The Arizona Senate has subpoenaed a considerable amount of documents and electronic equipment from the State’s Maricopa County to support the Senate’s audit of 2020 election results in that county. Actually, that was done some months ago, and the Senate has only recently been able to begin its audit as County officials stonewalled, obstructed, and generally interfered with the start of that audit.
Now, it seems, those County officials are outright refusing to satisfy some of the subpoenas’ requirements.
In its subpoena, the Arizona State Senate had asked for, in part, “access or control of all routers, tabulators, or combinations thereof, used in connection with the administration of the 2020 election, and the public IP of the router.”
The Monday letter from the MCAO said the county was refusing to hand over those routers or even digital copies of them, citing an alleged “security risk” associated with the hardware.
I suspect this pertains to servers more than it does routers. Routers only send data packets—small sets of 1s and 0s—hither and yon, retaining in their own systems only tables of Internet addresses and IT administrative data. The addresses, with their implied networks where they aren’t related to audit requirements, and the admin data are easily protected by auditor-trusted and -specified individuals. These do need to be inspected, though, for unauthorized communications or accesses. Servers will have the directly election-related data that those strings of packets represent when the data are transmitted.
Regardless, the subpoenas are mandatory and binding on the County officials, and they have been upheld, in no uncertain terms, by the Arizona courts.
This is just another example of Maricopa County officials disrupting and attempting to block the State’s audit of the County’s election results. This example repeats the question of what these guys are trying to hide.
Absent their obstruction, this audit would have been long completed, and the officials would have been demonstrated to have performed their duties wholly satisfactorily and the county’s part of the State’s election results shown to be entirely jake.
Or not.
Maybe it’s time for the State to send the State Police into Maricopa County to execute the remaining portions of the subpoenas by physically seizing the equipment in question and delivering them to the audit facility.
And arrest any who obstruct the seizures.
Enough of the County management’s stalling and obstruction.