Arizona auditors now say voter data is intact, after sparking GOP feud
CNN)Auditors hired by the Arizona state Senate backtracked Tuesday from claims that a key database had been deleted from Maricopa County's elections servers -- admitting in a hearing held by the Senate Republicans overseeing the audit that the data is intact and they'd been looking the wrong way.
The blunder was the latest embarrassment for state Senate President Karen Fann and the Republicans who sought the audit, which is being overseen by a company called Cyber Ninjas.
In
a letter last week to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Fann wrote -- in claims that have since been proved false -- that "the main database for all election related data" for the 2020 election in Arizona's most populous county "has been removed," and asked the board for an explanation.
The Twitter account for the Senate's audit went even further, saying: "Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the 2020 election cycle days before the election equipment was delivered to the audit. This is spoliation of evidence!"
Fact-checking allegations of irregularities in Arizona audit
Former President Donald Trump also seized on Fann's claim of a deleted database, saying in a statement over the weekend: "The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the Forensic Audit, is up in arms."
But, Maricopa County officials explained and auditors acknowledged Tuesday, those conducting the audit had made a technical mistake and the database was never deleted.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, and the county's Board of Supervisors -- four of five of whom are Republicans -- responded to the claims with
a scathing letter Monday that laid out a series of mistakes auditors had made. Among them: They had not properly reconstructed the RAID storage array used by the county when creating copies of the hard drives, which left them unable to access files that otherwise would have been readily accessible.
Ben Cotton, the founder of CyFIR, one of the companies involved in the Arizona Senate's audit, said in the closed hearing held by Senate Republicans on Tuesday that the county's explanation was right.
"All of this, however, may be a moot point because subsequently I've been able to recover all of the deleted files and I have access to that data," Cotton said.