Maricopa County officials refused Monday to comply with giving access to the election routers and other items contained in a subpoena issued by the Arizona Senate on July 26.
Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., also stated it would not be supplying the passwords sought in a separate subpoena directed to the company.
“Maricopa County long ago provided to the Arizona Senate everything competent auditors would need to affirm the accuracy and security of the November General Election,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Jack Sellers argued in a statement issued after a closed-door session of the board Monday morning.
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Arizona Senate Judiciary Chairman Warren Petersen issued two new subpoenas on July 26 to Maricopa County and Dominion.
The subpoenas set a deadline of Aug. 2 at 1 p.m. to comply.
The subpoena issued to the county sought information and access regarding six matters.
First, it sought all “reports, findings and other documents concerning any breach of the voter registration server, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office systems, or any other aspect of the Maricopa County elections systems at any time within six months of the November 3, 2020 general election.”
Next, all “ballot envelopes received in connection” with the election, or digital images of them.
A key finding of the audit revealed at a July 15 state Senate hearing was that there was reportedly no record of up to 74,000 absentee ballots being mailed that apparently were counted in November’s election.
The Senate subpoena also sought all “user names, passwords, pins and/or security keys or tokens required to access, or otherwise relating to, any and all ballot tabulation devices used in connection with the November 3, 2020 general election in Maricopa County.”
“This is specifically for all levels of access, including, but not limited to, administrator access or any level of access required to access and print the configuration of the ICP2 [in circuit programming] devices.”
Additionally, the senators requested all voter registration records and change histories for those records.
They also demanded access to the routers used in connection with the election.
Finally, they asked for all “splunk logs, network logs, net flows, or similar data related with systems associated in any way with the administration of the November 3, 2020 general election, for the time period beginning 60 days before the election and ending 90 days after the election.”
The splunk logs show the activity through the routers and would be a means to determine if anything abnormal happened regarding the vote tabulators and other equipment on or around Election Day.
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office replied in a Monday letter addressing each item listed in the subpoena.
Regarding the breach, Thomas Liddy, civil division chief for the office, wrote it only had to do with publicly available registration information and did not impact the tabulation system.
The county stated it already turned over the ballot envelope images, but was willing to do so again.
Concerning the passwords, the county said it has turned over all the ones it has and Dominion would have to provide the rest.
Liddy directed the Senate to ask the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office directly for the voter registration information sought.
The county outright rejected giving access to the routers used during the election, out of concern, the letter stated, that compromising information related to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office or other personal data of Maricopa County residents would be revealed.
Auditor Ben Cotton, the founder of CyFIR LLC, testified at a May hearing, “That data should not exist on that router, period. So to state that it could be compromised would be an inaccurate statement or an inaccurate portrayal of what the data is on the router.”
He addressed the issue again at the July 15 hearing, explaining that routers are like mail carriers delivering packets of information to addresses, but do not access what is inside.
“What you don’t have is the actual content or the letter that’s contained in the envelope within the router itself,” he said.
Regardless, Liddy contended previous voting-machine audits commissioned by the county and conducted earlier this year determined voting tabulators were not connected to the internet.
Further, he said other server logs and materials would provide the information the auditors seek.
The county offered the same answer regarding providing splunk logs.
“This BS is the ‘official reply’ from Maricopa County to the lawful subpoenas issued by the AZ State Senate,” Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward tweeted in response to the county’s refusal to comply. “They must be held accountable.”
The subpoena issued directly to Dominion sought the same usernames, passwords and access named in the subpoena to the county.
In May, Dominion refused to turn over the passwords to the auditors, stating, “Releasing Dominion’s intellectual property to an unaccredited, biased, and plainly unreliable actor such as Cyber Ninjas would be reckless, causing irreparable damage to the commercial interests of the company and the election security interests of the country.”
“No company should be compelled to participate in such an irresponsible act,” the company added.
Dominion argued Cyber Ninjas, the lead firm overseeing the forensic audit, is not accredited.
However, Fann told The Western Journal in an interview last month there are no accredited companies because no full forensic audit has ever been undertaken before.
The Arizona Republic reported that Dominion officials responded to the subpoena Monday with a letter stating they would not comply, arguing it “violates (the company’s) constitutional rights and … exceeds the Legislature’s constitutional and statutory authority. Doing so would cause grave harm.”
In February, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Timothy Thomason ruled the Arizona Senate has “broad constitutional power” to subpoena election-related materials.
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