The Arizona Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal filed by Arizona GOP chairwoman, Dr. Kelli Ward challenging the results in Maricopa County after a lower court dismissed her suit last week
KTAR reports:
Ward filed a notice of appeal with the state’s highest court late Friday.
The Supreme Court confirmed receipt of the case Monday and said it would decide the matter without oral argument.
The parties were ordered to file simultaneous briefs of no longer than 3,000 words and an appendix with their exhibits by noon Monday.
Last week, the Arizona Republicans were granted a review of 100 random ballots. The results? It showed a three percent average of tainted or invalid ballots.
In Arizona, it turns out that 3% of the votes cast in the 100 count vote sampling were tainted or worse. This would be, if carried forward, approximately 90,000 votes more than we would need to win the State. Now we were granted a much larger sample to work with. Wow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020
President Trump reacted to the news of the tainted ballots on Twitter last week, writing, “In Arizona, it turns out that 3% of the votes cast in the 100 count vote sampling were tainted or worse. This would be, if carried forward, approximately 90,000 votes more than we would need to win the State. Now we were granted a much larger sample to work with. Wow!”
According to Dr. Ward, 2 percent of the ballots studied changed from Trump to Biden.
She told KTAR she would “go to the end to prove” that “President Trump won this election by a landslide in Arizona.
Unlike the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, it appears the highest court in AZ still has a desire to at least appear fair and objective based on its decision to take up this very important case.
Can You Hack an Election in 7 Minutes?
Can an election be hacked in seven minutes?
Andrew Appel, a professor at Princeton University set out to do just that, hack into a voting machine. In order to do this he could have tried traditional ways of hacking or writing malware to sneak on to a machine at a polling place that are left unguarded for days, but he decided it was much easier to just buy one online.
For the cost of a whole $82, Appel became the proud owner of a behemoth machine called Sequoia AVC Advantage. This machine is one of the oldest and most vulnerable in the US and is unfortunately used in places like Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
No sooner did a team of bewildered deliverymen roll the 250-pound device into a conference room near Appel’s cramped, third-floor office than the professor set to work. He summoned a graduate student named Alex Halderman, who could pick the machine’s lock in seven seconds.
Clutching a screwdriver, he deftly wedged out the four ROM chips—they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate—making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes.
To mark the achievement, his student snapped a photo of Appel—oblong features, messy black locks and a salt-and-pepper beard—grinning for the camera, fists still on the circuit board, as if to look directly into the eyes of the American taxpayer: Don’t look at me—you’re the one who paid for this thing.
Appel’s mischief might be called an occupational asset: He is part of a diligent corps of so-called cyber-academics—professors who have spent the past decade serving their country by relentlessly hacking it.
Electronic voting machines—particularly a design called Direct Recording Electronic, or DRE’s—took off in 2002, in the wake of Bush v. Gore. For the ensuing 15 years, Appel and his colleagues have deployed every manner of stunt to convince the public that the system is pervasively unsecure and vulnerable.
Beginning in the late ’90s, Appel and his colleague, Ed Felten, a pioneer in computer engineering now serving in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, marsha led their Princeton students together at the Center for Information Technology Policy (where Felten is still director).
There, they relentlessly hacked one voting machine after another, transforming the center into a kind of Hall of Fame for tech mediocrity: reprogramming one popular machine to play Pac-Man; infecting popular models with self-duplicating malware; discovering keys to voting machine locks that could be ordered on eBay.
Eventually, the work of the professors and Ph.D. students grew into a singular conviction: It was only a matter of time, they feared, before a national election—an irresistible target—would invite an attempt at a coordinated cyberattack.
There is no singular national body that regulates the security or even execution of what happens on Election Day, and there never has been. It’s a process regulated state by state.
The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there. They’ve seen the skeletons of code inside electronic voting’s digital closet, and they’ve mastered the equipment’s vulnerabilities perhaps better than anyone (a contention the voting machine companies contest, of course).
They insist the elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized. But the threat, the cyber experts say, starts with the machines that tally the votes and crucially keep a record of them—or, in some cases, don’t.
Cleary hacking into voting machines is an easy task, which is a major concern for our democracy. If powerful people with money and resources want to stay in control, we now know they can make that happen very easily.
A Witness Has Alleged that Voting Machine USB Drives Had Totals Altered Overnight in Nevada
At an evidentiary hearing on Dec. 3., the Trump campaign brought forth a witness that alleges the memory disks used to store vote totals from the election machines used during the early vote period had the vote tallies mysteriously changed overnight.
The witness said the vote tallies were collected each voting day and stored on USB drives overnight.
“What they would do is they would log these disks in and out. Good practice. And the disks had a serial number on them. And numerous times that disk would be logged out with one vote total on it and logged back in the next morning during the early vote period with a different number on it. Sometimes more, sometimes less,” Binnall said.
“What that means is that literally in the dead of night, votes were appearing, and books are disappearing on these machines.”
Binnall said that the USB drives were not encrypted and the voting machineswere not password protected. “And they were hooked up with laptops, then where the laptops themselves could have been compromised,” he added.
The allegation about the vote total alterations was one of several Binnall presented during an evidentiary hearing, the first of its kind for the Trump legal team’s six-state post-election effort.
LIVE: Trump legal team presents voter fraud evidence to Nevada judge (Dec. 3) | NTD https://t.co/I6Py1F0iX0
— NTD News (@news_ntd) December 3, 2020
At the core of the election challenge in Nevada are several batches of ballots that the Trump campaign alleges were either cast, processed, or counted illegally, including roughly 40,000 voters who allegedly voted twice. The campaign is also arguing that the signatures on more than 130,000 ballots were verified solely by a machine in contravention of Nevada’s election law.
At this point it seems that no amount of evidence will convince a Democrat or main stream media that there was voter fraud.
Full story here.
