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Sorry, it's taking a while to type up the other testimony. Responding to your points, supported by the expert witness testimony:
Error rate is high though expert was not permitted to see every ballot. Witness was provided a sample of 348 from 6 vote centers, 50 of them had been rejected due to being printed incorrectly. He could see the same, very visible error, on other ballots he was not allowed to inspect ballots on. This error could not have been machine error. It was 100% intentional, would need to have been inserted by someone running a script on the printer from a secure laptop or by someone from the Election Management System setting the ballot definitions.
Maricopa is a mixed county, with a substantial number of blue and red precints., you can layer by party majority. There is a voter suppression issue, where if this happened in primarily red areas it could be considered voter suppression due to extended lines. If this happened primarily in blue counties, it could have been a way to force the ballots into "duplication" where ballots could have been triplicated, quadrupled, etc.
One witness, Steve Richner, testified that they don't count the number of ballots they transport to main tabulation center (where all the rejected ballots would go.) They count them at the main tabulation center, but not at the voting center. This is a vulnerability.
If it is proven to be intentional, (and the expert witness is very sure), then what is the intention? The only reason someone would intentionally cause a wide spread printer/tabulator error is to affect the election in some way. Maybe they were trying to throw it in favor of Kari Lake! But with the testimony at hand, I don't think it's possible to say that there was no significant, widespread fraud.
It was determined that it could not have done accidentally. The expert explained that security protocols on the print spooler and the Election Management System mean that it would need to be done intentionally or with willful negligence. All the ballot definitions are tested before the election.
Information Security Officer witness testimony begins around the 2 hour mark. (the 8 minutes before this was boring stuff establishing his credentials as an expert in root cause analysis and other things.) Honestly, the whole hour is worth listening to, but I will type out my best, though incomplete, transcript.
He reviewed the FOIA publicly available information, and then was permitted to examine ballots the day before the trial from 6 vote centers. The ballots had been re-tabulated for the recounts, and Maricopa county was unable to "map them back" so chain of custody "system of record" was broken when he did his inspection.
Plaintiff lawyer: "Were some of the ballots that you inspected duplicated ballots?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes sir, some of them are.
Plaintiff lawyer: "And what is a duplicated ballot?"
Information Security Officer Witness: Duplicated ballots are when there is an issue with a ballot and it cannot be read through the tabulation system. Therefore it is duplicated, and that duplication is then run through the system.
And is that duplication then the ballot that is actually tabulated and counted?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes sir, the way the process works is that the original ballot needs to have the duplication ID, which Maricopa did. The part where they failed in the statue is that the duplication ballot is supposed to be easily relatable ot the original ballot. They could not find the duplicate ballot that was tabulated.
So you inspected the original ballot that was duplicated?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes sir
And your understanding of Arizona law is that the duplicate ballot and the original ballot are supposed to be maintained together, physically?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes that's a EAC requirement. [EAC is US Elections Assistance Commission.]
And the duplicate ballot which was the ballot that was counted, was not there?
Information Security Officer Witness: No sir, it was not.
Out of the 348 that were set aside, how many were printed from a ballot on demand printer?
Information Security Officer Witness: [lengthy answer, I'm not typing it all out, ended by] 48 of those existed because there was a 19 inch image of a ballot printed on a 20 inch paper.
It's your testimony on inspections of these ballots, that you determined that there was a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch ballot paper?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes that is accurate.
How did you determine that it was a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch paper?
Information Security Officer Witness: These ballot images are a PDF file that is stored with configuration settings, which is created on the EMS, in this case EED. That application creates the style, the definition. It is loaded on the tabulator, how it is evaluated when the image is created. That is a print job, to use the common term, that is sent to the printer.
And how did you determine that it was a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch paper?
Information Security Officer Witness: I can determine that 100% of the ballots are projected, because the mechanics of aprinter, the feeds are not always accurate. On the 20 inch ballots you can see the same borders of the image. On the 20 inch ballots you can see the corners in the feed. On the 19 inch ballots you can see the corners well within the margins.
Did you physically measure the ballots?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes I did, with a ruler
Given your experience and training with electronic voting systems for 9 years, can you tell what the cause of a 19 image being projected on a 20 inch paper would be?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes, there are only two ways it can happen.
