the depth and Lint content of their navels.

      1. I would venture that they are far more intimately familiar with the contents of their own rectums. Or should that be recti? Rectii? Whatever.

        Anyway, that would explain why they have such a hard time seeing and/or hearing anything in the world outside, and why they constantly complain that the world is full of shit.

        It’s just a matter of perspective.
        ———————————
        Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.

        1. If it were rectus, the plural would be recti. For rectum, the plural would be recta. (Similarly, plural of datum is data.)

    2. @AndyInVA It functions quite well, just as Facebook and Twitter do. The catch is that the purpose and function of each is to serve its paying customers. If you aren’t paying the site, you’re not a customer.

  6. “Will that happen? Beats me. I don’t know jack about Arizona politics. ”

    I don’t think so. Arizona is solidly purple at this point, and the local media here has been spinning this crazy hard for over a month. Meanwhile Maricopa and the Democrats in general have been fighting everything tooth and nail, and are unlikely to stop. I just don’t know if anyone has the political gumption, much less political capital, to keep fighting that fight. I could be wrong, Ducey has shown some willingness to fight, but I doubt it will play out.

    1. Well we can fight this fight in the counties and the courts and validate that our elections are fair, or we will need to shoot ourselves out of socialist tyranny in a few years.

      The reason the left need to steal elections is that they are so fucking incompetently malignant in running things that they need this power or they will get voted out.

      I couldn’t have more contempt for the vile disgusting leftists in the country and the media.

      But always remember, when the war starts we kill the media FIRST because they were the ones that pushed us into this ever worsening hell. You think the Binden regime is bad now, they’re just getting started.

    2. Ducey is looking more and more to be heavily involved with Cartels and human trafficking. Just start digging into the Phoenix Skybridge project. His real last name isn’t even Doucey.

  7. If anything, this proves that Democrats can’t win without gaming the system entirely. Yeah, Republicans aren’t much better, but they stupidly appear to try to keep things fair and bipartisan or nonpartisan.

    This audit demonstrates that our electoral process is completely broken. All voter rolls need to be purged, better controls put in place, and all voters need to re-register.

    I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon, but I hope it does. Because this is the kind of crap that leads to civil wars.

  8. The only point I will make is that Maricopa County (Phoenix metro area) represents more than half the population of the state of Arizona. Even Pima County (Tucson metro area) only represents just over an eighth of the state’s population. I don’t know if there is any other state that has a single country, and presumably elections board, that represents such a large portion of the state’s population.

    1. “I don’t know if there is any other state that has a single country, and presumably elections board, that represents such a large portion of the state’s population.”

      Clark County, NV. 2/3rds of the state population.

      Oahu County, Hawaii also packs in 2/3rds of the state population into one county.

    2. Cook county, Illinois
      Clark county, Nevada
      Ada county, Idaho
      King county, Washington
      List continues…

      There’s a reason that the state legislatures are now bicameral in name only. It was the Warren Court’s proudest achievement.

  9. I think it’s worth noting that the Maricopa Republican Machine was built entirely by McCain and his groupies. As such I can easily believe such a machine would hate Trump every bit as much as McCain himself did. They broke it, and now they are taking every step possible, with the assistance of the Dems, to make sure their lawlessness never sees the light of day.

  10. I’m sorry, but the ‘audit’ didn’t audit the software or hardware of the voting machines? Am I right? So technically, it’s not a thorough audit.

    1. It’s hard to be thorough when a bunch of the things you would normally check are blocked by court orders or the evidence is destroyed beforehand.

      1. The people who deleted the logs need to spend years in prison.

        I hear the AG of Arizona want to run as a Republican for the Senate. If he doesn’t charge people for this crime, his political aspirations need to come to an abrupt end because the voters have to reject spinless weasels.

    2. The auditors were not allowed to look at the vote-stealing machines, or the miscounting machines, and still they found 45,000 more ‘problematic’ votes in one county than would be required to overturn the state election.

      I still want to know how Pennsylvania counted 2.6 million fraud-by-mail ballots when they only sent out 1.8 million. Did they breed new ballots in the voters’ mailboxes? Along with new voters to fill them out?
      ———————————
      The Democrats are willing to burn America to the ground, so long as they wind up squatting on top of the ashes.

      1. The AZ audit made a comment that might explain it – that early in-person voters were counted as returned without a corresponding sent out (since those ballots were not mailed). IIRC Penn was in a similar boat, and had some same-day returned ballots which defied mail possibilities, but this still wouldn’t explain the ‘mail’ votes that were received back *before* the date they were sent out.

    3. I watched the audit report read out online. Yes they had a whole section dedicated to the analysis of the machines. They found internet connection capabilities, deleted database files, deliberately overwritten logs, same passwords used by multiple logon id’s, machines with two CPUs and dual boot capability.

      1. Does “machines with 2 CPUs” mean 2 processors (or processor cores) like most reasonably modern computing hardware, or 2 separate computers or motherboards within one box? Or something else entirely? I don’t see any problem with a computer-based device having 2+ CPU cores as long as the officially installed software remains fully in charge of all CPUs.

        But dual booting… Yeah, it’d be hilarious to play Windows video games or run a Linux desktop on a ballot box. At home, on a decommissioned surplus machine that will never see the inside of a polling place ever again.

        1. “2 processors (or processor cores) like most reasonably modern computing hardware”

          Not necessarily even that, with multi-threading capability. It’s common to count twice the number of “CPUs” for the number of physical cores.

  11. I was living in Maricopa county in 2020 (now I live in Gila county which is much redder). I was working for the census during July, August, and September. I went all over the place counting people. I saw at least 10 Trump signs for every 1 Biden sign. So either the Biden voters were ashamed to admit to it, or there weren’t any.

    Maricopa county has, unfortunately acquired a fair number of democrats in government, and thus is doing all the usual democrat shenanigans: Mask mandates, lockdowns, &c.

    The other downside of Maricopa county — it is the biggest population center in the state, thus having undue influence in state politics.

    Out here in the wilds of Gila county, there are still dozens of Trump signs up — in silent protest of the election result. People here mostly ignore mask mandates, my local chief of police and sheriff have declared it to be a 2A sanctuary.

    It doesn’t help that our current governor, Doucey, is a RINO. However he does has a modicum of backbone and has refused to implement Biden’s vaccine mandate.

    Whether the audit proves Biden won, or not, there are definitely serious issues with the way elections are being run in Maricopa county. These issues need to be fixed before 2022.

    1. Folks need to update their signs, from:

      TRUMP
      2020

      to:

      TRUMP
      WON
      2020

      Hell, Guatemalans were waving TRUMP WON signs at Kamela. They know from crooked elections down in Guatemala.

      1. One of those Free Trump Flags (for a low low $9.99 postage and handling) outfits accidentally sent me an extra that reads:

        Trump 2020
        No More Bullshit

        At the time I thought it was a mistake. Now, of course, I know it’s just the naked truth.

    1. And our system is not equipped to offer redress anyway. I can’t recall a case even where fraud was proven that the beneficiary was removed and their official actions nullified.

  12. Hope the audit will do some good, maybe wake few people up.
    Some people only will believe things if they see with their eyes.
    Oh wait never mind. The video from Georgia of poll workers pulling suitcases of “votes” from under a table.
    That’s completely normal

  13. Use justthenews.com for getting real journalism.

    Various conservatives like dc_draino reported on actual findings on Instagram. IG still has a lot of freedom lovers, amazingly.

  14. So conspiracy theorist is an insult? What most people don’t seem to understand is that when scientists use the word “theory” they mean that the idea has been tested thoroughly to point that there is a high level of confidence in it being correct. So the hecklers are too stupid to know they just validated your position! And anyway, as the saying goes these days, the difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact is about 6 months.

    1. What most people don’t seem to understand is that when scientists use the word “theory” they mean that the idea has been tested thoroughly to point that there is a high level of confidence in it being correct.

      You are confusing the use of Theory (CAPITAL “T”) with theory (lower case “T”). The former is used in the scientific community in just the manner you state, although the Wokerati are corrupting that with their “Critical Race Theory” bullcrap. The lower case version simply means a possible explanation for a phenomena. A “conspiracy theorist” is, by definition, in the domain of the lower case theory.

  15. People, we can fix the voting system. Ask the election commissions who are using secure, trackable, verifiable systems to explain the general (not specific, not security-compromising) ways in which they protect election integrity and then challenge everyone else to conform to the highest standard.

