Feature Post Today from Tim Cushing @Techdirt: Welcome To Maricopa County, The Confusing Clusterfuck "Forensic Audit" Side-Show

Don't know about you, dear readers, but too much about all of this misses the point of specifically looking into about 10,000 ballots cast (or mailed-in) for Evan McMullin in Queen Creek in precincts now represented by Jake Hoffman ("Dis-Information King") who succeeded Warren Petersen. Those votes taken away Trump turned the tide for the election of Joe Biden.

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FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT CONSPIRACY-MINDED, here in Arizona for generations, there's a certain faith-based group of Republicans who can deliver hundreds and thousands of votes for candidates they support

Perhaps like many others, Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative and failed Presidential candidate in 2018, might have on a new mission to unseat Trump in 2020 . . .In 2019 National Intelligence Director Daniel Coats — Trump’s intelligence director — told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “foreign actors will view the 2020 U.S. elections as an opportunity to advance their interests. We expect them to refine their capabilities and add new tactics.”

In February 2017 Evan McMullin was "a person-of- interest" for David Haglund, the features editor of The New Yorker

Evan McMullin Is Trying to Save Democracy

"The former C.I.A. operative and failed Presidential candidate has become an unlikely civic superego for the age of Trump. McMullin seemed to offer himself as a bipartisan symbol of opposition—and he was saying all the right things. . .

After Trump won the nomination, McMullin announced that he was running for President of the United States. The bid was so quixotic that a handful of observers, some suspicious of McMullin’s C.I.A. background, wondered if someone was pulling the strings. “Who put him up?” Sean Hannity asked on his radio show in late October. “The Bush people?

The Romney people?”

"At the time Hannity was asking these questions, the polls had tightened in Utah, where McMullin, who’s Mormon, had based his campaign, with an eye on the one, exceedingly unlikely path he had to the White House:

If the race were close, and he prevailed in a single state, he might prevent Trump (and Hillary Clinton) from attaining an Electoral College majority.

In that case, the House of Representatives would decide the next President, and, who knows, maybe they would settle on him. . . .

He didn’t finish higher than third in any state.
But by then Trump had publicly complained about “that guy in Utah,” and when Trump went on his “victory tour,” in December, he blasted “McMuffin” repeatedly, boosting McMullin’s stature.
For those who aren’t conspiracy-minded, this is the more plausible doubt to harbor about McMullin: that taking a stand was also a way of kickstarting his career.
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 County's Voting Machines Rendered Unusable By OAN-Financed Vote Auditors

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the nice-work,-cyber-idiots dept

Mon, May 24th 2021 3:43pm — Tim Cushing

"The libs have been owned. They've been owned so thoroughly that Maricopa County, Arizona is going to need to buy millions of dollars of new electronic voting machines. . .

Before we get into the more expensive implications of this, let's backtrack a little to see how this came to be.

For months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump and his enablers claimed the upcoming election would be fraudulent. Suspecting he was on his way out, Trump ramped up his baseless claims that everything from voting machines to mail-in votes couldn't be trusted.

Once he had lost, the claims went into overdrive. The election had been "stolen." Hundreds of true believers stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with the intent of preventing the election from being certified as a win for Joe Biden.

The claims of fraud continued. Nobody could prove any fraudulent activity had occurred but Trump and his acolytes continued to insist Trump had been illegally removed from power. This group of idiots included several Congressional reps and Senators. It also included everyone from a pillow salesman to a cybersecurity "expert" who claimed his inability to properly compose a tweet was evidence of malicious hacking.

Welcome to Maricopa County, where everyday is another scene cut from "Veep" because it was considered too improbable. State senate Republicans hired the ridiculous-sounding "Cyber Ninjas" to perform "America's Audit" (called this despite the fact it's confined to a single county in a single state) -- a recount of every vote in the county.

Since then, it's been fiascoes piled on debacles piled on a foundation of conspiracy theories. . .

This brings us back to the latest insanity. The voting machines were turned over to the Cyber Ninjas, who then acted as though chain-of-custody isn't that big of a deal. Since they followed none of the steps needed to ensure the machines remained intact and secure, the county has no choice but to decertify them once the Ninjas are done entertaining their "stolen election" fantasies. This isn't just the Secretary of State saying this. This is also the DHS's election security experts.

[DHS officials] unanimously advised that once election officials lose custody and control over voting systems and components, those devices should not be reused in future elections. Rather, decommissioning and replacing those devices is the safest option as no methods exist to adequately ensure those machines are safe to use in future elections.

As many as 358 machines may be affected by the actions of cybersecurity "experts" who have no previous experience with either election security or conducting a vote audit. The total cost for replacement could be more than $6 million.

The only upshot is that local residents won't be paying for these.

Thanks to the agreement reached with the so-called auditors, Maricopa County isn't responsible for costs like these. No, it will be the entire state paying for the clusterfuck that is "America's Audit." The state is on the hook. And with lawsuits already flying, taxpayers will be out even more money no matter what the outcome of this litigation is.

And it all could have been prevented by either

1) hiring competent people to conduct the audit or

2) Senate Republicans not indulging the worst members and supporters of their party.