By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone, a partisan Democrat with an actual big gun on his hip, walked away resolutely from a reporter for the Gateway Pundit site.
The reporter was trying to question the sheriff’s claiming that for a different department in the county to provide ballot information for an official inquiry — which his own office wasn’t even expected to have — would be disastrous to his law enforcement.
It was a powerful video image posted May 17 showing the way officials of both major political parties in Arizona’s most populous county wanted nothing to do with an examination by auditors of election integrity in the 2020 vote here.
As Penzone left a county office building in downtown Phoenix, the reporter asked, “Are you against election integrity?. . . Why are you commingling law-enforcement data with election data?”
The sheriff walked silently down a ramp to a fancy chauffeured long-body vehicle at the front sidewalk before saying that he had work to do, and to make an appointment for answers to the questions.
When the audit had requested to check computer routers for the election, Penzone surprisingly exclaimed in a statement that this threatened calamity for his own office, with the “demands jeopardizing the entire mission of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
“We are talking about confidential, sensitive, and highly classified law-enforcement data and equipment that will be permanently compromised,” Penzone said. “The current course is mind-numbingly reckless and irresponsible.”
Left-wing billionaire George Soros contributed $2 million to Penzone’s sheriff campaign in 2016 in what the Politico site described in November 2016 as “the billionaire’s nationwide push on criminal-justice and immigration reform.”
Soros wanted more-liberal law-enforcers and prosecutors in office for the march toward his socialist dreams.
Shortly after taking office, Penzone referred to illegal immigrants as “guests” and began releasing more of them from jail.
In February 2017 the conservative Judicial Watch organization reported: “An average of 400 ‘criminal illegal immigrants’ are being released every 10 days by the newly elected sheriff in Arizona’s most populous county, federal law-enforcement sources tell Judicial Watch, many of them violent offenders.
“It’s part of Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone’s new policy to protect illegal aliens, even those who have committed serious state crimes, from deportation,” Judicial Watch said.
Penzone had defeated Republican incumbent Joe Arpaio, who was seeking his seventh consecutive four-year term as sheriff. Arpaio, who readily admitted loving publicity, was known for his opposition to illegal immigration and had been battered for years in so-called news coverage by open-borders dominant media here.
In his mid-80s in 2016, Arpaio showed far more stamina and alertness than Joe Biden at age 78 in 2021, but Arpaio might have been better advised to have cultivated a GOP successor rather than seeking a seventh term.
The November 4, 2016, Politico story said that “Soros’ spending against Arpaio, a high-profile liberal boogeyman, is his single biggest investment in a local race this year, as well as the billionaire’s first effort against a sheriff. It folds in immigration reform, another policy passion of Soros’, alongside criminal-justice reform.”
While Soros’ 2016 backing of Penzone was paying unexpected dividends in 2021 by having another official in place to oppose the audit of 2020 results, a newly promoted national Republican official in Washington, D.C., expressed her approval for Arizona’s audit.
The new GOP House conference chairwoman, New York State’s Cong. Elise Stefanik, said she supports the Arizona Senate’s pursuit of election integrity. Stefanik also warned that Joe Biden’s administration is trying to stop it.
“I support that audit. Transparency is important for the American people. And again, this should be a nonpartisan issue, whether you are Republican, Democrat, Independent, or conservative, transparency is important,” Stefanik told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo.
“And the audit was passed by the Arizona State Senate,” Stefanik said. “The Biden Department of Justice is trying to block that audit. That is unconstitutional, from my perspective. . . . So the American people deserve to get those answers when it comes to the Arizona audit.”
The majority-Republican Arizona Senate and majority-Republican Maricopa County Board of Supervisors remained at loggerheads. After the supervisors were invited to a hearing at the state Capitol on May 18, they set up their own meeting elsewhere for the previous day, May 17, and announced they had no intention of cooperating.
Angry-sounding supervisors’ Chairman Jack Sellers called the audit a “sham,” said they were done with the Senate and were moving on to other issues.
Reporter Howard Fischer, of Capitol Media Services, wrote that the following day’s Senate meeting wasn’t able to clear up questions about access to the routers, which direct traffic between computers.
Ken Bennett, the Senate’s liaison for the audit, “again insisted that he was told earlier this year by Joseph LaRue, a deputy county attorney, that the routers had been removed from the system and were ready for delivery” for the audit, Fischer wrote, adding:
“The current county position is that providing the routers would provide a ‘blueprint’ of the county computer system which could direct criminals where to stage their hacking attacks to access confidential information and compromise law enforcement.”
A subcontractor to the audit, Ben Cotton, said that if this county claim is true, Fischer wrote, “that means the election equipment which was connected to the routers also had to be exposed to the Internet. ‘That’s certainly something that we need to explore, given the inconsistencies in the public statements and reports,’ he said.”
If the election equipment had been connected for some period to the Internet, that would have compromised security.
Senate President Karen Fann and Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen resolved to do what was necessary, including potential new subpoenas, to make progress.
The Just the News site posted on May 19 that the liaison, Bennett, a former Republican Arizona secretary of state, told the Capitol hearing “that serial numbers were missing on damaged ballots that were duplicated so they could be read by vote-tabulation machines.”
Both the original and duplicated ballot needed to have the same serial number so it would be counted only once.
But, Just the News reported, Bennett “has found many batches of damaged ballots without the serial numbers that are on the duplicates, violating state law. ‘We are struggling as to how we’re going to be able to match up’ those damaged and duplicated ballots, Bennett said.”
Arellano Supports The Audit
Arizona conservative Republican activist Sergio Arellano wrote a column expressing support for the audit and saying those who were trying to stop it had a goal of partisan sabotage.
“The entire state would be well-served if everyone would take a deep breath, refrain from turning the effort into a partisan circus, and waited for any findings and supporting evidence,” Arellano wrote at the AZ Free News site.
“In the meantime, let’s give credit where credit is due, to Senate President Karen Fann and State Sen. Warren Petersen, both of whom continue to make themselves available to a media that is looking to undercut them, while providing reasoned answers in measured tones,” Arellano wrote.
Arellano’s support for the audit is significant because as this year began, he ran against Kelli Ward, D.O., a strong proponent of the audit, for the position of chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, and came close to beating her, the incumbent, in the second round of voting.
“The audit will show that everything was largely done right, or it will show meaningful problems or weaknesses in systems that need to be corrected,” Arellano wrote. “Both outcomes are victories for Arizona voters, even though some will claim victory and insist it is a defeat for others.”
“If all was well then that’s obviously good news,” he wrote. “If corrections need to be made, then the fact that they were identified and can be fixed for future elections is also good news. We all benefit from a system that strives for perfection and is checked for improvements.”
In another pitch for election integrity, on May 18 Arellano told radio talk host James T. Harris on Phoenix-based KFYI (550 AM) that 33 percent of the population here now is Latino, and they’re used to seeing unreliable election results in Mexico.
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