Was the Maricopa County Database ‘Wiped’ Before the Cyber Ninjas Audit?

No.

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After the results of the Maricopa County partisan election “audit” were released on Friday, false rumors of voter fraud in Arizona have been circulating. An article from One American News Network, which has been shared widely on social media, for example, claims that “Maricopa County Election Database Wiped One Day Before Audit.”

According to the article, Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired to conduct the review—who has a history of promoting baseless voter fraud claims—and Ben Cotton, the founder of digital security firm CyFIR and a member of the Arizona audit team, claimed that “an administrator account deleted the entire Maricopa County general election results the day before the audit began.” More specifically, per the article, Cotton maintained that “the EMS server was connected to the internet February 1 and SQL logs indicated election records were wiped that day right before two audits were due to begin on February 2.” The article suggests that Logan “confirmed” this claim. 

The assertion is false.

Maricopa County officials did not wipe out the election database the “day before two audits were due to begin on February 2,” and Maricopa County’s election management server (EMS) is not connected to the internet. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Alfie K

    So the senate republicans are so unlearned about how their own states election system works spent a bunch of time and money recovering and rebuilding the data they wanted because they were to lost to realize it was archived? Or did they not trust the archive? Or did they want to make a story out of nothing because none of their followers understand how the system works.
    Seems to me they were pulling donuts out of their own excrement because they didn’t listen to their wife when she told them the box of donuts was on the counter.

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  2. Brett

    Was the data in the archive degraded? Zipped? Accessible to the Cyber Ninjas?

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      Alfie K

      The article says the archives weren’t requested.

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    Victor Clairmont

    I really like ninja’s.

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    Skier / Cyclist Guy

    I wonder what the heck "forensic data recovery processes" means? I have various ideas what it could mean but sounds like woo to me.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Not Jonah Goldberg

    Unfortunately, the ninjas for Joe Biden are faster than the ninjas for Trump and they deleted everything before we could see it.

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    1. Kyle Gionis

      ha ha ha. But I thought Trump had beautiful, fast ninjas...

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      Pat Riot

      Faster ninjas, older whisky, younger women, more money...

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  6. Avatar photo
    Pat Riot

    78% of Republicans now believe Trump won the 2020 election. While this is a national catastrophe, we shouldn't forget where it came from. For years Republicans have been justifying voter suppression laws with a fig leaf of utterly nonsense "voter fraud" allegations that they made up out of the whole cloth. They did this in order to enjoy a marginal advantage in elections by making voting more inconvenient for their opposition's voters.

    All Trump did was run the ball 30 more yards down the field. Trump is pretty stupid, but he knows how to exploit the corrupt.

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    Frank Lee

    "Maricopa County officials disputed the claim of deleted databases on Twitter on September 24, saying, “Nothing was purged. Cyber Ninjas don’t understand the business of elections. We can't keep everything on the EMS server because it has storage limits.”

    This is ridiculous. So the argument is that data did not get wiped, the system just overwrote the logs as it needed space. This is not believable as storage is cheap these days and any election machine should be designed to hold enough data to support a single election cycle.

    I smell a big rat here.

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    1. Brett

      I am with you Boone. Archiving data CAN mean nothing, or it can mean the data is degraded or rendered inaccessible. Rendered inaccessible was very common 15 years ago, less common now. This is a routine issue in litigation every day, and it's the first question you ask when someone says they put all the data in an archive. I'd also want to know why they were doing the archive right before the audit, when they normally do the audit, and the extent to which Cyber Ninjas was given access to that data.

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        Bill Nelson

        To archive is to save. We have a national archive. The data in question was returned to access so was not deleted.
        The ninjas got all the data, and the prescribed audits had already been completed.
        The Maricopa county election officials are republicans, the county board of supervisors are majority republican. The audit was a joke and the vast majority of Arizonans paid no attention.
        The damage done to the Arizona Republican Party is immeasurable.

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    2. Shaybult

      "We didn't keep everything on that one server" is clearly not the same as "we overwrote the data." Have you never heard of archiving?

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      Skier / Cyclist Guy

      In my shop every spec we write we need to explicitly spell out data storage, archival, and retention requirements. We definitely don't treat storage as cheap. That storage has to be purchased and maintained. I'm an application guy and I like to say "xyz resource" is cheap too, but the infrastructure team says otherwise and so too the people paying for that resource.

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        Bill Nelson

        The FAA has class A and class C requirements. A is very stiff. But it is in a separate archive not touchable by others.

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      Jake

      You take the internet and cloud storage for granted and have no idea what the real world is like.

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        Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B)

        LOL I think we've hit a civilizational paradigm shift when we refer to the "virtual" world as the "real" world.

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    5. Avatar photo
      Bill Nelson

      Nothing was overridden. When data is no longer needed, it gets archived to another location, aka server. Storage may be cheap but governments tend to have antiquated systems.

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    6. Avatar photo
      Don S.

      If you can smell a big rat then we know you don't have covid... Just not sure what rat you are smelling. Still trying to figure out how you determined the system just overwrote the logs as it needed space based on that tweet. That certainly is one way of handling limited space but I have yet to see a statement from the county officials where they have stated they use that procedure. If you have something that explains their data retention procedures that led you to that conclusion, please feel free to share it.

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      Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B)

      An archive file is still a file and backup procedures still back up files. It means zilch that it is not on the server. It is still accessible. And anytime you remove a file from the system that data gets overwritten at some point.

      The server is just hardware.

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      Isaac P

      “Storage is cheap.”

      And elections are underfunded.

      And I’m not sure we have any idea how forward-compatible these machines would be with newer, larger chip boards. Not to mention how you go about “proofing” the machines against hacking with the addition of a “supposably innocent ‘memory module’.”

      Seriously, the hypotheticals are making me run out of nested layers of scare quotes.

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        Mudskipper

        Yeah, I think J Boone is overlooking the costs involved with a seemingly simple upgrade. You can't just swap in one server for another--everything would have to go through more testing for functionality and security. And that's where the $$$ would come in.

        I'm sure the attitude is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." They have a working mechanism to deal with the space crunch, which is to archive data. Lord knows the last time their election system hardware was upgraded, but if it continues to do its job, people aren't likely to throw money at another upgrade.

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      George.Skinner

      The data was all archived, meaning it is available from a back-up. Cyber Ninjas is trying to make it sound like a cover-up when the data was simply stored in a different location.

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  8. Avatar photo
    Bill Nelson

    Anything about the audit that was leaked by the ninjas was ignored by 98.4% of Arizonans. The audit result was ignored by 94.7%.

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      Synchronize Your Dogmas (Bill B)

      I don’t think that last is true.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Bill Nelson

        Could be higher.

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