    For example: does your county / city / state use some secure watermark, numbering, hash code or other means to assure that only ballots issued to registered voters are returned and counted?

    How often does your jurisdiction audit and spot-check registered voters?

    When the returns come in, are they cross-checked against the tax records, vital statistics and motor vehicle records to assure that the person hasn’t moved, died or changed address since registering? If there is a problem, are those votes moved to a specific pool for further investigation?

    How are problematic votes handled and when a problem is confirmed (multiple votes, voting after moving, etc.) how often are those people referred for criminal prosecution?

    It is really basic stuff, people. Push together and we can raise the bar!

    1. No problem, we’ll just print a few extras with that secure watermark, number, or hashmark, and have our trusted ballot counters deal with them in the most secure way possible, behind locked doors!

      The real problem is there’s no good way to secure mail-in ballots, especially if you also have mail-in registration. Simply create as many voters as required… all of whom then vote “securely”.

      Ever wonder how Iowa became a bellwether state for the primaries? Newt had an election fraud expert on a while back who said Iowa’s voter registrations are somewhere around a third (IIRC) fraudulent. So what’s really going on is that’s where they test the system to see how many ballots they need to manufacture.

  16. I’ve been monitoring the post-election debacle from day one, mostly by perusing patriots.win (an otherwise bland pro-Trump circlejerk, but it has its moments and uses as a news aggregator), and here’s my couple of cents on the whole deal:

    The efforts of Trump & co., from the initial hearings, filed lawsuits, the widely advertised “Kraken”, even the audits, seem to be a deliberately botched token opposition. You can’t have top-notch attorneys working to “save America”, who somehow can’t draft a suit without spelling errors on the first page. Never mind the suits being dismissed outright, by judges appointed during the Trump administration, in otherwise longstanding red states. You can’t have audits finding a literal ton of duplicated and invalid ballots, and then failing to mention the name next to the ticked-off box. And then there’s Trump himself, who still regularly makes public appearances, singing the exact same song of “I won, it was rigged, we will keep fighting”, etc. etc., without any other effort in that regard.

    Meanwhile, the Biden administration appears to be as wobbly and incoherent as the meat puppet himself, ruling by decree yet being wildly inconsistent about which Trump-era policies it maintains or overturns. It’s clear that someone else is pulling the strings, literally telling ol’ Joe what to say and cutting him off when he goes off-script.

    All this leads me to believe that these theatrics are meant to be a distraction – or rather, a time-filler, an opening act for a larger event… and for a different audience.

    It might be a weird tangent, but I’m currently looking at a real estate market bubble in China, big enough to make the global financial crisis of yesteryear look like a minor stock drop. It would make sense to take Biden – whose Chinese overlor-, er, contacts, are well-known – and instate him as a puppet president, only tying the strings beforehand so he can’t do anything of consequence. And then stage a melodramatic “resistance”, with just enough traction to keep puttering on and keep people occupied until said bubble pops. After that, however, it’s anyone’s guess. I’m pretty sure China will end up as yet another failed Communist state, but as to the US, even I don’t dare to forecast.

    1. I can’t speak to the rest of your theory but your bubble should be here in a couple months. What’s the name of that group out of Hong Kong that’s about to go belly up?

      1. That would be Evergrande. It was hearing about that case that gave me some crucial pieces of the puzzle. I work in media, so spinning yarns is something I’m versed in. The whole “rigged election” spiel is what I call a taffy plot – one that can be stretched indefinitely, always remaining conveniently inconclusive and able to swing both ways as needed. It’s like Ross and Rachel’s improbably contrived romance, only somehow even dumber.

        Thus, the primary remaining question was what event the debacle was meant to fill-in for, or wait out – and an eventual severe weakening of China’s economy and global market power seems like a viable answer. It’s kinda like how the visible weakness of the Carter administration enabled the self-destructive Soviet arrival in Afghanistan, (a graveyard of empires if there ever was one) before Reagan slayed the dragon for good.

        By the way, not wanting to speak out of turn about the audit, I have to ask again – shouldn’t it have been clear which way the invalid ballots were cast? It’s kinda hard picturing it otherwise, unless the voting details were physically separated from the ballot identification markers.

        1. They were. Part of the whole “secret ballot” thing.

          Last time I voted by mail-in ballot was back in 2016, but there were two envelopes, one marked and one unmarked. I put my ballot in the unmarked envelope, put that in the marked one, along with the evidence that I was actually the person in question, sealed it up, and sent it off.

          Once it got to the voting office, they (presumably) opened the outer envelope, verified that I was who I said I was, then took the inner envelope and gave it to someone who would have no idea whose ballot it was.

          It’s necessary to preserve the whole “secret ballot” concept, but it does make it impossible to trace which ballots were questionable and which weren’t.

          (Also, my personal opinion RE: mail-in voting? You start counting the things as they come in. You don’t accept any postmarked after the deadline, which is the day before the election. And then, you do whatever it takes to make sure that they are all counted before the polls close on election day, and you announce the mail-in total fifteen minutes after the polls close.)

          1. What, they expect proof of identity in your mail-in ballot? Ours (Colorado) have no such requirement. They automatically mail ballots out to everyone who is registered to vote – at least that’s true for my county, unsure about other parts of Colorado. (The DMV really pushes mass voter registration, as if convincing greater numbers of random apathetic members of the public to vote will somehow magically lead to better elected leaders. But that’s a rant for another day.) So we fill out the ballot, tuck it inside the privacy envelope, put that in the outer envelope, sign the back, and drop it off in what looks suspiciously like an outgoing mailbox in the sheriff’s parking lot. At no point do they check ID aside from when first registering to vote. It would be super easy to vote on behalf of inattentive family members.

        2. I vote in person with a paper ballot, that gets counted by an electronic machine, and stored in a box.

          So, in advance, from an address, I have registered for a voter identification card. That gets sent to that address, and I keep that in my wallet. (I’ve just checked my wallet, and didn’t transfer it to the new wallet.)

          The voter ID card lists a voting location, which has been the same for me for years, and which I just know to go to. Whenever I get a fresh card, I see which place it sends me to vote at.

          I show up at the voting place, tell them my name, and sign in a book, right where my name is printed. As a matter of principle, I show them my driver’s license, which has my picture, and is a form of ID treated as definitive at many places. (Starting a job may require that I provide, in addition, a copy of my birth certificate. My last new position, let me email in records, but then after the lockdown panic eased (before the election), had me come in personally so that HR could make their own copy of my Driver’s License.)

          After I sign the book at that voting place, they give me a paper ballot. It does have a code in it, but to match it to me they would need a record of the order in which people came in, and signed the book. I’m not sure if there is a camera watching, that would be available later.

          I take the ballot to a little cubby, and fill it out. Again, I do not put any marks on it that would identify me.

          It turn it in to an electronic voting machine, which scans the ballot, and which shows a count of ballots that have been scanned in, and placed into the box.

          If they don’t physically count the ballots, then it could be gimmicked through the electronic voting machines. If they do physically count the ballots, the voting machines are still a problem. 1) They could use remote information to estimate the number of fraudulent ballots to be added. 2) As voting occurs, they can be preparing the fraudulent ballots. Then, when they take the ballots to a location to open the boxes and count them, they can bring in fraudulent ballots seperately, and mix them in. Or pull out votes they dislike, and replace them. If certain voting places have honest officials, they cannot tamper as easily with the signature rolls, and it is harder to safely add ballots instead of replacing them. But, if they do have places where they can tamper with the signature rolls, or have a place where they have added a bunch of phony registrations, they can change the number of ballots cast at a location, and add ballots. If the voting place does not mark the ‘voters’ who did not cast a ballot, despite registration, one could go back later and sign the number of ballots that you had decided to add.

    2. Yeah, there have been fingerprints pointing towards the PRC since 2016. Given the other things Trump was accused of, failure to accuse him of working for the PRC basically meant that some of the accusers were working for the PRC. And the PRC has had a number of signs of things that would motivate their regime in that direction.

      the suits being dismissed outright

      Yeah, there are two or three things going on here that won’t be obvious overseas.

      One, certain apparent facts involving the legal professions. Judges and Lawyers both have law degrees. Law degrees come from law schools, and whether the degrees count depends on the accreditation of the specific schools. That brings us to the Bar associations, which I understand are private professional organizations for lawyers. There are state bar associations, but a lot of law schools are accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA). There are around two hundred law schools accredited by the ABA.

