Yesterday’s Arizona Senate/Auditors meeting was interesting. Taking the statements at face value, things are much worse for Maricopa County than I thought. The issue of no matching serial numbers on “spoiled” ballots that had to be duplicated appears to be an outright violation of state law (Bennett read the relevant text from the law in the meeting).
I think the Board of Supervisors shot themselves in the foot by not attending. As it was, the auditors were able to carefully and clearly lay out some preliminary findings without interruption. The BOS missed an opportunity to disrupt and confuse the presentation. In their place, I would have attended, but maybe they were busy packing for abrupt overseas vacations.
In fact, the auditors were able to explain the deleted directory, and its recovery, in enough clarified detail that the lefty mainstream media has to spin it away.
Arizona auditors backtrack, say no election data destroyed
Firms hired to run a partisan audit of the 2020 election for Senate Republicans in Arizona said Tuesday that data was not destroyed, reversing earlier allegations that election officials eliminated evidence
The auditors did not backtrack.
The auditors had not alleged that “election officials eliminated evidence.” What they had said was that a directory had been deleted. They did not say by whom, and they never said the data was “destroyed.”
In the computer world, “deleted” means that a file has been marked in the Master File Table to indicate that the physical portion of the drive where it is written is now available for reuse. But until a new file does get written over it, the data can be recovered simply by editing the MFT to say that’s still a live file, and space is not available for reuse. And that is what the auditors did. (Real pros, please be patient with my babytalk explanation.)
The difference between “deleted” and “destroyed” is why I have file space overwrite tools to permanently clear any personal data from old drives before tossing them out.
Despite the spin, as described, someone did delete the directory, and was stupid enough to not overwrite the old data. And to my way of thinking, that violates election data retention laws.
I briefly considered the possibility that “reporter” Jonathan J. Cooper might be computer-ignorant or stupid, rather than dishonest. Then I realized that although the story is on ABC, he’s listed as Associated Press. That swings the pointer way over to the dishonest side of the ignorant/liar probability meter.
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