Election Audits

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CNN

Assuming CNN is a legitimate news source is you first mistake
They have proved themselves to be partisan liars countless times
and cannot be take seriously on any subject

[YoDoug]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/18/politics/fact-check-maricopa-audit-arizona-cyber-ninjas-74000/index.html">Fact check: Arizona audit chief baselessly raises suspicion about 74,000 ballots

(CNN)Arizona's Senate held a Thursday briefing on the ongoing Republican-initiated "audit" of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, where Joe Biden outperformed Donald Trump by enough of a margin to win the state.
The review is being conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity firm that has no experience in election auditing. And the company's chief executive officer, Doug Logan, made some Thursday claims that were immediately called into question by the county and independent experts.
Here's a brief look at two of them.

The 74,000 ballots

Logan said that door-to-door questioning of Maricopa County voters is the "one way" the auditors could determine whether what they are seeing in the elections data are "real problems" or "clerical errors of some sort."

"For example, we have 74,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent," he said.
Logan made clear that this wasn't necessarily a case of fraud, saying it could be a "clerical issue." But his claim about an unexplained 74,000-plus ballot gap between the county's list of mail-in ballots received and its list of mail-in ballots sent out was amplified on Twitter by Liz Harrington, the spokeswoman for former President Donald Trump, and by numerous other Trump supporters, such as Republican Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert. Some of them, including Boebert, went further than Logan did.

"In Arizona, 74,000 ballots were counted with no record of being sent in. That's not normal. That's not right. That's not safe nor is it secure," Boebert wrote.
On Friday, Trump himself went further than Logan. In a written statement, he claimed that the Thursday Senate briefing showed "74,000 mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing ballots)."
Facts First: There is no evidence of either fraud or any significant error with these ballots, and certainly not "magically appearing ballots." Both Maricopa County and outside experts say there is a simple explanation for the gap Logan claimed had not been explained: the existence of in-person early voting. Contrary to Logan's claims, the ballot lists he was talking about include not only mail-in ballots but also ballots cast early in person.
Here's why it's entirely normal for Maricopa County's submitted-ballots list to include a significant number of votes that do not match up with entries on the requested-ballots list. After the deadline to request a mail-in ballot, which was October 23 in 2020, the requested-ballot list doesn't get updated by the county. But the submitted-ballots list does get updated after that October 23 deadline -- with the votes of in-person early voters.
Logan's suggestion of some sort of unsolved mystery was definitively debunked by Garrett Archer, an election analyst at ABC15 television in Phoenix and a former official in the Arizona secretary of state's office, who is known locally and on Twitter for his mastery of the state's elections data.
Archer explained that the county stops updating the requested-ballots list, known as "EV32," after the last day people can request a mail ballot, October 23. So ballots cast in person after October 23, Archer said, were included on the submitted-ballots list, known as "EV33," but did not have a corresponding item on the "EV32" requested-ballots list.
Archer analyzed the files and found that there were 74,241 ballots on the submitted-ballots list without a corresponding entry on the requested-ballots list -- nearly identical to the figure Logan cited, "74,243." But Archer found that more than 99.9% of the ballots in question were recorded in the submitted-ballots list on October 26 or later.
That is in line with the October 23 cut-off date Archer had previously noted for the requested-ballots list.
The explanation: October 24 and 25 were weekend days when county clerks didn't update the submitted-ballot list, Archer said, so they added the ballots cast by in-person voters on those weekend days to the submitted-ballot totals starting on October 26.
"This is a glaring omission in the analysis," Archer tweeted of the auditors. "It is either grossly negligent for failing to see a pattern of ballots being returned after a certain date or the statements were deliberately misleading."
Tammy Patrick, an elections expert who spent more than a decade working at Maricopa County's elections department, also said on Twitter that the requested-ballots list stops getting updated 11 days before Election Day but the submitted-ballots list continues to get updated until the day before Election Day.
Patrick tweeted of the auditors: "AGAIN: They don't know what they're looking at."
Archer said the two EV files are created for the benefit of the political parties' campaign efforts and not meant to be comprehensive records of all ballots, so they are not ideal documents for a forensic audit. The county made a similar remark on Twitter, calling them "not the proper files to refer to for a complete accumulating of all early ballots sent and received."
Meanwhile, some citizens interpreted Logan's remarks as a claim that the total number of mail-in ballots the county recorded as received was higher than the total number the county recorded as having sent out. We don't think that's what Logan actually said, but for the record, Maricopa County tweeted on Friday that this was not true, either.
Without the access Logan's team has, we can't say for certain that there are no errors or issues with the two lists; it's entirely possible that some issue or another will be uncovered at some point. It's possible, Archer said, that there were clerical errors with the small number of ballots -- 29 -- that he found had been recorded on the submitted-ballots list before October 26 but did not have a corresponding entry on the requested-ballots list.
But Logan had suggested there was a massive, unsolved data problem. Experts have made clear that he simply did not understand the data.
Signature verification
Logan also claimed that Maricopa County simply stopped verifying voters' signatures at some point of the election.
"Yeah, we've had an affidavit that specifically stated that when mail in ballots were received that so many of them were received that the standards reduced over time," Logan said. He said the affidavit claimed the verification process started with 20 "points of comparison," then "after some time" was reduced to just 10 points of comparison, then to five points of comparison, "and then eventually they were just told to let every single mail-in ballot through."

