Following the Maricopa County audit of the 2020 general election performed in mid-2021, then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs urged the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to replace their Dominion tabulators with new equipment claiming that the machines may have been tampered with during the audit.
Then-Senate President Karen Fann rebuttled:
The Senate has concerns about the latest accusation from the Secretary of State and Maricopa County regarding replacing the machines used in the election, over concerns that they are safe to use
Maricopa County hired firms to perform audits after the 2020 election and relied on their Logic & Accuracy tests (L & A) to declare equipment safe to use and tamper-free. The County can now use those same L & A tests after the Senate audit. If it can’t, their L & A tests are invalid. And if their machines can’t undergo a forensic audit to verify what happened, then it never should have approved those machines to be used in an election in the first place.
The machines were nonetheless decertified and replaced to the tune of $3,000,000 of the taxpayer’s money, despite the EAC offering guidance on how to re-secure voting machines if tampering is suspected. It would have been significantly cheaper than $3 million dollars. The purchase of new machines, however, gave investigators a pristine starting point for their investigation.
Maricopa County’s 2022 Election Day was riddled with problems from the moment the polls opened. One instance of the widespread problems with tabulators rejecting ballots was documented by a Maricopa resident here. Candidate for Governor Kari Lake sued over the discrepancy, among other issues, and was granted a trial, but ultimately fell short after the court severely restricted what her attorneys were permitted to argue.
One of the questions that many citizens asked regarding this widespread rejection was “how did this happen if the machines were adequately tested beforehand? How did they pass any form of testing?”
A simple answer: they likely weren’t, despite testimony under oath from Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett to the contrary. The following is from the Lake v. Hobbs trial during Jarrett’s testimony under oath:
Q. And are you following the procedures set forth in the 2019 Election
Procedure Manual when you’re performing the tests of the tabulators prior to
an election?A. That’s correct.
Q. And would that — would those procedures require you to perform logic and
accuracy testing?A. That’s correct.
Q. And what is logic and accuracy testing?
A. So a logic and accuracy test, that is a two different sets of tests for
a federal or a statewide election that requires that a test be performed by
the County itself as well as a test performed by the Secretary of State. So
I don’t oversee the Secretary of State’s logic and accuracy test, I have to
make the equipment available for the Secretary of State’s logic and accuracy
test. For the County’s logic and accuracy test, that is to run test ballots
through; and for the County’s tests, it’s thousands of test ballots through
our tabulation equipment, both the central count tabulation equipment as well
as the tabulation equipment that would be used at the vote centers, to make
sure that they are accurately programmed to tabulate those ballots.
Jarrett is correct about the process that is required. A.R.S § 16-449(A) states:
The officer in charge of elections must test precinct voting equipment and central count equipment within
30 days of an election. In the case of federal, statewide or legislative elections, the Arizona Secretary of
State must also test selected equipment within 17 days before the election.
The Logic and Accuracy test was “performed” on October 11th, 2022. On October 12th, 2022, Maricopa County tweeted:
Maricopa County claimed that the Logic and Accuracy testing was satisfactorily completed. Remember Jarrett’s testimony:
“… thousands of test ballots through our tabulation equipment, both the central count tabulation equipment as well as the tabulation equipment that would be used at the vote centers”.
A new report provided to The Gateway Pundit shows the brand new Dominion tabulators used in Maricopa County were likely not tested at all by county officials, and if they were, they were tested inconceivably below the standards of the Arizona Revised Statute.
Each tabulator is equipped with a Lifetime Counter. It is similar to a car’s odometer in that it maintains a count for every single ballot run through the tabulator for the lifetime of the machine, hence the name “Lifetime Counter.” The Lifetime Counter cannot be reset or changed and includes all testing. The following is directly from Dominion’s manual:
When Maricopa County ordered brand new tabulators to replace the old ones, the only ballots that should have been counted on them are ballots that were used for factory testing. This provides a relatively simple starting point in determining if they performed a Logic and Accuracy test. Maricopa County’s Voting Center model requires all tabulators be programmed to accept the 4500 ballot styles utilized and each is required to be tested for every candidate and every contest selection for every ballot style the tabulator accepts. This is to ensure the tabulators function properly on Election Day to avoid a mishap like the 2022 election.
The report and evidence below shows that “82 of the ImageCast Precinct tabulators used for Election Day for the 2022 General Election had Lifetime Counters with less than or equal to 65 total ballots scanned at the time polls opened on November 8th, 2022.”
The following image is an excerpt from the system log files (SLOG) from the tabulator used at Central Christian Church Mesa on Election Day 2022. These were obtained directly from Maricopa County via a Freedom of Information request.
The Lifetime Counter shows just 59 ballots previously scanned on November 8th, 2022:
This is the SLOG file for Paradise Valley Community College showing just 45 ballots on the Lifetime Counter:
This is the SLOG file for Charles W Harris School showing just 57 ballots on the Lifetime Counter:
According to the report:
The number of ballots cast on 82 tabulator Lifetime Counters used on election day are so low that it
precludes even the possibility that they were tested for Logic & Accuracy as required by Arizona State
Statute Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 16‐449 and the Rules and Regulations defined in the 2019 Elections Manual as
adopted by the Secretary of State.
According to Jarrett’s testimony, there should be “thousands of test ballots through our tabulation equipment.” So why are there brand new tabulators with only double digit tallies on the Lifetime Counter when there are over 4,500 different ballot styles programmed on each tabulator? Had these machines been properly tested, it’s likely the 19″ ballot discrepancy that caused extraordinarily long lines on Election Day would have been caught and remedied.
We learned through Jarrett’s testimony in Lake v. Hobbs that this discrepancy has occurred in the past three elections (2022 primaries, 2020 general, and 2020 primaries). Jarrett was still working on the “Root Cause Analysis” that seemingly just begun once this pointed out by Kari Lake’s expert witness Clay Parikh during his examination of the ballots and the discovery of the 19″ ballot instead of the proper 20″ design.
Longer version…”Vote anywhere”…sounds like each tabulator has to have ALL definitions…
But we don’t know if that’s the option or the ability since Hickmann never finishes that thought. pic.twitter.com/lo8GgfrFFM
— CannCon (@CannConActual) January 21, 2023
View the entire report here: Maricopa L&A Test Report