      Around 150 of those schools had the heads of those schools sign a letter saying that lawyers filing cases on behalf of Trump were an embarrassment, and that they would use their influence to prevent their future graduates from being willing to file such cases. Also, a bunch of the lawyers working for Trump quit. The law school letter included some claims about fact, said claims were incorrect, and the law schools heads did not have the background to even understand certain of the facts.

      The thing that may not be obvious to you, is that in America, in other situations, lawyers promise that they will work for clients, regardless of whether they believe that they clients are correct. This pretense is in fact one of the requirements for accepting the way we have defense attorneys, and not holding defense attorneys personally responsible for future crimes committed by the criminals they get released. So, this letter undermined the profession of law, in that lawyers have less credibility in providing service. It has also contributed to an appearance that the courts have been rigged by the schools, or the ABA, or something. Rigged courts do a poorer job of resolving disputes, and hence make the services of lawyers less valuable. I have heard law faculty make this mistake, so I know they over look it; Americans have alternative means of resolving disputes that very much do not include lawyers or the formal legal system. But, law faculty would understand that refusing to represent blacks in civil rights claims would be worse for the reputation of lawyers than all of Ben Crump’s fraudulent suits. So, their failure to remove these heads of schools, the failure of the schools to disavow the letter, makes the law faculty look crooked.

      Furthermore, the ability of a lawyer to make money in the future from practicing law in the future heavily depends on their ability to convince other judges, and other lawyers, to listen to them. A lawyer is also someone who has a bunch of time invested in skills that only gain income through the practice of law. So, they generally have a deeply ingrained habit of only speaking in public very, very, carefully.

      Furthermore, law practice is very specialized, and the highest skill levels do not transfer from filing one type of case to filing other types of case. This is one place where it really matters that for decades the Republicans had been under a consent decree that preventing them from filing law suits alleging electoral fraud. So, you had lawyers not experienced in filing lawsuits, and you had lawyers experienced in filing them on behalf of lawyers. Additionally, the established case law has not much been updated to match recent developments in other areas of law. So, taking on such a case inherently is a huge professional risk, in a high profile case, even before you consider the possibility of a corrupt black listing by the industry. Back in 2016, it was starting to become clear that some of the lawyer/Republican activists were lawyers first, and not willing to risk the earning hit of alienating other lawyers.

      So, Trump tried courts, and one explanation for the failures of his law suits is the courts being far more rigged then would have previously seemed possible.

      That leads to a second issue. It has become more clear to Republican voters in America that ‘this official is formally a Republican’ is not the same as ‘this person is trying to implement the formal Republican policies’. There is the national Republication party, fifty state parties, a few territory parties, and a very large number of county Republican parties. These run on a mixture of volunteers, positions paid from fund raising, and elected officials who draw a public salary. Successful officials bring in fund raising that supports their personal faction, and volunteers that support their faction. So, Presidents, Governors, federal Senators, federal Congressmen, and state senators and state congressmen have a lot more influence on the factional politics of the Republican parties than a lot of other people. And that is listed from great to small. But, there is one president at a time, and sometimes he is not in your party. Senators have a lot more continuing influence. Governors are hugely influential on a state power when in office, but Senators and Congressmen stay in office longer, and can grow deeper roots. We voters were privately warned about it back in the day, but it has become clear that Bush, McCain, and Romney were part of the same Republican faction, a faction that is basically okay with the insane would be mass murdering lunacy of the modern Democrats. If McCain or Romney had won, they would have further packed the GOP with Bush faction friendly partisans. And, losing did not cost them anything, because they still had the backing of the Bush faction in the overall GOP, McCain was a Senator, and Romney became a Senator with the backing of the Bush faction. Trump winning cost the Bush faction influence. And the folks paid from fundraising, who had lost many elections before for Republicans, would not have the same connections to a new faction.

      So, the inside baseball showed clearly that there was a faction who was against Trump simply because Trump would not necessarily have preserved the established faction.

      Furthermore, a bunch of people who had been making a living telling the public they were Republican intellectuals, have shown that they either were Democrat information operatives originally, or were tied deeply to the factional politics and desperate not to see a new Trump faction develop.

      Again, we had been been warned. Including by people who had been around for Bush (41) undermining Dan Quayle, who had been the last hold out of the Reagan faction. After Quayle, Bush had completely consolidated power in the GOP for his own faction. There was a similar pattern to McCain and Romney with Bob Dole in 1996. The Bush faction actually wanted Bush 43 to win in 2000. In 2000, the Democrats were already in the mindset of feeling entitled to all the Presidential elections, and started showing their hissy fits on losing.

      Bush faction felt it was their turn again in 2016, and that is probably why they ran Jeb. After Jeb lost the primary, they /wanted/ to lose the general.

      So, TRump’s possible actions: Law suits. Asking the officials directly, which he did. Asking the public, which he did, even with interdiction of his twitter, etc. Use of the executive power as President to suppress an insurrection using military force. Which brings us to that fellow Milley. Who has outright admitted to interfering with Trump’s access to military communications.

      And the Democrat regime is constantly trying to frame Trump with this stuff.

      It may be reasonable for him to now conclude that what he is saying is as far as he can safely go in public statements. Also, Biden, Harris, Pelosi, and HRC, are seriously disturbed, and every Trump voter has paid close enough attention to know this. He is sales oriented, and knows that he cannot convince us to shut up, close our eyes, and trust Biden. So, telling us to do so will only cost him political power, and possibly whatever influence is keeping him alive.

      At this point, Trump cannot do anything for us that will actually fix the situation. It is all on Americans. Whether the solution is electoral, non-compliance, or violence, Trump can only stay out of the way.

      And a lot of the Republicans in red states will happily cooperate with Democrats in private, so long as they do not lose their advantageous position with state voters. Those 150 law schools that need to have their heads fired? Some of them are in red states, and have university presidents appointed by boards of regents appointed by Republican governors. The Regents and the Governors are derelict, at a minimum. Some of those university presidents are definitely a whole lot worse than that.

      Definitely, US outcomes are unforeseeable. Most likely, the PRC regime will fail. But the Democrats clearly thought that the lockdown extermism, and the BLM terrorism, where game winning board flipping moves. And they have changed the game, but have not won the game, nor prevented others from playing.

      The feuding over the elections is not a distraction move. Americans don’t know who the sides are if a civil war starts. Mostly, of the locally accessible targets, they do not know who it is that should be killed on general principles.

      I gather that in your neck of the woods, you may know who the Muslim villages are that are trafficking kidnapped persons to elsewhere. Or at least, whoever the other side actually is in whatever longer simmering grudges have developed. This is not true in America.

      If a fight occurs, a long discussion before hand, or posturing in the early stages, tells us who is on what side. Sure, there are definitely feuds that have been quietly developing long enough for those that are engaged to know who the other side is. We are really, really, bad at telling other Americans about this stuff.

      1. Many thanks for the detailed info, I appreciate the effort you’ve taken to respond thoroughly. Even to myself my theory seemed a bit too cinematic, so poking holes and filling in unforeseen blanks is more than welcome.

        Just for comparison, the “other side” around here isn’t all that well defined. We’ve got the usual anti-Soros brigade, some russophobes/russophiles bickering ever since before the 90s, the general view that all politicians are bastards, all while the perennial default criminal groups are mostly gypsies… who self-identify as Muslims, but mostly for convenience and double minority status. And they generally vote for the highest bidder. Which, in turn, is the preferred method for election rigging, what with voter ID and party-representative count challengers being mandatory in all polling stations.

        Really, anything even close to the covered-up windows and blocked observers last November would send a rather politically diverse crowd literally setting the parliament building on fire and deposing the whole government… again. Not that it changes all that much, but still – in lieu of a tree of liberty, our own little shrubbery of essential freedoms is still apparently a cause for spilling the occasional drop of blood. Then again, so is the average soccer game – typically by the same crowd – so make of that what you will.

      2. During the Trump administration it was shocking to see Lawyer type groups promote and even demand the punishment of lawyers who worked for Trump. How anyone in the legal professions could see those reports and not be utterly horrified, I can’t imagine and yet they did.

        And it wasn’t just Trump. There were law professors fired for defending clients who were “bad”. Their students demanded it.

        So we’re looking at a future where legal representation, or the ability to GET legal representation, will become dependent on finding a lawyer who is willing to risk their entire career on defending someone who the mob finds abhorrent, or who the mob may decide is abhorrent in the future.