Facts First: The office of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican elected in 2020, strongly denied this claim. "At no point during the 2020 election cycle did Maricopa County modify the rigorous signature verification requirements. Any suggestion to the contrary is categorically false," the recorder's office said on Twitter.
Logan was not clear on who supposedly reduced the comparison standard and how widespread the supposed change was. We can't, of course, definitively fact check what happened or didn't happen at each and every elections office in the county, especially without seeing the affidavit Logan referred to.

In the CNN article the "experts" admit that they can't actually disprove the claims. No fact checking here, just CNN spin to keep ignorant dem voters in the dark. Smit fell for it.

"Without the access Logan's team has, we can't say for certain that there are no errors or issues with the two lists; it's entirely possible that some issue or another will be uncovered at some point."

[Smit]

I'll bet you guys don't like the associated press either.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ap-fact-check-trump-makes-false-claims-about-arizona-audit/ar-AAMgNio"> AP FACT CHECK: Trump makes false claims about Arizona audit

PHOENIX (AP) — Former President Donald Trump issued three statements in two days falsely claiming that voting fraud and irregularities cost him Arizona's electoral votes.
Trump relied on comments made Thursday by contractors hired by state Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 vote count in Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix.

The "forensic audit," as Senate GOP leaders are calling their review, is overseen by Cyber Ninjas, a small computer security firm with no election experience before Trump began questioning the 2020 results. Its CEO, Doug Logan, spread false conspiracy theories about the election before he was hired to lead the Arizona review.

Logan and Ben Cotton, a digital forensics analyst working on the audit, described issues they say need further review. Trump has parroted them as evidence the election results are tainted.

County officials and elections experts say the claims are false and based on a misunderstanding of election materials, which they say creates an appearance of irregularities where none exists.

Trump laid out his claims most specifically in a statement Friday night. A look at the irregularities he alleges in that statement:

TRUMP: "168,000 fraudulent ballots printed on illegal paper (unofficial ballots)"

THE FACTS: All of that is false. The ballots were not unofficial or printed on illegal paper, and even Logan never alleged they were fraudulent.

Logan pointed to ballots with the printing slightly offset between the front and back. He claimed this could cause votes to be counted for the wrong candidate if ink from one side bleeds through to another. He said the alignment issues were mostly from polling-place ballots, which are printed onsite, and said about 168,000 ballots were cast that way. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail.

"We are seeing a lot of very thin paper stock being used especially on Election Day," Logan added.

The allegation harkens back to the debunked "Sharpiegate" conspiracy theory that arose in the days after the election. Election experts say bleed-through doesn't affect the vote count because bubbles on one side of a ballot don't align with those on the other. Ballots that can't be read are flagged and duplicated by a bipartisan team.

