PHOENIX β Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli is asking Maricopa Countyβs top prosecutor to investigate claims of security gaps in election systems in three counties.
But at a news conference Wednesday at the Capitol, the Lake Havasu City Republican refused to share what he said is a declaration from a βcybersecurity expertββ β whom he also would not name β claiming data and equipment used in the 2020 and 2022 elections βhad been altered.ββ He said all that has been turned over to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican.
Mitchell got what appears to be a declaration delivered to her electronically and will look at the information, said her press aide Jeanine LβEcuyer.
But LβEcuyer said Mitchell was βamusedββ by the claims because they suggest problems in the software are βsupposedly undetectable.ββ
βShe wondered how further investigation would allow us to find something that is undetectable,ββ LβEcuyer said.
Borrelli is undeterred.
βThere is probably cause here of a crime,β he said.
βWhat we have here is a breach in security, cybersecurity on our electronic voting systems in our last two elections,β Borrelli said. βWe need to make sure this gets done and is addressed properly before the 2024 election.β
He said any probe would affect Maricopa, Pima and Coconino counties, which he said use the same kind of equipment.
At the news conference, Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, said there was also evidence the master encryption keys for the electronic voting system were in a database of plain text, βprotected by nothing other than a Windows log-in where credentials are easily bypassed.β
If all this sounds familiar, itβs because both issues are carbon copies of claims filed by Kari Lake last week.
Lake asked the U.S. Supreme Court to give her a βdo-overββ of the lawsuit she lost claiming voting machines are inherently untrustworthy and the only way to ensure an accurate tally is with a hand count. Lake told the justices she has new information that was not available when she and Mark Finchem first filed suit in 2022.
βWhile this breach has the game changing magnitude of the Alliesβ deciphering Germanyβs ENIGMA machine in World War II, it is far worse,ββ Lake told the court. Rogers on Wednesday repeated that quote word-for-word.
βI have no idea what youβre talking about,ββ Borrelli said when told Rogersβ claim is a verbatim copy of Lakeβs.
These kinds of allegations are nothing new for Borrelli and Rogers. They have been proponents of claims β all so far rejected by multiple courts in multiple lawsuits β that the 2020 and 2022 elections were somehow rigged.
But Borrelli, for his part, would not say Wednesday whether he believes the official certifications showing that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in Arizona and Lake lost to Katie Hobbs in the 2022 gubernatorial race.
βThis is not about Biden or Trump,ββ he said, as Rogers called the reporter asking the question βa radical.ββ
βItβs not about Lake or Hobbs,ββ Borrelli said. βTo me, this is a national security issue, period.ββ
He also brushed aside questions of whether there was any actual evidence of a data breach.
βWhat we do know is over the last three and a half years is that the third-party vendor had full access to MCTEC (Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center) and workspaces,ββ he said, referring to Dominion Voting Systems, which provides the county with the counting equipment. βAnd they even got badged in by a county employee into the server room, unsupervised.ββ
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, said thereβs a big flaw in all of the claims that the voting system is insecure.
He pointed out that state law requires officials from both major parties to select specific precincts or vote centers after each election as part of a verification process. They then pick out specific races and do a full hand count to ensure that tally matches up within acceptable margins to what the machines tallied.
In no case has there been a finding of a mismatch.
βWhy isnβt this revealed in any post-election hand count audits if manipulated?ββ he asked of the allegations.
Richer said alterations to programming also would show up in pre- and post-election tests of each countyβs equipment conducted by the Secretary of Stateβs Office.
He also pointed out there have been multiple lawsuits following both the 2020 and 2022 elections claiming the machines were not properly counting the ballots. In each case the judges who heard the arguments found nothing wrong.
βAre we really still doing this?ββ he asked of the latest round of allegations.