        Contrary to that, no one thought that the rapist that Hillary Clinton defended shouldn’t have a lawyer (or even that it shouldn’t have been Hillary) but the complaints were that she “won” the case by claiming that a 12 year old *asked* to be violently raped into sterility because she liked the attention of older men, and then laughed about the case afterward.

      3. There is one side in the next Civil War that are so obvious they are as if they are on fire.

        The MEDIA.

        They are the pre-eminent ENEMY of the PEOPLE.

    3. I think your theory is a stark-raving mad conspiracy theory of the highest order.

      Which, of course, in this day and age means we’ll have definitive proof that it’s true in about 5 months’ time I make this comment ….

  17. I find the complete lack of computer security and fraud to be the most disturbing part of this report, no updates since the voting system was installed and usernames with all the same password. While I will admit is lazy and something I could see happening the ritual destruction of the security logs in the computers is not only disgusting but supremely telling about how “secure” the voting system is. This just makes my disbelief in the idea of fair elections ever occurring anywhere or at any time ever again. I was already distrustful of the government and politics in general now I have specifics to quote to show just how bankrupt the system truly is and this isn’t even a big county in a big state, as Larry says this was the boring stuff state.

      1. Actually, log rotation (renaming / compressing / archiving the current log files every so often and continuing to log system events to fresh files) is a fairly standard feature in Linux servers – I don’t know about Windows offhand. I think there’s a way to set limits of keeping so-many days or so-much drive space used, but I haven’t looked into that lately so I can’t say if auto-deleting is standard or not. However… For machines as important as election servers, log rotation probably ought to be ON while deleting any previously archived log files should be OFF. And possibly digitally signed just in case. If drive space becomes a problem (that’d be a seriously chatty machine!), just mirror the data stream to a separate logging server. Better yet, go ahead and do that anyway in case a hard drive conveniently fails right after a contentious election.

        Deleting logs and DB before handing off to an auditor is a real eyebrow raiser. It’s either sloppy or criminal, the kind of thing that would get someone fired if done in response to (for example) a harassment investigation.

        That’s assuming the audit report and my understanding thereof are correct. So far I’ve just skimmed the executive summary though.

        1. I used to work for a company that did business with the federal government and a number of banks. Our log requirements (mandated by the federal government) were as follows:

          Logs had to be retained on the server for 180 days.

          Logs were mirrored to two separate servers (one managed by the systems team, one managed by the security team) and stored on those servers for 180 days.

          Daily backups were made of all servers to tape in the event of a server failure.

          Weekly full backups to tape were made of all servers, including the log files. All full backups were maintained for a year and stored at an offsite location. After a year, one full backup per month was retained for an additional 10 years.

          In addition, each month all log files had to be written to non-rewritable media (DVD was what we used) and retained for 10.5 years offsite.

          All offsite materials were inventoried every 6 months by a group of 3 people each from different teams (1 systems, 1 security, 1 other)

          We had 2 government audits, 1 client audit, 1 private internal audit, and 1 3rd party audit every year, and as part of those audits we had to show examples of meeting all the above criteria along with the full inventory list of the tapes and the DVDs. They would also inspect logs (suitably redacted for confidential information) from the security log server and the systems log server to verify that they matched exactly.

          So with the voting machines, I wouldn’t expect every log file to necessarily be on the machine itself, but they should be able to pull every log made by each machine from some place. Tape backup if nothing else. I’ve never worked for a company that didn’t keep at least 7 years of backups stored somewhere, even if that somewhere was a closet in the IT part of the office.

          Lack of logs is a HUGE deal, and would fail any serious IT audit.

  18. Mr Sanford I concede your point on the difference between upper and lower case wording. My core idea was just to use the scientific wording version to fuck with the lefties. And like I stated these days supposed
    fiction is soon proved to be fact way too often.

  19. The critical finding in their report was in section 5.3 and declared that 23,334 voters submitted ballots from prior addresses and their cutoff date for address validation was October 5, 2020. They make this sound like a big deal that people broke the law getting these ballots to former residents and that they intentionally disrupted the County Recorder inactivation process. They neglected to investigate these numbers further outside of a small note that said, “there are potential ways a voter could receive their ballot which in some cases would not violate the law.” For context, here are a couple of simple reasons this could happen:

    1. Students – Students go to college every September, right before Cyber Ninjas October 5 deadline, but frequently maintain “dual residency” rights to vote either in their school location or their home location. There is nothing wrong with a student at UNLV having an absentee ballot mailed to their home address in Maricopa County and their parents holding it for them till their next visit.

    2. Family – Frequently when younger people are moving out of the house for the first time they are cautious about transferring sensitive material to their new address until they are confident they are staying there permanently. 15,000 of the questioned votes are from folks that just moved to another address in Maricopa County which suggests this scenaro. I am not going to declare an invalid election because Jimmy moved 2 miles away to an apartment but still gets his mail at home.

    The single most “critical” issue found by these folks has easy to explain reasons and is also accompanied by 0 named individuals who voted illegally as a result. One thing I have noticed in the audits I have seen from right-leaning groups is that they are very forthcoming with numbers and lists of “concerning votes” but are very short on actual names. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, made the same comment to Gulliani regarding his fraud claims according to Bob Woodward, “Give me some names, You need to put it in writing. You need to show me the evidence.”

    1. Where do they get the names from then? Are you saying “left-leaning” auditing groups have access to information such as who made a specific vote? Really?

      But where you are wrong, profoundly so, is suggesting that finding reasonable explanations is BAD, or that anyone thinks finding reasonable explanations is bad. Reasonable explanations are GOOD. We’d all like to know why weird things happened.

      Instead, what we’ve been fed, is condemnation for pointing at the weird things. How dare you! Well, they’re weird things. Are not! Are so, you know? They are definitely weird things. Odd patterns that were “off” one way or another. Alarming jumps in vote counts at odd times.

      So give people the reasonable reasons. Right? How bad is wanting that?

      Apparently it’s treasonous!

    2. Are you barfing up a rebuttal narrative without reading the actual report?
      Because your point 1 and 2 are in there. It is 15k within county. 6.5k who moved out of AZ. And 1.7 out of Maricopa but in AZ.
      The AZ senate isn’t going to dump the spreadsheet with names and addresses of random citizens with questionable votes onto the internet, but I’m pretty sure the governing body that commissioned the audit gets the details. So that’s an obfuscating non issue.
      And I already explained that audits only go back to a certain point, and then it becomes a law enforcement issue if the body that commissioned the audit wants it to be.
      And even more, I explained in the post about how they aren’t allowed to signature verify, so that don’t matter.

      So basically, they found a real legit issue, which is beyond their power to pursue further, and all you have to do is wave your hand, think of one excuse and poof. It vanishes. That’s magic. 😀

      1. “Are you barfing up a rebuttal narrative without reading the actual report?
        Because your point 1 and 2 are in there. It is 15k within the county. 6.5k who moved out of AZ. And 1.7 out of Maricopa but in AZ.”

        I did read the report and if you look back at my post I quoted the 15K number who moved in the county as support for point #2. I also directly quoted the report in this manner “there are potential ways a voter could receive their ballot which in some cases would not violate the law.” Nothing in my post points to the fact I didn’t read the data.

        “The AZ senate isn’t going to dump the spreadsheet with names and addresses of random citizens with questionable votes onto the internet, but I’m pretty sure the governing body that commissioned the audit gets the details. So that’s an obfuscating non issue.”

        The senate supplied Code Ninjas with a file called “VM5 Final Voted File” which is described by Cyber Ninjas as “A list of all the people who cast a ballot in the election”. Cyber Ninjas had the explicit set of names and as opposed to stopping their analysis with 23K people voted from addresses they moved from more than 1 month they could have taken the Personator data and done more. I signed up for that service and got 1000 free lookup credits so I found they had easy access to age in the report returned. Why not include in their analysis that X number of these folks are age 18-23 and likely fall into college status? They also had the length of time at residence, why not run a report around if a person resided at their previous address since they were a minor and deduce that they were likely venturing out for the first time and still getting mail at home. I agree that Cyber Ninjas doesn’t have prosecuting authority but leaving their analysis at such a superficial level and not saying “Of these 23K we found 2.3K to be especially troubling because they don’t fit into profiles of college students, military, or recent moves out of family home” and supplying the AZ Senate with those named individuals, redacted to the public, so that a more likely prosecution could occur is not indicative of getting to the root of a problem.

        “So basically, they found a real legit issue, which is beyond their power to pursue further, and all you have to do is wave your hand, think of one excuse and poof. It vanishes. That’s magic.”

        I stated they found a real legit issue, had the power to narrow down that issue to likely offenders and left the number as large as possible for shock value, and I have dismissed it as being overly inclusive of valid reasons so not worth getting upset over. I would also point out that the Republican Attorney General of AZ has had access to this type of analysis since the election because it isn’t exactly hard to do and has not prosecuted anyone regarding this issue despite the fact he would get significant political points locally and nationally from the GOP for doing so. This indicates to me that he has waved his hand to this concern as well.

        1. What obfuscating horse shit. 😀
          They found an issue, and in typical leftist fashion you pulled the first possible excuse you could think of out of your ass, and POOF, the matter disappears. Off to the internet to tell everybody who gets out of line to shut up. You could be a facebook fact checker!
          Your last paragraph is fucking nonsense that does not at all match with political reality.

          1. LC – “Your last paragraph is fucking nonsense that does not at all match with political reality.”

            The Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) stated on 9/28:

            “The Arizona Senate’s report that was released on Friday raises some serious questions regarding the 2020 election,” Brnovich said without detailing any of those questions. “Arizonans can be assured our office will conduct a thorough review of the information we receive.”

            He is running in a primary to win the right to take on Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) next year. If you don’t think he would win significant political points for his Senate Campaign by successfully prosecuting voter fraud from this “Critical” list of 23K votes then we are arguing in 2 different realities.

          2. Yeah, your reality doesn’t seem capable of grasping the power of the US news media going all in on portraying anyone who talks about election fraud as a dangerous maniac. (also apparently AZ media if the google searches that led to this post are any indication)
            Also, AZ establishment GOP was McCain land, home of the go along to get along, where the safe course is to suck up to the media, while being a “maverick” for standing up to your own party. (note however, this doesn’t apply to Sinema, who is not the DNC’s antichrist who is going to destroy the whole world)
            There is great cost in pushing further. Less cost in vapid platitudes. Which is typical GOP playbook.
            Ergo, your post remains fucking nonsense that does not match political reality.

    3. You aren’t going to get actual names because a SIGNATURE MATCH WAS FORBIDDEN!!!!

      Take you pedantic, yeah butttss and go to hell.

    4. Jesse H, “Frequently when younger people are moving out of the house for the first time they are cautious about transferring sensitive material to their new address. . . . I am not going to declare an invalid election because Jimmy moved 2 miles away to an apartment but still gets his mail at home.”

      maybe you should READ THE ACTUAL REPORT because they accounted for that. They specifically state that there were 23,344 votes where the resident had moved out of that address AND NO ONE WITH THE SAME LAST NAME STILL RESIDED THERE!

      So your little FANTASY explanation of jimmy moving out but getting his mail at his parents house DOES NOT APPLY to ANY of these votes. Try again shill.

  20. Because the only newsworthy event was the fact that the recount confirmed every other recount. That part was funny. The rest didn’t matter because you hired partisan idiots to conduct the audit. If you wanted real results you would have pushed for real experts to audit the count. But real experts wouldn’t have produced the dumb bullshit you needed to keep going. This is all about you being a weakling who can’t accept reality. You need these partisan amateurs to tell you that reality isn’t real so you can pretend you are a winner. But you aren’t. You are all pathetic losers who can’t handle the real world. This audit proved nothing and pretending you’ve got an angle into winning the 2016 election is very sad. You don’t doubt the election because you are skeptics. You doubt it because you are easier to fool than the average person. Wallow in what below average suckers you are.

    1. Geez, the troll farms are turning out more and more substandard products these days. Quality control has completely gone to shit. It’s not even a little bit entertaining.

      Whacking this one like a piñata is emphatically NOT recommended; nobody wants what would fall out.
      ———————————
      It takes a LOT of education to make an idiot that stupid — and even then, you’d have to work at it.

      1. It’s like they’re grown in cloning vats and have their talking points downloaded into their tiny overheated heads and set loose upon the ‘Net.

        1. They’re like toadstools: grown in damp basements, kept in the dark and covered with bullshit. Then they are unleashed upon the Internet, where they contribute no meaning, only worthless noise. Even by that low standard, we’re getting a decidedly inferior breed of trolls here. They’re just…boring.

          Like I said, quality con-troll has gone straight to shit. 😛

    2. So…do you have an explanation for why none of the seemingly-shady stuff is shady? Or is repetitive ad hominem mind-reading all you have?

      (And I say this as someone who’s reasonably certain that Biden did not win the presidential election by fraud.)

      1. It’s not shady because (waves hands) democrat magic!
        Think of any possible excuse!
        POOF!
        The problem vanishes!
        Yay!

        These are the same NPCs who had perfectly rational explanations for why it is normal to destroy your computer hard drive or cell phone with a hammer too. 😀

      2. 60guilders,

        If this isn’t fraud and naked will to power, do you have an explanation for the apparent weirdness on the legal side?

        Have you even read the letter?

        https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/law_deans_joint_statement_1.12.21_final.pdf

        (I’m not 100% sure this is the same version that I have read. I recall downloading two copies from places other than Yale, but this was the link that showed up on my search.)

        1. I’ve checked the file size and first page against the previously downloaded file of the same name. There are two key points.

          One, exactly what gives these people reason to believe that they understand what the facts are? I’ve asked a sympathetic lawyer, and was told that the word ‘facts’ does not have a special meaning for lawyers. A legal educator is not someone who you would expect to have a background in electronics hardware, either design, or fabrication, or in thinking about using instruments to find out the structure.

          Two, with this level of test for conformance to facts, we can very rapidly establish that many defense attorneys are likewise as much a disgrace to the profession. IOW, this is clearly a case of a double standard.

          Check into the current status of whichever signatory you prefer. Just checking the half dozen or so that came to my attention, I found one who was not still in place, an interim head who has been replaced by a permanent head.

          Third element, that which I will mention again as it enrages me, is the use of democracy, etc., where republic would be more appropriate. Fundamentally, the seat of democracy is a mob. If a large enough mob lynched the whole of congress, it would be a democratic act.

        2. Oh, I have little doubt that most of the people who were determined to sweep any notion of electoral fraud under the rug were not doing so out of principle.

          I just don’t think that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were within the margin of plausible fraud.

          1. Point.

            Yeah, that guess is in the realm of defensible inference.

            I suppose the lunatics are crazy enough to pull this stuff, even if they had ambiguous information.

            For background, after 2016 did you conclude that the public polling was a massive disinformation operation, or did you conclude honest mistake in methodology?

          2. “I just don’t think that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were within the margin of plausible fraud.”

            As a PA resident, I don’t trust the numbers from here at all. Philadelphia opened up a bunch of _vote acceptance stations_ around the city. They wouldn’t let Republican poll watchers to even enter the offices where they were set up, because “no voting was happening there”. They even got court approval for the position.

            There is no reason to believe the numbers reported from PA are actually related to reality.

    3. Hehehe.
      I’ve been accused of many things in my life, but “below average” has seldom been among them.
      Fuck off, dummy. 😀

      Audit finding are audit findings. The news decides what they think is news worthy. Which is why I wrote this post about how they only reported on the part of the findings they liked, and ignored the rest (even though it was conducted by the same people).

      And WTF are you going off about “an angle into winning 2016”? Reset your script, dipshit.

    4. That is incoherent.

      If Democrats wanted “trustworthy” audits, they shouldn’t have tried to block the audits. They could have participated, you know, and gotten the “true” results that you imagine they’d have gotten, right before you declared that they, too, were partisan hacks.

      Which is what we saw after 2016 and three years of extremely expensive investigation only to find out that there was no evidence that Trump was guilty of anything involving the 2016 election. The heroic investigator that Democrats trusted so much was suddenly a partisan hack because he didn’t come to the right conclusions.

      Projection is not a good look.

  21. As a programmer that lives in Maricopa county, the thing that has my alarms blaring involve the following lines:

    “Logs appeared to be intentionally rolled over, and all the data in the database related to the 2020 General
    Election had been fully cleared.”

    “Maricopa County failed to follow basic cyber security best practices and guidelines from CISA”

    “Software and patch protocols were not followed”

    “Credential management was flawed: unique usernames and passwords were not allocated”

    “Lack of baseline for host and network activity for approved programs, communications protocols and
    communications devices for voting systems.”

    Pardon my french, but some of the companies I’ve worked for would likely fire you for pulling that kind of shit in TEST environments, let alone in the customer facing end product (read ACTUAL FUCKING VOTING MACHINES/ROUTERS). Hell, they’d probably get bitchy if you let it go on in sandbox dev servers – we had to get special test environments set up just to be able to test the antivirus & security apps for our webservices because they tend to get a little paranoid. And rightly so since leaving yourself open to the internet at its most benign is kind of like sticking your arm into a bag of random needles which may or may not have been used.

    And clearing the logs?! Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t think I’ve been on any project that didn’t have at least 6 months worth of logs at hand and likely keeping a considerably longer timeframe constantly rolling over onto various backups and stored for years on end. Losing information that should be in logs can trigger war rooms and emergency deployments. I can’t even imagine the kind of hell that would be raised over intentionally wiping logs!

    So in short, forget the physical ballots, by my estimation the servers and voting machines are completely untrustworthy regardless of whether or not the issues raised were intentional malfeasance or ludicrously incompetent bumblefuckery.

    1. I come at the problem from the understanding that IT security requires secure practices and secure software on secure hardware, in a location with physical security.

      Trump put in a bunch of federal funding requirements restricting the use of PRC suppliers. Before those, and the covid supply issues, HW folks wanting to prototype on the cheap discussed fabricators in Shenzhen, etc. So, interested parties with fabs, who might not fully disclose everything they made. And, here in the US, interested parties with potential physical access.

      Every complaint about improper restrictions on poll watchers, every complaint about chain of custody on ballots, and every complaint on record retention raises questions about physical security.

      So, without even thinking about the software, to consider this election fair I would have to have it shown that the fraction of votes passing through electronic systems was low for all states of interest. Necessary, going back a couple of decades, but not sufficient. Because registration, proof of identity, and mail in.

  22. yeah exactly. oh, lets see, the audit was done by cyber ninjas, a company owned by a prominent Trump supporter, and having zero election audit experience. and, while confirming the results of the election, they nonetheless went on to insinuate various problems which are easliy otherwise explained (see wikipedia, for f’s sake). hmmm … that DOES sound like all the insuations are the real story. LOL.

    1. “see Wikipedia”

      ….see the site that anyone can edit for any reason? THAT is the source you’re touting?

      ….heck, why not mention Snopes as well, because one random person in Canada is totally the source of all truth? ????????

    2. Oh let’s see. Internet rando expects companies to have experience in a thing that nobody has much experience in, expects the owners of said company to be an apolitical gerbil, even though no leftist CEO would ever touch this job, then said internet rando doesn’t understand what the audit report actually says, and to prove his point cites motherfucking Wikipedia. 😀
      Yeah. You better put LOL at the end. Otherwise we might think you were stupid enough to think that was a serious rebuttal!

  23. The audit doesn’t (can’t) address the question of how many mail-in ballots were signed by the people they were sent to, then given away or sold to someone else who filled them out and sent them in. There was nothing in Arizona to guard against that–I know, I live and voted there.

    I strongly suspect a lot of that happened on both sides. In the face of Trump Disappointment Syndrome among his supporters, and constant demonization by the media, I don’t see any other way Trump could have gotten 11 million more votes than he did in 2016.

    1. “I don’t see any other way Trump could have gotten 11 million more votes than he did in 2016.”
      Then you have little to no understanding of the American electorate.
      I didn’t vote for him in 2016. I thought he got pushed to be the nominee by the news media because they thought he was the most beatable for Hillary, and in the unlikely event he won, he’d govern like a New York Democrat.
      A couple years later I had been pleasantly surprised by him not sucking, and I voted for him in 2020.
      From talking about this a lot, I was far from alone in this.

  24. I see the trolls and sock-puppets are out in force on this one. Hi JJ!

    I should mention that the proximate source for this latest infestation came out in favor of Australian cops shooting unarmed protesters, on the theory that all those literal card-carrying trade unionists were in fact Right Wing Agitators and White-supremacist malcontents.

    No link, we all know his handle.

      1. Yes, the camel flop. Hilarious watching him call Tradies a bunch of right wing white supremacists because they objected to being made guinea pigs against their wills, when you know he’s voted solid Labour his entire life.

  25. “I don’t see any other way Trump could have gotten 11 million more votes than he did in 2016.”

    Peace accords in the Middle East, the best economy in history, right-to-try, VA reform, massive deregulation, massive tax cuts, building the wall, Space Force, moving the Israel embassy to Jerusalem, no new wars, moving America from being dependent on OPEC to being an oil exporter, NAFTA, are just some policy reason why those suspicious of Trump in 2016 might have become supporters in 2020.

    For non-policy reasons, a number of people sick and tired of the lies of the MSM might have enjoyed watching him call them Fake News.

    Also, Blacks and Hispanics might have realized in ever greater numbers that the Dems were merely keeping them on the “vote harvest plantation” and decided they had nothing to lose to try a GOP candidate for once.

    You seem to forget: nobody hated Donald Trump before he announced a presidential run.

    Also, considering that he was running against the least able and least likeable politician in living memory, an uptick in Trumps votes surely was inevitable.

    1. Yeah. 2016 there were some people who voted for Trump, but there were more people who held their nose and voted against Hillary Clinton. And it was close.

      By 2020 regular polls showed Blacks and Hispanics with vastly increased numbers saying they’d vote for Trump. It still may not have been a lot but going from single digits to double digit percentages of a demographic isn’t small.

      And Trump voters had extremely high enthusiasm in 2020 which usually results in large turn-out. Going from barely beating Hillary with (mostly) skeptical voters to high enthusiasm makes the gain in votes unsurprising.

      What’s harder to know is how Biden managed to get more votes than Obama. Maybe hate and anger is really a better motivator than the joyous flamboyance we saw all over the country with car parades, parties, and huge Trump rallies?

      1. I noticed that, too.

        Trump rally: Thousands of people, brightly colored, cheering, exuberant, turning out to celebrate freedom and support ideas they believe in.

        Biden rally: Small cluster of crabby, bitter partisans in dark clothing and masks, glaring suspiciously at their enemies. Everybody not part of their group is an enemy.
        ———————————
        Most days, I suspect that we could get a better government by picking 535 people at random. On bad days, I’m certain we’d get a better government by picking 535 people at random from lunatic asylums.

    2. And how many people right here, including our host, didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but did in 2020?

      How could he NOT have gotten a whole lot more votes than the first time?

      1. I voted for Johnson in 2016, and Trump in 2020. I don’t know a single person who voted Trump in 2016 and then didn’t vote for him in 2020.

    3. “You seem to forget: nobody hated Donald Trump before he announced a presidential run.”

      HAHAHAHAHAHA

      you seem to forget he was widely reviled for decades before he announced a presidential run

      1. “widely reviled” is not the same as reviled by Marxists.

        Reviled by Marxists is a good character reference.

        1. He wasn’t widely reviled. Of course, he was getting sucked up to by Democrat politicians and given awards because they wanted money from him. He also had a vastly popular television show that I never watched. He was chummy with the Clintons and others. Some of the people he pissed off certainly deserved it, such as the Country Club set in Florida that had kittens because he let Jews and Blacks into his Country Club.

          Not everyone liked him, of course not. But becoming evil was 100% about running as a Republican. Because that’s what happens. And then when you lose, like you’re supposed to do, then Democrats like you again, like Hitler McCain and Hitler Romney. Trump was supposed to lose too, so he could stop being evil incarnate, but he didn’t.

          1. Some people clearly didn’t follow this stuff very closely leading up to 2016.
            Trump wasn’t reviled. The left mostly saw him as amusing.
            The news media wanted Trump to win the primary because they thought he would be the easiest to beat.
            If you recall, Trump got absurd amounts of free coverage from the media.
            I recall right after Cruz won Iowa, being in a steak house, with CNN, MSNBC, and FOX playing on the TVs behind the bar, and even with the sound off, for an hour an a half, all three networks were nothing but Trump… Keeping in mind this is immediately after a Cruz victory. Trump got billions of free advertising.
            During this I went on a book tour, and I did a bunch of radio interviews… All of the radio interviews wanted to know my opinion about Trump. Why? WTF does he have to do with this? Didn’t matter. The media fix was in. He was picked as the one to beat and everything pushed the primaries that direction.
            Then once he was the nominee, then the media declared him to be super evil and the worst thing ever, so on and so forth.
            Shockingly enough, Hillary was such shit, he actually won, and then the media went super nuts.

          2. Sort of?
            Pre-2016, Trump’s rep in the media was a bit of a mixed bag. He was a bit abrasive, a bit of a jerk, and an egotistical blowhard (that was half the reason why “The Apprentice” was so popular), but he was also seen as a solid, savvy businessman and someone who could get things done (the other half of the reason why “The Apprentice” was popular), and the aforementioned negative traits were usually played for laughs when they came up.