Arizona's election procedures manual says only that ballots "must be printed with black ink on white paper of sufficient thickness to prevent the printing from being discernible on the reverse side the ballot." Maricopa County uses 80 pound Votesecur paper from Rolland, which is among the papers approved by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the county's tabulation equipment, said Fields Moseley, a county spokesman.

Logan did not provide any evidence that alignment problems affected the vote count and said the issue needs more analysis.

TRUMP, citing "74,000 mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing ballots)."

THE FACTS: No, there were no magically appearing ballots. He is alleging that the number of filled-out ballots received in the mail by election officials exceeded the number of people who had asked earlier for mail-in ballots, by 74,000. But that's not at all what happened.

[byte]

I'll bet you guys don't like the associated press either.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ap-fact-check-trump-makes-false-claims-about-arizona-audit/ar-AAMgNio"> AP FACT CHECK: Trump makes false claims about Arizona audit

PHOENIX (AP) — Former President Donald Trump issued three statements in two days falsely claiming that voting fraud and irregularities cost him Arizona's electoral votes.
Trump relied on comments made Thursday by contractors hired by state Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 vote count in Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix.

The "forensic audit," as Senate GOP leaders are calling their review, is overseen by Cyber Ninjas, a small computer security firm with no election experience before Trump began questioning the 2020 results. Its CEO, Doug Logan, spread false conspiracy theories about the election before he was hired to lead the Arizona review.

Logan and Ben Cotton, a digital forensics analyst working on the audit, described issues they say need further review. Trump has parroted them as evidence the election results are tainted.

County officials and elections experts say the claims are false and based on a misunderstanding of election materials, which they say creates an appearance of irregularities where none exists.

Trump laid out his claims most specifically in a statement Friday night. A look at the irregularities he alleges in that statement:

TRUMP: "168,000 fraudulent ballots printed on illegal paper (unofficial ballots)"

THE FACTS: All of that is false. The ballots were not unofficial or printed on illegal paper, and even Logan never alleged they were fraudulent.

Logan pointed to ballots with the printing slightly offset between the front and back. He claimed this could cause votes to be counted for the wrong candidate if ink from one side bleeds through to another. He said the alignment issues were mostly from polling-place ballots, which are printed onsite, and said about 168,000 ballots were cast that way. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail.

"We are seeing a lot of very thin paper stock being used especially on Election Day," Logan added.

The allegation harkens back to the debunked "Sharpiegate" conspiracy theory that arose in the days after the election. Election experts say bleed-through doesn't affect the vote count because bubbles on one side of a ballot don't align with those on the other. Ballots that can't be read are flagged and duplicated by a bipartisan team.

Arizona's election procedures manual says only that ballots "must be printed with black ink on white paper of sufficient thickness to prevent the printing from being discernible on the reverse side the ballot." Maricopa County uses 80 pound Votesecur paper from Rolland, which is among the papers approved by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the county's tabulation equipment, said Fields Moseley, a county spokesman.

Logan did not provide any evidence that alignment problems affected the vote count and said the issue needs more analysis.

TRUMP, citing "74,000 mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing ballots)."

THE FACTS: No, there were no magically appearing ballots. He is alleging that the number of filled-out ballots received in the mail by election officials exceeded the number of people who had asked earlier for mail-in ballots, by 74,000. But that's not at all what happened.

I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information, we can't really believe anything the news says, we need forensic investigations to clear the air.

[Smit]

Do you think that's what they're getting with the "Cyber ninjas?"

[neurosis]

Haha.. WTF are "Cyber Ninjas"?  

