The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is interfering with the Arizona State Senate’s audit of the county’s election materials—which have been under Senate subpoena for the audit for nearly four months (112 days according to OANN as I write on Thursday) and which subpoenas have been upheld by the courts repeatedly. The Board is actively blocking access to the secure facility housing the county’s computers and election materials, and it is demanding that the Senate, at Senate expense, transfer those materials to a separate facility for the audit.
Aside from trying deliberately to run up the cost of the audit, the county’s relocation demand is an equally deliberate, and cynical, attempt to sabotage the legitimacy of the audit’s results and findings. A proper inspection of the activities involved in and surrounding the election must be conducted in situ. That’s the only location in which the computers’ and documents’ can be set up for audit in a way that doesn’t risk contaminating or losing outright any evidence that might be found. That’s also the only way insight into those surrounding activities can be inspected, and absent that surround, the inspection—the audit—cannot be complete. The forensics aspect will be fatally interrupted.
The Arizona Senate has been patient enough. It needs to send the State Police down to Maricopa County to execute the subpoenas for the audit by seizing the county’s secure facility and allowing the Senate’s auditors to conduct the audit within that facility.
There also needs to be this item added to the audit: the computers and documents and their interactions must be carefully inspected to determine the level, if any, of tampering, of alteration or elimination during those 112 days of obstruction, with appropriate civil and possibly criminal action taken against those county supervisors if any such evidence is found.
