The Arizona phony election “audit” just backfired

| 5:00 pm EDT August 3, 2021
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Last week, Arizona Republicans issued a fresh set of subpoenas to the Maricopa County Election Board and to Dominion Voting Systems demanding a wide range of information including five months of network logs, passwords and security keys, and the physical routers that run the county’s network. The subpoena was not authorized by a Senate vote and had a completely unrealistic deadline of less than one week.

The so-called audit was supposed to be finished several weeks ago and the voting machines have already been returned to the county. So why would Cyber Ninjas need passwords and security keys now?

Security keys protect the machines so that only authorized software updates can be installed. They are how the machine knows to trust that the new software came from the manufacturer and not some nefarious hacker. There is no legitimate reason why someone auditing a past election would need to know this information. On the other hand, this knowledge would be invaluable to a hacker attempting to tamper with voting machines in a future election.

Let me repeat that. The only purpose for requesting Dominion’s security keys would be to install unauthorized software onto voting machines, either in Arizona or elsewhere.

This suspicious request did not go unnoticed. The county refused to comply with the subpoenas, listing 11 objections and concluded by saying “release your report and be prepared to defend any accusations of misdeeds in court.” Dominion promised to “seek discovery of all materials related to Cyber Ninjas and other contractors’ copying, review, transfer, storage and any other use of Dominion’s physical and intellectual property.”

It will be interesting to see how Cyber Ninjas and Arizona Republicans attempt to rationalize this intrusive request when the FBI comes a-knocking.