The group conducting the election audit in Maricopa County in Arizona claims the county is refusing to turn over routers or even images of routers to election auditors, according to a report, in deliberate defiance of a judge’s ruling.
Arizona Senate’s liaison for the audit, former Republican Secretary of State Ken Bennett, was informed of the news by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office this week. The county had previously refused to comply with the subpoenas but had been ordered by a judge in February to provide the equipment to auditors.
“We had previously believed that the risk would be eliminated by redacting the law enforcement data on the routers and not producing it,” Joseph LaRue, deputy county attorney, explained in a letter obtained by The Epoch Times. “But we were informed that redaction did not eliminate the risk.”
A Maricopa County spokesman also told The Epoch Times that its technology professionals “determined the information contained in Maricopa County’s routers can be used as blueprints to intercept sensitive county data.”
“Maricopa County has more than 50 different county departments, and the routers the Senate subpoena commanded the County produce support all of these departments, not just elections operations. This includes critical law enforcement data that, by law, cannot be disclosed, as well as Maricopa County residents’ protected health information and full social security numbers,” he added.
Election auditors are asking for access or control of all routers, tabulators, or some combinations thereof “in order to garner the system logs,” according to subpoenas issued by the state Senate last year.
Maricopa County officials claim that two laboratory tests on the voting equipment didn’t find any evidence that the voting machines were connected to the internet. Bennett disputes this finding, saying that auditors can’t confirm this without access to the logs.
“Here we are several weeks into the audit, and we still don’t have some of the information that was subpoenaed by the state Senate from Maricopa County,” Bennett said. “They told me personally weeks ago that they had taken all the routers and the internet connections and the hubs and everything out of the building so they could send it to us, and we would have the logs when we got into those devices, we would be able to see those logs, that nothing was connected to the Internet during the election. And lo and behold, they don’t show up in the equipment that they said would be delivered to us.”
What exactly are county officials trying to hide?
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