Maricopa County Board of Supervisors At It Again – Won’t Provide Routers Requested by Auditors of County’s 2020 Election Results

 

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBOS) is at it again.  Silently they have decided not to provide routers to the audit team attempting to audit the county’s 2.1 million votes and machines used in the 2020 Election.

We’ve seen this time and again since the November 2020 election where the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBOS) decided not to comply with reasonable requests related to the 2020 election and now again.  The Arizona Daily Independent reports:

Maricopa County officials have not fully complied with the State Senate’s election audit subpoenas, a decision made to avoid causing a “significant security risk” to data utilized by numerous law enforcement agencies, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said Monday.

“We had previously believed that the risk would be eliminated by redacting the law enforcement data on the routers and not producing it. But we were informed that redaction did not eliminate the risk,” Deputy County Attorney Joseph LaRue wrote in a letter to Senate Audit Liaison Ken Bennett. “We also learned that if criminal elements or others gained access to this data, it might compromise county and federal law enforcement efforts and put the lives of law enforcement personnel at risk.”

The letter from LaRue was prompted by Bennett’s comments to KFYI’s James T. Harris on Monday that Maricopa County officials are not in compliance with subpoenas signed by Senate President Karen Fann and Senate Judiciary Chair Warren Petersen. A judge ruled in February the legislative subpoenas are valid.

Of course, this is likely not the real reason these routers are being withheld.

We’ve seen the MCBOS do this kind of stuff in the past.  When the Senate decided they wanted to perform an audit of the County’s results, the MCBOS sued the Senate to stop it.  After the Senate updated the law so it was clear that they had the right to audit election results, the judge in the case opined that the MCBOS had to allow the Senate to perform an audit.

The MCBOS then claimed the Senate could perform an audit but only by using auditors certified by DC’s agency the US Election Assistance Commission (EAS).  So the MCBOS selected the only two firms who appeared to be certified and had them give the County a clean bill of health.  The problem was that we identified that these two firms were not certified when the MCBOS used them, they hadn’t been certified in years.  Within hours the EAS certified these firms.  (We are waiting to find out what information they used to certify these firms on that day within four hours of our report.)

The fact that the MCBOS won’t comply with the Senate’s request is no surprise.  They simply do not want to be transparent about the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona.