2020 Election Audits Costing Millions but Not in the Way You Think

Arizona’s Republican led state Senate hired Cyber Ninjas to review the election results for Maricopa County. Unfortunately, these ninjas had no experience doing election audits and, apparently, not much experience doing any kind of forensic investigating. They did not maintain custody of the equipment, they did not maintain surveillance on the equipment and they allowed unauthorized people to access the equipment.

The result? The state decertified the equipment which means that the County needs to replace all of it. Since it was leased, they have to buy out the lease from Dominion. And then destroy it. In a deal with the state, which threatened to withhold $700 million in state funding if the county didn’t turn over their routers, the state Senate agreed not to do that if the county agreed to pay the $3 million to replace the election equipment. Credit: AZCentral

In Pennsylvania, another fight broke out when the state started a similar audit. The Pennsylvania Department of State said that they would decertify all voting equipment in all 67 counties in the state if the chain of custody was broken. The state says that could cost up to $40 million. Credit: Reuters

The FBI is investigating a situation in Lake County, Ohio, where a private laptop was connected to the state network in the office of the Board of Commissioners Chairman John Hamercheck, allowing this person to capture network traffic. This is similar to the investigation going on in Mesa County, Colorado. Credit: Washington Post . This data was given to MyPillow guy and used at his August non-cyber-symposium event where he was supposed to show us how the election was hacked and did not.

As I reported the other day, in the Mesa County investigation, images of the hard drives of the county’s election counting equipment were uploaded to the Internet. Images of all of the counties passwords were also posted on the Internet.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Iranian Hackers breached the network of newspaper chain Lee Enterprises to test modifying and creating content in the chain’s newspapers. The Justice Department recently indicted these hackers.

All of these, along with other similar events, are costing governments across the country millions of dollars in investigation costs, added labor including overtime, additional security expenses, legal expenses, replaced equipment, downtime and other costs.

All of this money is coming out of taxpayers’ pockets.

While this may be justified, if this was done within channels – which the people wanting the audits don’t trust, the cost would dramatically less.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. All of the recounts, all of the audits, even if they are done within channels still cost tens of millions – probably hundreds of millions.

Of course there is no tally of all of these costs. But you and I get to pay for them.

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