Arizona Election Audit Results reporting shows how the media is manipulating the public via misinformation
Don’t you find it odd, or even suffer a little of cognitive dissonance when you read about the Arizona’s Maricopa Election audit results new reportings?
The “bogus” and “partisan” election audit, as what the media had been branding the audit as, that is out to manipulate the auditing in order to prove that Trump won instead of Biden won the election – is now out to celebrate that the audit had confirmed Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in Arizona… but… isn’t it a bogus and scam audit?
If you are a casual reader of news, especially if you do not support Trump, then you probably read articles like these, tell you that the audit actually concluded with Biden winning even more votes than before (but its a sham audit…. was it?)
But since you are reading this article, you probably know I’m going to contradict the above reports: no. The audit results does not confirm the victory of anyone – in fact, it pointed out a lot more problems and discrepancies with the election will have serious implications and likely changes to the election processes moving forward.
The purpose of an audit is always to find issues and problem with a set of a procedure, documents or in this case, an election. The job of the audit is not to overturn a result (which is what the media is fixated on) – this audit was to address the myriad of complains and discrepancies witnessed by voters and observers, which happened to be predominantly Trump supporters.
So since no media seemed to be interested to report the facts of the audit results (since I bet you probably did not watch the 2+ hours long hearing; we watched it in full) – we will take the initiative and do the troublesome thing: to list down, at least the conclusions & major question marks with regards to the election in Maricopa County, Arizona.
First up, was the report from Dr Shiva Ayyadurai.
Shiva is a professor graduated from MIT with a Ph.D in biological engineering (he have 4 degrees, all from MIT). He is purportedly the inventor of the email system (controversial and challenged), own several companies including EchoMail (pattern recognition classification of documents), CytoSolve (computational modeling) as well as decades of experience in pattern recognition and classification of signals and signatures across industries and applications. However, his alignment to the Republicans and his rather confrontational style had seemed to see his reputation tarnished.
After explaining in depth about how his part of the investigation is done, the theories behind the work done and the things that he discovered, he end his presentation with major questions on the discrepancies as well as a conclusion. I will list some highlights from the presentation as well as these major questions and conclusion below, to understand what those questions actually mean (it will blow your mind), you have to watch the full presentation via the video I had shared above.
His major questions for Maricopa County as a result of his investigations (something for the authorities to think about)
After this, he shared some recommendations for further investigations if required.
So, we have to put this in mind that Joe Biden only won by 10,457 votes. Thus any thousands of discrepancies have implications. And if you had watched, you will know that the number raised is at the low end as his company had use extremely liberal settings to decide if a signature if valid. Any increase in the percentage of “ink” in the signature box as a threshold to decide if there is a signature, would result in a quantum increase in votes discounted as signed.
And the fact that there IS ANY discrepancies and it takes so long just to do an audit, its a failing of the election process itself. Elections SHOULD be transparent, simple and auditable. How difficult it is to audit just one county, does show serious problems with the election processes in the USA.
And if there is any discrepancy found – even if its 0.1% of the total votes – that should not be acceptable and the problem/issue should be investigated and resolved. But it seems like USA don’t really like accountability. Not internationally. Not with the politicians. Not with the elections.
Next up, is the now famous/infamous, Cyber Ninjas
Cyber Ninjas is a software security consulting company specializing in ethical hacking, security program development and training. Cyber Ninjas’ founder, Doug Logan is described by it’s company as an expert in operating leading edge cyber strategies and teaches on the subject. Cyber Ninjas is widely criticized to be a company that had never done election audit (not sure why this is an issue… should an election be THIS difficult to audit?)
Cyber Ninjas presentation starts off introducing the physical recounts and its processes, with a major emphasize that all the counters were Maricopa residents who voted in the election.
And slowly, you will see why, the allegations of “sham audit” makes no sense (because it looks like a proper audit if you look at their reports objectively)
This next slide is what most of the media used exclusively as the “conclusion to the audit result” – that Biden won, and with a slightly larger margin than before… although they reckon this is a “sham” audit…. they celebrated the result regardless.
But what is important though, is that the count is LARGELY similar – confirming that the Cyber Ninjas did not manipulate the physical count process in a “shamming way”; but also confirming that, if there IS any form of fraud, it is not going to be detectable through a hand count.
What comes next would be the findings, and the most damning part of just the voting audit.
And with the above slide, Doug Logan ended his part of the presentation and handed over to his colleague Ben Cotton, where he goes into the IT forensics and cybersecurity issues they had discovered in their forensic investigation of the computer devices they managed to get their hands on. (they didn’t managed to get everything, as the Maricopa County had been fighting them all the way even against court orders to hand over election-related devices and materials)
Coincidentally, he started of describing what was withheld from them.