Can you tell the court the two ways?
Information Security Officer Witness: One way is by changing printer adjustments, making the printer settings override the image file. The other is through the application side. If so, there would have to be a 19inch ballot definition.
Where does that definition reside?
Information Security Officer Witness: Based on the testimony, it was on the laptop that was connected to the printer, the print spooler, that controls the print jobs.
Is there any way, in your opinion, for a 19 inch ballot image to be projected on a 20 inch ballot by accident?
Information Security Officer Witness: No sir. Because the setting in the configurations in the procedures that are used, cannot allow that. These are not a "bump against the printer, and the settings change." I reviewed the evidence, and the printers are configured via script. This takes away the human error of someone mis-coding the instructions on the printer.
Is it permissible to have two different ballot definitions in the same election with respect to the ballot image?
Information Security Officer Witness: No sir. If you have two different styles, you are assessing them differently. That can also produce forgery, there is only supposed to be one ballot style per voting options (people in same regional election).
What effect would a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch piece of paper have when it is placed in these vote center tabulators?
Information Security Officer Witness: It would cause it to be rejected. According to Dominion's documentation, they perform hundreds of checks on the physical paper ballot that is inserted. They state that it can reject the ballot for incorrect margin. It causes a paper jam issue. A tech, Aaron Smith, reported that these same errors occurred in Maricopa county during the election - there were paper jams errors, and when he examined there was no paper.
What is your understanding of Mr. Smith's role during the 2022 election?
Information Security Officer Witness: He followed every procedure he was instructed to follow. He put a good solid effort forward to resolve the issues, it finally came to the point he could not resolve the issues according to the procedures and he requested a replacement tabulator, which happened to be misconfigured.
Witness is asked about his printer experience. He goes into his extensive experience with printers, including solving security issues with top secret printing.
Do you have any concern about the security of the ballots given your findings yesterday?
Information Security Officer Witness: If it is ok with the court, I have to answer this in two ways. First, I observed that ballots were being put out and sampled. I observed more improperly imaged ballots that were not inspected that were there. To answer the question, those should be secured. I handle everything from physical security to accrediting buildings for classified information storage, I have been a classified courier. As a forensic investigator I understand everything about chain of custody. And what I will say is, the facility, and security, and chain of custody at the buik and tabulation center is highly inaccurate and those ballots can be tampered with.
Information Security Officer Witness: For example, security seals were only placed on the boxes that we inspected, and that was due to the court order.
On the cross examination:
I believe you testified that you examined some ballots that had been duplicated, and you testified that the duplicates were not kept next to the ballots?
Mr Jarett said that it would take them a week to try to find them.
I am running out of space and time tonight. Tomorrow I will try to cover the next witness. Sorry this project is taking a while. I did not want to be the person who drops a long video without a written summary/transcript, but making things takes time.
One of the things most astonishing to me is how little concern is given this. The Plaintiffs are reminded that they only have 6 hours to present their case. The judge says that he "doesn't want anyone burning the midnight oil on this." This is a case that could change who the Governor of the State is and the judge doesn't want it to be given significant time.
I will not make you transcribe even more. I will watch the whole video and the day 2 testimony as well, if I can find it, along with further days if they exist (I see the description says day 1, presumably there are more days? I don't see any other days on Viva Frei's channel after searching). But, I will need some time to go through it all. I will probably post my thoughts on it in the next culture war thread in a few days.
Also, is this the trial court's opinion? The date and the judge's name seems to match up, but I want to double check. The trial judge's opinion, and not the appeals court's, is most important here since they are level that deals with matters of fact while appeals courts only deal with matters of law.
Side note: It is incredibly annoying trying to search for a court opinion and only finding news articles talking about the opinion without ever linking to it. So many news articles do not link the primary source they are citing. Side side note: this also makes Wikipedia much worse since you aren't allowed to use primary sources, so you are stuck using high quality secondary sources like news articles that cite the primary source. So, it can be a real headache trying to find the actual source of something on Wikipedia.
Day II can be found at https://youtube.com/live/uahoqdJVc0Q?si=Wu_ZZXF5fR-U8Cx2. There was no day III.
