In the wake of the Maricopa County audit of the 2020 election results, one GOP Arizona state senator is demanding that the state’s electors — which went for President Joe Biden — be recalled, and a new election be conducted in the state.
In a Twitter thread on Thursday, state Sen. Wendy Rogers said the revelations from the audit were severe enough that she thought the election needed to be rerun.
“I have heard enough,” Rogers tweeted.
“With the tens of thousands of ballots mailed without being requested, the over ten thousand people who voted after registering after November 3rd, the failure of Maricopa to turn over the 40% machines, the passwords that Dominion still refuses to turn over, & tens of thousands of unauthorized queries demonstrating how insecure the election was, I call for the Biden electors to be recalled to Arizona & a new election must be conducted,” she wrote.
“Arizona’s electors must not be awarded fraudulently & we need to get this right.”
to turn over, & tens of thousands of unauthorized queries demonstrating how insecure the election was, I call for the Biden electors to be recalled to Arizona & a new election must be conducted. Arizona’s electors must not be awarded fraudulently & we need to get this right.
— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) July 15, 2021
On Friday, Rogers further called for an audit of all 50 states’ results from the 2020 election.
#AuditAll50States to #DrainTheSwamp and put #AmericaFirst!!! 🔥🔥🔥🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🙏🙏🙏
— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) July 17, 2021
Rogers was quoting from a statement by the cybersecurity firm auditing the election in Maricopa County — Cyber Ninjas. According to Newsweek, Cyber Ninjas founder Doug Logan told the Arizona state Senate this week, “Thousands of names were added to the voting rolls after election day, but are recorded as casting a ballot in the 2020 election.”
Logan also told the Senate that up to 74,000 records for mail-in ballots were missing from Maricopa County — Arizona’s most populous jurisdiction, home to Phoenix. The ballots were received but there was no record of them being sent by elections officials, according to Logan.
NOW I get why Maricopa County and Biden admin fought tooth and nail to prevent an independent audit. 74,000 absentee ballot mail-in records missing, 25K duplicates, voter rolls a mess, bleed throughs, tens of thousands of ballots on demand, admin passwords issues. A disaster.
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) July 15, 2021
The lead auditor also said his findings lent support to a theory that’s taken on the name “SharpieGate.”
Ballots in Maricopa County are supposed to use a type of paper called VoteSecure which doesn’t let markers like Sharpies bleed through the sheet. However, auditors reportedly found that Sharpies caused significant voter discrepancies in the Maricopa County tally.
Another auditor and digital security expert, Ben Cotton, said the security on Maricopa County’s election systems was so poorly secured it could be hacked in under 10 minutes.
“We know through public record, public statements, that an element of the election system was actually compromised or breached during the course of the November 2020 election,” he said.
“The registration server that was public-facing did have unauthorized access to that in cybersecurity terms, it was breached. We know that the county has accepted that as an unauthorized breach because they actually issued a letter to a small subset of the voters who were affected by that breach.”
Cotton also said auditors found 37,000 queries on an elections system in one day for using a blank password; the system only contained eight accounts, making this highly unusual activity on the system, to say the least. The issue is that chain of custody information might have been compromised because several individuals might have gotten access and run multiple processes under one account.
“Accountability is out the window, from an individual aspect,” Cotton said.
Auditors also said 11,326 voters that weren’t on Nov. 7 voter rolls were suddenly on the voter rolls on Dec. 4.
Now, granted, the likelihood that all 50 states will be audited or that Arizona’s 11 electoral votes will be decided by a new election is roughly similar to your chances of finding both Jimmy Hoffa and D.B. Cooper alive, well and managing a Quiznos in Cincinnati that they co-own.
Still, if there’s something behind Cyber Ninjas’ allegations, the voting process in Arizona needs to be put under the microscope. The 11 electoral votes in the state aren’t likely to swing — but there are plenty of people like state Sen. Wendy Rogers who don’t believe the voting process was on the up-and-up — and it’s not because they believe “the big lie” or are carrying water for QAnon.
Instead, it’s people who are losing faith in our election processes — and are seeing Democrats trying to erode that faith further by passing an electoral power-grab at the federal level. That’s going to be poisonous for our republic going forward. It’s something that needs to be squared away to restore trust in the integrity of our elections.
