Arizona GOP election auditors suffer embarrassing setback after GOP official blows up their latest false claim

According to the Press-Enterprise, the private "auditors" behind the Arizona GOP's controversial recount of ballots in Maricopa County have been forced to admit their claim about sensitive elections server data was a lie after being publicly blasted by the Republican county recorder.

"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," reported Eric Bradner. "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."

Previously, the Twitter account associated with the audit had tweeted, "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!" County Recorder Stephen Richer smacked this claim down as "insane lies."

"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," noted the report. "'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. Cotton did not directly acknowledge that auditors had erred and that characterizing the files as having been deleted was false. But his explanation made clear that the database had never been deleted."

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