That is the trial courts opinion. I disagree with the judge on the following:
First, there are things that are touched on in the trial that the judge did not allow to be tried. Specifically, there were issues with ballot chain of custody and seals being broken, that in the pre-trial the judge forbade any line of inquiry on. When you listen to the trial recording, you can hear witnesses occasionally mention the seals not being present, but the judge did not permit this to be investigated and does not include it in any of his own rationale. If it was included, it provides another mechanism than voter suppression to affect the election results.
Another thing is that very little time was allowed to investigate and present the case. This isn't like a murder trial that goes on for weeks. The plaintiff's expert was only permitted to review a small handful of ballots in less than a day, the day before the trial. The lawyers only had the night before the trial to assess their strategy based on the evidence the expert provided. They had 0 days to pursue leads that this investigation generated. If there seems to be gaps in their argument, then that makes sense with what they were given and does not indicate there was nothing there inside the gaps, just that they were unable and not permitted to dig further.
The last thing that isn't really explained in the judge's reasoning is that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of the election in the State of Arizona, was also the Democratic nominee for this election. If the Plaintiff is correct, Katie Hobbs directly benefited from the problems in Maricopa County. The Judge writes at the beginning of his opinion that "this Court must presume the good faith of their official conduct as a matter of law" without including any consideration of cui bono.
Now onto the matters of fact. The Judge ignores some of the most credible witness testimony, that of Clay Parikh, because the Judge decided that:
This is the judge's own opinion on a technological matter. This is not something a witness testified to. I do not know the judge's technical expertise, maybe he became CompTia A+ certified in his spare time. I don't know. I do know some of the expert witness credentials though, and Parikh seemed very competent and very confident.
And Parikh gave two possible explanations for the 19inch issue. One was someone with admin access to the laptop attached to the printer changing settings, one was someone changing the settings on the Election Management System. The judge, in his own technological opinion, ruling out the definitions in the Election Management System (maybe someone made a duplicate definition, and set those to 19 inch, and some ballots were printed out under the duplicate definition and some not), does not rule out an admin changing printer settings, and that this itself could not be an accident because the printer settings were controlled via a script.
Even the things the Judge admits is pretty damning from a "fraud happened here" perspective, but did not supply evidence of violations of the very limited topics the Judge allowed inquiry into. For example, he does not deny that there is evidence that "Runbeck employees were permitted to submit about 50 ballot packets of family and friends into the ballot stream improperly." He claims that this evidence is countered by Maricopa County Election officials being there to supervise and not reporting anything of the sort, but that is equally evidence of Maricopa County officials not paying enough attention to catch fraud or being participants in the fraud. There is a huge element of "We investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing" here.
Lastly, Richard Baris is a poll director who testified to the statistical unlikeliness of how few votes were counted in this election.
He also testified that anything that impacts election day specifically will have a disparate impact on Republican voters who are more likely to vote on election day than vote early.
What my take away from this is, even if Maricopa County is just incredibly incompetent at running elections, this incompetence is indistinguishable from fraud significant enough to sway an election. And if that's the case, how on Earth can we claim that the government is run by the will of the people?
I watched the section you highlighted, and yeah that was bad. The witness to me like someone who knew he fucked up and was trying to give technically correct answers. To play armchair lawyer for a sec, I think the lawyer, rather than trying to get the witness to speculate on why X happened, I might have phrased it as "In a typical scenario what measures are taken to prevent X?"
As far as some of the other anomalies, as a team lead and someone who teaches a lot of board games, you can teach someone something but they don't know it until they've done it. You're in a situation you don't really know how to deal with and you're trying to avert a crisis which leads to more fuck ups. And they can't just do a redo of the election.
An audit definitely seems called for here. Who set the machines should be pretty damn traceable. I'm not convinced it was intentional rather than incompetence because that would be pretty damn brazen. It would be very easy to end up with a target on your back.
You think so, but what odds do you want to give on the password for the laptop being a shared admin password that 20+ people know?
I have unfortunately seen a lot of stuff like this while working in IT. There was one school district that stored all parent passwords in the clear on a csv file.
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