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.

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.