            From 2016 forward, the news media ignored the positive traits, treated the negatives dead seriously, and exaggerated the latter.

          3. He’d been sucking up to the Clintons to the point of carrying water for HRC’s attacks on Obama in 2008.

            Then, the payback for that was Obama using a venue to cast shade on Trump, with Trump getting zero support from the Clintons.

            So, he decided favor from the Clintons was no longer worth seeking.

            He may or may not have known that running would have let him cast shade at the Clintons, but he definitely knew he would be able to cast some shade on Obama.

            Trump found a surprising amount of customers for what he had to offer, and it screwed up what we now in hindsight understand to have been the plans of HRC, Obama, Pelosi, et al. Also of the GOP establishment.

            The effers thought that doubling down in 2020 and 2021 had salvaged their plans, and they are deeply profoundly wrong.

            Evil oft doth evil mar.

        2. Before running, he was visible but not in the right way to be widely reviled by any group.

          He was basically an entertainment celebrity, and those folks have to be outed as pretty seriously bad before enough people have information, and care enough, to widely revile them.

          The people who follow celebrity news have information about a lot of celebrity news, but it is mostly churn and gossip. You would have to be pretty seriously interested to find more reliable information about a specific celebrity, and people are mostly doing that for ones they like, and that shapes their analysis. People often study celebrities because they want a feeling of intimacy, with a famous person, because of the fame. They aren’t asking themselves ‘is this person someone it would be good to have anything to do with’. Okay, there’s also watching a train wreck, and gathering material for arguing that Hollywood is the evulz.

          So, yeah, the TV show with “You’re fired”, professional wrestling, and the other results of a wealthy salesman who has carefully been raising his profile for decades. Okay, every celebrity who uses an extreme personality as a gimmick has haters who dislike the personality type.

          It was pretty clear, early on, that the Democrats figured that he would be easy to beat, and easy to sell to the Republican voters, so the ones in media gave him a lot of unearned media. A bunch of Republican establishment professional political activists were very angry about that. Even more so, with his marketing expertise, when he turned himself into enough of a story that the media, due to ratings and financial issues, basically found themselves compelled to continue covering him. The establishment activists were all ‘look at how little he was spending, he is not serious’. And I believed them, those scammers. I spent between Cruz dropping out, and Trump winning, deeply depressed because I feared the results of HRC.

          He was widely reviled after, because he kept his eye on his actual customers, and everyone else who wanted to shake him down wasn’t getting much. Okay, the Democrats probably could have gotten something from him if they wanted to deal, but did not. Because they had their hearts on what they pulled in twenty twenty. In the dreams of the Democrat leadership, they could eat the goose laying the golden eggs, and still have an income of golden eggs. The feminist cultists and establishment cultists in the general population listened when the feminists and GOP establishment said to hate Trump.

      2. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

        We have always been at war with Eastasia.

        I find it remarkable and frightening that apparently rational beings can, without hesitation, so completely edit and rewrite their own memories when so commanded, that they are utterly unaware of their own degradation.

        I almost pity the hour when your eyes will open, and you realized how much you sacrificed, and for so petty a slave-master, when you soul your integrity for the momentary bubble of self-flattery, which your mental jailors signaled you to reward to yourself.

        You are drunk on the gas of gaslighting.

      3. Dear Mountain Bob,

        Is it just me, or did you not address the point of the comment to which you penned your curt but cackling mad reply?

        Peace accords in the Middle East, the best economy in history, right-to-try, VA reform, massive deregulation, massive tax cuts, building the wall, Space Force, moving the Israel embassy to Jerusalem, no new wars, moving America from being dependent on OPEC to being an oil exporter, NAFTA.

        Did these things also simply never happen in the private parallel timeline you maintain in your small yet crooked skull, the world where Trump was widely reviled for decades, but no one save you remembers this?

        Are you from a nearby cosmos, or one further off?

        Did the South win the Civil War in your timeline? The Japanese conquer California? Money grow on trees? Patriarchs in America oppress feminists with systematic racism, but not in the Middle East? Just asking.

        1. Objectively, empirically, and comically wrong.

          Trolls ’round these parts usually put forth a tad more effort.

          At least try.

          1. I remember this asshole now. It’s the same wanker that got banned from AccordingToHoyt about a month ago. I guess Sarah has a lower tolerance than Larry for annoying, boring, predictable trolls.

  26. Maricopa county has a population of about 4.5 million. So over half the population of the state live in Maricopa Co. Think, Salt Lake County, but bigger. Politically speaking, Maricopa County IS the state of Arizona. It’s also larger in land area than at least seven states.

    It’s mostly Red, with some Blue areas in the crappier parts of Phoenix.

    The Machines are basically giant Scantron machines. I don’t believe anyone reasonably thought there were issues with the equipment. You feed your own ballot into the machine, and if it’s “bad” it gets kicked out. In this case bad would be if you voted for 2 people instead of one.

    The concerns are (properly) with the mail in ballots, chain of custody thereof, and handling of. We have hundreds of folks who will sign affidavits stating that Maricopa County sent them an e-mail saying that MC got their ballot, but they moved out of state and never actually voted in AZ.

    The issue is not the equipment, it’s the ballots.

    1. It’s in the equipment, too. If they weren’t doing fraud in the voting and counting machines, they wouldn’t have raised such a fuss over them, and then deleted the data.

      You have to ask the question, “If they had nothing to hide, why are they so desperate to hide it?” Why are they STILL violating state election laws, federal election laws, and orders from the state legislature which has Constitutional authority over elections? Why do they refuse to answer the simplest questions? How does what they’re doing make any sense if they didn’t cheat on the election?

  27. I suppose having you ominously hinting at sinister implications of an audit is better than you spewing out bullshit numbers and claiming that dozens of small groups working independently across America had subverted the election results.

    You’re still ignoring the details of the audit that contradict your ominous hints of widespread corruption, but this is still progress. Good job, I’m proud of you!

    1. You know, if you did your trolling from the same fake email every time, you wouldn’t have to wait for me to approve your new trolling each time you make up a new fake email… and I take weekends off. 🙂

      Also, you dense motherfucker, I linked to the actual audit report, and I talked about the first part about the recount matching. I absolutely stand by my original thesis that small groups work independently to commit fraud, because that happens constantly in literally every other walk of life. It’s only elections (which benefit democrats) that society pretends otherwise.
      If a piece of shit like you was ever actually proud of me, I’d have to stop and reexamine my life.

  28. I keep trying to change the discussion away from “Fraud”. It’s too specific a charge.

    Suppose you have a process that makes it easy for rich people to vote and difficult for poor people. (Some might be willing to suppose that the existing process has that feature.) All the votes cast via that process are valid — not “fraudulent”. But the results are illegitimate given the declared intentions of the process owner.

    Suppose it’s easy for a rich person to register to vote, twice! Once in his home state, and once again at his vacation address. Imagine it’s Dick Cheney voting in Texas AND Wyoming. Imagine it’s Rush Limbaugh (RIP, PBUH) in New York & Florida. The ballots in each are properly issued to a “registered” voter and properly counted when returned. No “fraud”, but …

    Suppose we extend registration and voting privileges in local elections to resident, non-US-citizens. After all, the aliens pay local taxes and burden /benefit local service agencies. So they should, we argue, participate in selecting leaders and deciding on borrowing measures for school boards and zoning commissions… Now a Mexican or Haitian citizen votes in Los Angeles AND in Tijuana. (A U.S. citizen votes only in the U.S.) Also, the process that prints separate ballots with ONLY local issues on it from the “joint” ballot that has local and federal issues and candidates is junked after it’s shown that the “local only” ballots are too easy to match to particular individual voters, violating their privacy. So all voters get identical ballots and instructions, with maybe including a sworn affadavit when the ballot is mailed back, that the alien voter voted ONLY in local races. No fraud, right? Legitimate, though?

    Suppose you have a process where “early” voting runs from middle of September to end of October and “election day” is the first Tuesday of November. (Virginia, right now!) The voter who tries to vote on 20 September and told his ballot has problems has weeks to “cure” that problem. The election day voter with a problem has no such opportunity. Fraud? No. But equal rights that is NOT.

