Updated on May 13.
Led by the Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, a state Senate-backed audit of 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County, Arizona, is currently underway at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. With the aid of high-tech cameras and UV lights, the audit includes a full hand recount of ballots and a thorough investigation of other election materials.
John Brakey, Co-founder of Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections (AUDIT), told CBS Station KPHO about a theory that 40,000 ballots used in the 2020 election were allegedly flown in from the “Southeast part of the world.” The audit team is using 5K cameras to look for fold marks on ballots because “92-percent of all the ballots here should’ve been folded because they came in through an envelope.” Brakey said that he was “on a mission for facts.”
Additionally, traces of bamboo fibers in the ballots could be used as evidence that the ballots were manufactured abroad. Brakey explains that people in Southeast Asia use “bamboo in their paper processing.” He added that while he does not believe that the bamboo theory will be proven correct, “I’m just saying that is part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about and this is a way to do it.”
Without factoring in possibly fraudulent ballots, Biden won Maricopa county by more than 45,000 votes and beat Trump in the state by over 10,000 votes. A “progressive Democrat,” Brakey said in the interview with CBS Station KPHO that the only way to change people’s minds about something is by presenting facts, which he claims will be done through the audit.
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Brakey’s organization AUDIT has been around for 17 years and has contested several elections nationwide in the last five years. He said, “I’ve sued Alabama. I negotiated in Virginia. I sued in Ohio, and I’ve been in 18 states, just working elections.” In a Twitter video from the official Maricopa Arizona Audit account, he stated, “People need to know if elections are real or not.”
In a report titled “The Immaculate Deception” released in December, the advisor to the former President Trump, Peter Navarro, called out several irregularities about the election. “In Arizona, which has the narrowest alleged Biden victory margin at 10,457 votes, there are nearly 10 times that number of possible illegal ballots; and the ratio of the alleged Biden vote lead to possible illegal ballots is even higher for Georgia,” stated the report.
Audit team denied access and information
On May 12 and 13, the audit team posted breaking updates, including evidence of a “directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle” that was removed just days before being sent to the team. They also found “boxes of ballots” with “significant discrepancies between the number of ballots therein and the batch reports.”
The Maricopa County officials have refused to hand over routers and router images to the audit team. In a letter addressed to Senate Audit Liaison Ken Bennett, the Maricopa County Attorney’s office said that providing access to routers would pose “a significant security risk” that could threaten the lives of law enforcement personnel.
“We had previously believed that the risk would be eliminated by redacting the law enforcement data on the routers and not producing it. But we were informed that redaction did not eliminate the risk… We also learned that if criminal elements or others gained access to this data, it might compromise county and federal law enforcement efforts,” Deputy County Attorney Joseph LaRue wrote in the letter.
Hannah Klain, the daughter of President Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, signed a letter asking the Department of Justice to deploy federal monitors to the audit site. “We are also concerned that, under the senate’s audit procedures, the auditors are preparing to cause imminent violations of laws prohibiting voter intimidation,” the letter states.
The letter was signed by three groups, including the Brennan Center for Justice that is funded by American billionaire George Soros. The Brennan Center has teamed up with several Wall Street firms and law firms to pressure states to abandon election reform proposals.
However, critics believe that the failure to provide critical information needed to conduct the audit is a major red flag that calls election integrity into question. Bennett said, “Here we are several weeks into the audit, and we still don’t have some of the information that was subpoenaed by the state Senate from Maricopa County.”
“They told me personally weeks ago that they had taken all the routers and the internet connections and the hubs and everything out of the building so they could send it to us, and we would have the logs when we got into those devices, we would be able to see those logs, that nothing was connected to the Internet during the election. And lo and behold, they don’t show up in the equipment that they said would be delivered to us,” he said.
The Maricopa County audit was initially scheduled to finish by around May 14. However, the process will likely be temporarily paused on May 14 for previously scheduled Phoenix high school graduations in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, and continued afterwards. According to an Arizona Republic article, Senate audit liaison Bennett said that there is “no deadline” for the audit and that “We have as much time as we need to do it right.”
With reporting from Prakash Gogoi.
