CVRs are in: Pima “Slide” and the “Whistleblower" -- Taking a look

By Seth Dobson |10/18/2022

"When you want to know what's happening, the two questions you should ask are: 'What's there that shouldn't be there?' and 'What's not there that should be there?' " Professor Walter Daugherity, Harvard Math graduate and Senior Computer Science Lecturer, has looked both “inside the machines” and at the Cast Vote Record “output” available for most election systems showing the “sequential order of the records (votes) as they were recorded.” His work brought to light the 22-month federal retention requirement for election records, a minimum standard for the states, which now has passed. With voting machines under scrutiny for inaccurate results and susceptibility for fraud, state legislators will inevitably be dealing with with these timetables for all races in the days to come.

Now under appeal with the US Ninth Circuit, Judge John J. Tuchi eventually dismissed the case to end the use of voting machines in Arizona for “lack of standing,” calling the claims “conjectural or hypothetical.” In his supporting declaration analyzing Pima County Arizona’s “early/mail-in” votes – comprising over 87% of more than 522,000 cast for president, Dr. Daugherity assesses the incoming ballots from across the county prior to the start of the precinct-aggregated “election day” reporting:

“31. After approximately the first twelve percent of votes are tabulated, the early votes are predictable and dependent in the relationship between one block of votes and the next… ”

If you were to calculate a hypothetical cumulative average starting from the 50,000th ballot, using groups of 1000, you would see Joe Biden’s vote share begin at approximately 75% with some “initial fluctuations” upward and then fall. The whole number percentage would continually decrease, going into “election day.” At that point, you would also see precincts located in Indian Reservations and the remaining early votes not yet recorded.

“ … Such predictability and dependence would not occur without artificial manipulation. Achieving such predictability requires what should be independent votes to be artificially manipulated to form the downward sloping line for the cumulative vote ratio. In my expert opinion such predictability is so statistically improbable as to be impossible without manipulation or control and thus demonstrates to a reasonable degree of scientific and mathematical certainty that the tabulation of these ballots was artificially controlled. ”

(Dr. Daugherity points out that a “cumulative ratio” includes all votes to the particular point –a graph line expected to level out as each county wide, early vote is added, because each is a smaller portion of the increasing total. This is what would result from “random shuffles” of these ballots).

It’s worth noting, the spreadsheet posted online from a Pima County data analyst who received daily early voting reports, would show a gradual decline in the cumulative average/ratio for “Democrat” declared voters (D to R) starting on October 13th (to 10/14, ...), with relatively few votes received before October 12th. This early vote ratio, while not including Independent/other voters, is quite close to the actual Biden/Trump outcome. Also the 2020 Republican nominee for recorder, he has been critical of “early vote/mail-in” claims, having raised questions about “ballot harvesting” in the past.

Close Races: Local, State and National Impact

The unsettling report goes well beyond Arizona’s prized 11 electoral votes in a state where Joe Biden prevailed by 10,457 votes. In Pima, where Donald Trump topped Biden by more than 2 to 1 on election day (“polls”), you had a tight US Senate race, congressional, and close state and county contests, including the Board of Supervisors’ seats where three new Democrats increased their control. Democrat Rex Scott won a seat, held by a Republican for decades, by 730 votes. The county recorder’s race decided who would replace the retiring Democrat who held the office since 1993.

“Whistleblower”

During the Nov. 30, 2020 Arizona election hearing with Donald Trump’s legal team and Arizona state representatives, an emailed letter was read from an individual claiming he was invited to a September Democrat party meeting in Pima County where plans were shared “to embed 35,000 in a ‘spread configured distribution’ to each Democrat candidate's vote totals” and a larger number in Maricopa County.

Sent to the criminal division of the Department of Justice and then to members of the legislature shortly after the election, in which he says these were added “in the initial count to the Vote-By-Mail (VBM) totals released at 8pm on Nov 3rd 2020,” the alias-signed email read: “impacted include county, state and federal election candidates” with the "total voter turnout verses total registered voters determin(ing) how many votes we can embed. The embedding will auto adjust based on voter turn-out."

“Because the ‘embed votes are distributed sporadically all embedded votes will not be found, if audited, because the embeds are in groups of approximately 1,000. This is so the county recorder can declare an oversite issue or error as a group of 1,000 is a normal and acceptable error. ’ "

In looking at the statistics, Daugherity is concerned with a 6 to 1 Biden-Trump “spike” roughly a quarter way through the vote. This group of 1,000, from approximately 200 of 248 voting precincts, is followed shortly thereafter by a group of 500 votes, as indicated on his graph, where Trump received less than 13%, each verified in the public record.

He observes the timing may be relevant to an investigator as this “occurs throughout the Pima races and in federal races in Maricopa county, despite using different vendors.” Daugherity also refers to Mesa County, Colorado where he and Jeffrey O’Donnell, a 40-year software and database developer, were able to identify a second set of databases created with votes reprocessed as election workers struggled to move the ballots through during both the 2020 General and 2021 Municipal Election. Not all ballots from the first database were copied into the second. “The machine made only the re-processed ballot files visible to local election officials and hid the original (not re-processed) ballot files, making the final vote counts exceed the number of ballots visible to officials.” This broke the chain of custody for the ballots. “The absence of secure hash algorithm (.sha) files for each digital ballot image makes the authenticity of each digital ballot image, and the ballot-level record for those ballots, impossible to verify (Mesa County Colorado Voting Systems, Forensic Report #3)”

In response, after consultation with Dominion Voting Systems, the county is claiming the new databases were created due to the specific input from the election manager while trying to resolve the problem.

“When I asked ‘has this ever been tested?’ and ‘how do we know it works?’ The response was ‘Yes, this has been test(ed) and has shown significant success in Arizona Judicial Retention Elections since 2014 even undetectable in post audits because no candidate will spend the kind of funds needed to audit and contact voters to verify votes in the full potential of total registered voters which is more than 500,000 registered voters. This year our Secretary of State has removed precinct level detail for election night releases so candidates can't see precinct over-votes.’”

Biden “spike” groups show low point in retention votes,
inconsistent with Democrat numbers in these judicial races

A interesting “need to know basis” exchange. We do see the average ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes to retain judges decline gradually during early voting and the vote record brings us back to the identified Biden “spike.” Those specific groups show a noticeable drop-off of judicial retention votes not reflected in other races. Superior Court Justice Bennett, for example, received not only the lowest number of ‘yes’ votes, but after more than 250 groups of 500 voters to this point, she received her lowest number of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes. This is also the case for Supreme Court Chief Justice Brutinel, both of which can show us another anomaly.

“Republican voters don’t vote for (or against) judges appointed by
Republicans (?)”

Keeping in mind the official canvass “early/mail in” vote was close to 62% for Biden, in the 20 (pre-election day) groups where Justice Bennett, appointed by Gov. Ducey, received her lowest total ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes, Trump came in higher than Biden in 14, with Biden higher in three plus the Biden “spike” groups (total six). In the 20 groups where Supreme Court Justice Brutinel, appointed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, received the lowest total ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes, Trump came in higher than Biden in 11, with Biden higher in nine including the “spike” groups (again three for this comparison).

In the 20 groups where Bennett and Brutinel received their most ‘yes’ or ‘no’ votes, Biden comes in higher than Trump in all of them. The other Democrat candidates across Pima races also consistently received more votes than the Republicans in the groups of 500 where these retention votes (‘yes’ and ‘no’ total) were highest.

Overall, if we look at the early voting groups, arranged lowest to highest, we see Donald Trump’s votes fall as the total retention votes rise (see graphs).