    Rules about registration and ballot management and poll watching and canvassing the counts exist for REASONS! Chesterton’s Fence. And the modern progressives are sailing up and saying “I see no use to this statute, let’s just ignore it and do something else.” Idiocy. At best “problematic” and at worst deliberate malfeasance.

    Fraud isn’t the word for it, though.

  29. Frequently when younger people are moving out of the house for the first time they are cautious about transferring sensitive material to their new address until they are confident they are staying there permanently. 15,000 of the questioned votes are from folks that just moved to another address in Maricopa County which suggests this scenaro. I am not going to declare an invalid election because Jimmy moved 2 miles away to an apartment but still gets his mail at home.

    Consider the case of a new college student who is registered at his parents’ (single family fixed abode) address, then moves to a college apartment. A September campus registration drive scoops zim up to register at the apartment complex — where a dozen or so other voters are also still registered. As it happens, the student takes the opportunity of a change in life status to revise the name ze uses. “Dana P.” is now registered as “D Pat”. The county mails ballots to both Dana and D Pat. Also, D Pat has a dozen other ballots in the mail box to other, prior tenants.

    How indifferent to the outcome of the election; how strictly do his parents have to manage zis transition to adulthood; how committed to the integrity of the “one-person, one-vote” process does this young person have to be; how to resist the temptation to vote all the available ballots?

    And if super-majorities of voters are such saints, why do we need government at all?

    When DO we decide that the election process (if not any particular election) is hopelessly compromised?

  30. A Guy Who Researches Everything Looks at the Legal Issues
    Around the Cyber Ninjas’ Report

    Larry, thank you very much for the link to the Cyber Ninjas’ report. I did what you said, I started with Part III of the Report. Ok, I’m the strange kind of guy who always reads the citations and footnotes. I am also one of those weirdos who can scan a large document in a few minutes to get a general sense of what’s in it. The Cyber Ninjas’ report gave me both citations and clues to information outside the report to find out how they did the audit and just what that might mean in real life terms.

    I did the work, and have all the links to appropriate laws, the Arizona Elections Procedure Manual, live-tweets from the Maricopa County Twitter account, etc, to back me up. There’s a possible problem with putting the links here. It looks like this comment system is the sort that will not accept links in a random post. So if the links do not appear, I’d appreciate if Larry or a moderator would email me for links to be used in a comment for this post.

    The first thing I did was get the complete Cyber Ninjas’ report (link below). I did not download the presentation. I use Linux and find the M$ files work really oddly with the programs I use to read M$ format files. So yep, scanned through Part III. I immediately noticed the citations for both AZ state statute as outlined in the “Official State of Arizona Election Procedures Manual” (link below), as well as federal law from the US Code. So I read the cited relevant federal laws and the cited state laws too.

    The primary law for a federal election is covered in the US Code. Specifically, most of the those governing laws for federal elections are in Volume 52 of the US Code. The federal law about how ballots and election records are preserved is 52 US Code § 20701 (link below). This is the place where my reading got interesting. And § 20701 is why I didn’t go much farther in my reading past the appropriate state law for elections.

    52 USC § 20701 says that ballots and records from federal elections must be saved for 22 months following the election. Cyber Ninjas claim the Maricopa County elections official illegally deleted the electronic records. Maricopa elections officials replied that the results were archived and not subpoenaed (Part III, page 61, footnote 62). But that requirement for records preservation in 52 USC § 20701 has something more interesting and relevant.

    Going back to the text of 52 USC § 20701 shows something very important. The records that are required to be retained for 22 months can only be legally transferred between “election officals”. The link I provided for this USC citation at Cornell has a hyperlink to the definition of election official.

    Right away we find a major problem. The Arizona state legislature never appointed an elections official to be the official custodian of record when the ballots, servers, machines and records were transferred to the Cyber Ninjas. I looked! I really did. I could find no one mentioned in the actual Cyber Ninja audit process who was a legal custodian of the records! That means that as soon as the ballots left the Maricopa County elections office, they were null and void for the purpose of legal reporting, criminal charges, or civil suits.

    To explain briefly, election records are legal evidence. That legal evidence is what can be used in a court of law to dispute or confirm the election results. Like any evidence, there is a legal chain of custody. 52 USC § 20701 sets out that chain of custody as being between “election officials”. Without a named custodian of record to guarantee the security of the records and vouch there was no tampering, the chain of custody is broken and the evidence is no longer considered valid. That’s because no one who could legally assure the chain of custody was watching to prevent illegal manipulation of records or ballots. It doesn’t matter how honest Cyber Ninjas might be. The AZ legislature dropped the ball and broke legal chain of custody.

    The other, lesser, issue is Arizona state statute ARS 16-261 (link below). ARS 16-621 states that counting centers must have representation from candidates or parties in the election, plus state officials and third party observers. The only part of this statute observed by Cyber Ninjas was to provide a live video feed of the audit. There were no accredited representatives from any political parties, any candidates, any appropriate state officials, or any third party observers. So by state law, the audit was not valid.

    Other links included below this post are to related documents or web pages. I tried to fill in some background. Because I’m not a lawyer, the custody issue bugged me. There are several news articles and commentaries findable on the web about chain of custody for the ballots. I included a commentary article from the Arizona Mirror. I also provided a link to live-tweets by Maricopa County elections officials that were made during the official Cyber Ninja presentation of their audit results. Some of the comments were referenced in Part III of the Cyber Ninjas report, so I thought it was useful to include them.

    I find this all very depressing. Arizona spent how many million dollars on this, and didn’t do basic things like assure the legal chain of custody? Oh well, at least it was fun 3 hours of research. Organizing and writing took a bit longer. Since this is comment #175, I’m not sure anyone will read it anyway.

    —–
    The Links Were Here
    Moderator, please email me for the links. Your interface seems to think that even official government sites are potential spam. Plus, hey where did my formatting go?

      1. I sent the links to your email address on Friday afternoon, 16 October. Thank you very much again for your aid.

        [Added by request- Jack]

        Cyber Ninja Reports and Presentation – To reduce noise over signal problems, I recommend just reading Part III, the forensics report.
        https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/cyber-ninjas-report

        Official State of Arizona Election Procedures Manual
        – Really useful! References all relevant state laws. Describes election procedures.
        https://azsos.gov/sites/default/files/2019_ELECTIONS_PROCEDURES_MANUAL_APPROVED.pdf

        52 U.S. Code § 20701 – Retention and preservation of records and papers by officers of elections; deposit with custodian; penalty for violation
        https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/52/20701

        ARS 16-621 – Specific Arizona Statute for Vote Counting Centers
        The Cyber Ninjas don’t seem to have followed the statute closely.
        https://www.azleg.gov/ars/16/00621.htm

        Maricopa County Twitter Account
        They live-tweeted during the Cyber Ninja Presentation on 24 Sept. 2021, to debunk claims of illegal or unethical behavior.
        https://twitter.com/maricopacounty

        Aggregated Thread of Some Relevant Tweets from Maricopa County Officials
        This has most of the relevant tweets from the 24 September live tweet session.
        https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1446210850142896148.html

        Official State of Arizona Election Procedures Manual
        – Really useful for seeing where Cyber Ninjas went wrong.
        https://azsos.gov/sites/default/files/2019_ELECTIONS_PROCEDURES_MANUAL_APPROVED.pdf

        52 U.S. Code § 20701 – Retention and preservation of records and papers by officers of elections; deposit with custodian; penalty for violation
        https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/52/20701

        ARS 16-621 – Specific Arizona Statute for Vote Counting Centers
        It would have been nice if the legislature had followed the laws.
        https://www.azleg.gov/ars/16/00621.htm

        The Arizona Mirror Commentary Article from 6 May, 2021
        https://www.azmirror.com/2021/05/06/arizona-audit-ignores-federal-law-on-election-records/

        Federal Prosecution of Election Crimes – Eighth Edition
        Provided for background and research purposes. Handy if you really want to know the most pertinent the legal background for US federal elections.
        https://www.justice.gov/criminal/file/1029066/download

      2. Thanks again, Jack. Though this thread is so long that I think you will be the only one reading my post! But hey, I was just glad to be inspired to do the research. I don’t get asked enough serious questions these days. I am mostly pitching concepts for reality-based, table top RPGs.

  31. I’m in Phoenix , and I thought the ILoH might be interested to hear that Thanksgiving night the non-network channel here did an “expose’” on how lax the security was around the audit process, how they just walked in to the building where it was being conducted without challenge. I didn’t watch it, I admit; I get way too upset, but someone obviously thought that “We can’t prove it” was still too definite for comfort.

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