Yet another Republican-led review of Maricopa County, Arizona’s voting equipment has debunked claims made by top Arizona officials who said the 2020 election results in the Grand Canyon State’s most populous county were tainted by machines being connected to the internet.
According to a report released Wednesday by former Arizona congressman John Shadegg, three independent computer security experts who examined routers and other network equipment used during the 2020 election found “no evidence” that “routers, managed switches, or election devices” used in Maricopa County during the election were ever “connected to the public internet”.
“The special master and expert panel found no evidence of data deletion, data purging, data overwriting, or other destruction of evidence or obstruction of the audit,” he wrote.
Mr Shadegg’s report also found that claims by Arizona Republicans that Maricopa County — which has a large non-white population — was deliberately obstructing the sham audit.
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The review of Maricopa County’s equipment was commissioned as part of an agreement between the county and the Arizona Senate, which had demanded the county turn over its equipment for the partisan “audit” conducted last year by Cyber Ninjas, an outfit with no election experience run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist who believed he could prove the state was won by Donald Trump — not Joe Biden — in November 2020.
Among the outrageous claims made by Cyber Ninjas founder Doug Logan was a proposition that his company could find illegitimate or forged ballots by searching for bamboo fibers in the paper used in counted ballots.
Mr Logan’s company eventually found no signs of fraud in how Maricopa County ran the 2020 election and shut down rather than comply with court orders to release records of how it conducted the audit.