So for context on what there is these cybersecurity and IT audit, especially if your country do not do “electronic voting”, like in Singapore, all elections are paper based and counted by hand – then such IT / cybersecurity related issues would not have been an issue or even a thing to audit.
But in the USA, their election cramps in multiple election votes into one slip (as they vote for multiple people into multiple different roles) and in some states, referendums are included in their elections – which is why USA have such complication election system/processes. Some states vote directly into machines (if I’m not mistaken) and others vote via paper and then will be fed into machines to read the votes. Which ultimately, like in Arizona’s case, makes election audit, extremely difficult.
We can definitely all agree that, election related devices should not be touched, accessed or have anything deleted after the election, just like the paper ballots – for an extended amount of time – for audits and accountability purposes. Somehow, this is very american (unaccountable).
This is the kind of thing, that Cyber Ninjas were actually hired for. Its not for the counting of paper ballots – it is for the data analysis and IT forensics. Which is why the argument that they had never done any election audit work before as a reason to disqualify them is ridiculous. Firstly, any company would have to start somewhere. 2ndly, election audit isnt really a common thing in USA post elections, since it is “unamerican”.
There is also mention of the lack of accountability of who accessed the computers, as every user login is generic, and all had the same passwords. As a result, there is no way to know who used the devices and who did what. So much for election security.
After skipping a few slides (you can find out what they are in the video yourself), comes the part where they discovered that the election devices had connected to the internet (which they shouldn’t have).
Cyber Ninjas then entered their recommendations (as mentioned, this is an audit – the purpose is to find flaws, and rectify them for future elections – all so to restore confidence in elections)
And this ends the presentation for Cyber Ninjas. Their work is not done yet, as there are still some audit work to do as mentioned much earlier in this article.
Next up, is Randy Pullen.
Randy is the former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party (2007 – 2011). He is founder of Randall Pullen & Company (Financial Consulting and Accounting services) and WageWatch inc. He is appointed to do the independent count by the Arizona Senate, especially he has experience in election audits, thus would be the perfect person to run the machine and hand count.
So according Arizona Senate President Karen Fann that, this additional machine count is to be a 3rd party reference to compare the count result by Cyber Ninjas and the original election count – so that in the event of differing count, they will know which way to go.
Last Up, is Ken Bennett.
Ken Bennett is the Senate Audit Liaison for this audit. He was the former Arizona Senate President (2003 – 2007) and Arizona Secretary of State (2009 – 2015). His job seemed to be related to auditing the compliance of the election to the election laws and procedures.
His report will give legal backing to the discoveries by Dr. Shiva and Cyber Ninjas to invalidate votes or demand further action against election officials/departments (should that be the action taken by the Arizona state).
Which means, the discoveries in this audit had contravened election laws and procedures and the authorities should take action to correct these issues or prevent such failures in future elections.
At the moment, as the county had not been forthcoming to provide everything requested/required for a complete audit – it remains to be seen if Arizona Senate will be willing or able to push further to audit more to ensure all the discrepancies can be explained away with more facts or failures be punished.
Senator Warren Petersen in his closing remark however mentioned that the next step would be: legislations and law enforcements. He say there is 8 points he want to highlight.
- He feel the most unsettling is the obstruction by the county – the brazen willingness to violate a legal subpoena which is against the law. County also expended significant resources and human capital to stop the audit.
- The numbers don’t reconcile. He feel that the election results should be transparent and be easily reconciled so that every balance.
- The law is broken for ballot duplication. And how to prevent it in the future.
- Churning of logs. He say that they need to get to the bottom of why that happened, who did it, what was the motive and what was there.
- Chain of custody issues.
- Failure to preserve data files.
- Cybersecurity weaknesses.
- Envelopes with blank signatures.
So, if you are still here, reading until this point, you can make your own conclusion of this Arizona election Audit. If you are still unhappy, you can also read all of the election audit documents here: https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/audit
According Karen Fann, she mentioned that 18 states sent representatives to the hearing/presentation. If this audit is such a sham and had not be able to conclude any issues with the election, then we wont be seeing the following headlines:
Apparently other states had seen enough to sow doubts into their minds about their own state’s election integrity and process – even when the results aren’t in question.
Texas, a firmly red state, is planning to do full forensic audits on 4 counties: 2 largest Democrat counties and 2 largest Republican counties. Other swing states’ Republicans are also seeking for review of their election, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Even within Arizona, where this audit on Maricopa County is done, there is now an intention to push for audit in the 2nd largest county in Arizona, Pima County – in order to address concerns from voters.
The audit had fanned the start of potentially huge waves in US politics, and will have huge consequences to come in the very near future, especially when Biden’s favorability is at an all time low.
However you won’t know, if you only be reading left-wing news media.
Since all you know would be: they recounted, Biden got more votes, everything else reported are just conspiracy theories to allege fraud in the election to help Trump get back his presidential seat. You will be none the wiser.