[YoDoug]

Cyber Ninja's audit process;
-full count of all ballots
-full transparency
-redundant counts
-proper chain-of-custody for all ballots
-forensic inspection of ballots to ensure they were not fakes/zerox/etc.
-live video and recordings of entire process
-police security
-color coded uniforms and sections/tables for easy identification of worker roles and tasks

State's counting and recount process;
-random samples, not full count
-hidden counts, no transparency
-who knows if redundant counts
-missing chain-of-custody
-all ballots accepted without inspection
-no video
-their own "security", mainly used to keep Republican watchers out
-no public knowledge of who and what was done

Two very different processes. The Dems have no solid criticism of the process so they are resorting to ad-hominem attacks, including making fun of Cyber Ninja's business name.

[Smit]

Haha.. WTF are "Cyber Ninjas"?  

Do a little research, it would actually be a little amusing if they weren't working with Republicans who are trying to trash our democracy.

[neurosis]

I've never heard of them before and everything that I pull up from pretty much anywhere, says that the founder is a qanon conspiracy theorist.

Usually when you do a search for a reputable company you would be able to find at least some information on them that isn't in recent news?

[YoDoug]

The bottom line here is that if the Dem's really believed they won fare and legit, they would fully support doing forensic audits. If a full forensic audit showed the results were legit, the R's would look like the conspiracy theory nuts Smit claims they are. It would be one of the biggest wins the Dems could get in terms of political capitol. However they completely oppose full forensic audits. They act as if they have something to hide. In recent polling, the majority of Americans support voter ID because they don't trust elections. The Dems opposing forensic audits just adds to that mistrust and makes them look even more guilty.

[Smit]

I've never heard of them before and everything that I pull up from pretty much anywhere, says that the founder is a qanon conspiracy theorist.

Usually when you do a search for a reputable company you would be able to find at least some information on them that isn't in recent news?

Exactly.  

The bottom line here is if the Republicans really believed there was a fraudulent election they wouldn't have to dig up Qanon wackos to manufacture evidence and obfuscate results to get the "data" they want their followers to see.

[neurosis]

The bottom line here is that if the Dem's really believed they won fare and legit, they would fully support doing forensic audits.

I would probably agree, but who would anyone trust to do the audit?  the Dems aren't going to trust a company founded by a "stop the steal" supporter and neither would at least half the country. Anyone who calls themself a conservative these days aren't going to trust anyone other than another hard right conservative. Everyone else is a Rino.

[neurosis]

Just to add to that and then I'll but out because I haven't followed the election fraud news enough to give an education opinion either way - This guy does sound like a bit of a kook.

Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan was confirmed as the voice behind "Anon" in the election conspiracy theory film The Deep Rig. Logan's ties to the far-right, baseless theories come after his firm was chosen by Arizona's GOP state lawmakers to conduct a review of the 2020 presidential election results on behalf of former President Donald Trump. The Deep Rig film is directed by a man whose previous movies included a documentary that claimed aliens masterminded the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

https://www.newsweek.com/cyber-ninjas-ceo-doug-logan-revealed-anon-deep-rig-election-conspiracy-film-1604505">https://www.newsweek.com/cyber-ninjas-c ... lm-1604505">https://www.newsweek.com/cyber-ninjas-ceo-doug-logan-revealed-anon-deep-rig-election-conspiracy-film-1604505

[YoDoug]

The bottom line here is that if the Dem's really believed they won fare and legit, they would fully support doing forensic audits.

I would probably agree, but who would anyone trust to do the audit?  the Dems aren't going to trust a company founded by a "stop the steal" supporter and neither would at least half the country. Anyone who calls themself a conservative these days aren't going to trust anyone other than another hard right conservative. Everyone else is a Rino.

I think that is exactly the spin the Dems are trying to accomplish. Cyber Ninja's has been 100% transparent about their process. It is all documented and recorded. The results could be accurately reproduced upon any challenge. The Dem's want to play partisan politics because they know this. They don't want people to see or understand the audit process because that would remove doubt.

Back to my last post, R's in half a dozen states want to do full forensic audits of the election results. If the Dems were so sure a full audit of any one state would prove the election was legit, it would shut down hopes of audits in other states.

[Jeff]

Did DumbSmit actually try to pawn off a "cnn fact check" link as being credible?

If it was a fact check link from Burger King it would have more clout.
WTF