1.04

Control Environment

Principle 1: Demonstrate Commitment to Integrity and Ethical Values

Tone at the Top

Attribute 1.04: The oversight body's and management's directives, attitudes, and behaviors reflect the integrity and ethical values expected throughout the entity. The oversight body and management reinforce the commitment to doing what is right, not just maintaining a minimum level of performance necessary to comply with applicable laws and regulations, so that these priorities are understood by all stakeholders, such as regulators, service organizations, employees, and the public.

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Jamie's Story

November 2022: Mid-term Election

Katie Hobbs was serving as the Arizona Secretary of State while running for Arizona Governor during the 2022 Mid-term elections. Katie was serving an oversight role for all Arizona county elections as the Arizona Secretary of State. Relevant to this Green Book Attribute 1.02, she refused to recuse herself from the oversight role, from which ethical questions arose. She was setting the tone at the top, complying with the law was important, but ethics, not so much. This sends a signal to subordinates; they may also demonstrate unethical behavior as long as it is legally compliant.

Election Anomalies

Arizona Senate Allegations

As already noted in Green Book Attribute 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 Arizona Senate allegations arose from a failure to recognize the Arizona Senates Oversight Role. These allegations were investigated and reported on by the Arizona Attorney General's Office 2020 General Election Investigation. The elected officials were considered as a possible oversight entity for MC operations.

This Green Book attribute emphasizes the need to "commitment to doing what is right, not just maintaining a minimum level of performance necessary to comply with applicable laws and regulations, so that these priorities are understood by all stakeholders, such as regulators, service organizations, employees, and the public," MC Elected Officials and MC leadership were apparently doing less than the minimum given their position that the Arizona Senate was not entitled to perform oversight. Hence, the oversight and management were both demonstrating a lack of integrity and unethical behavior in the eyes of the public because of their lack of transparency. This potential deviation from the Green Book standard applies to the following Arizona Senate Allegations:

• Allegation #1 Signature Verifciaton
  • Our of 1,910,317 early ballots tallied, the Level I Signature Verifiers only rejected 587 early ballots for "bad" (mismatched) signatures.
  • Maricopa County trained 29 and 4 part-time MC employees in June 2020 to fulfill the role of Level 1 Signature Verifier. Four months later, 40 temporary employees were hired and performed Level 1 Signature Verifier duties without any training. Therefore, 55% of the Level 1 signature verifiers were untrained.
• Allegation #2, Maricopa Dropbox Collection (2020)
  • The Arizona Senate was alerted to documentation discrepancies by Verity the Vote, which was lead by two citizens. Maricopa was unable to resolve issues raised by members of the public, which is why they took their concerns to the Arizona Senate for follow up.
  • MC violated the Arizona Secretary of State's Election Procedure Manual and their own Maricopa County Election Procedures, which were written to ensure compliance with Title 16 - Elections and Electors.
  • There were five procedure violations that adversely affected the ballot security for an unknown thousands of early ballots. In this case, MC could not even do the minimum requirements of the procedure.
• Allegation #3, Maricopa Election Management Server (2020)

All of the following are sub-allegations of Allegation #3:

• MC EMS 2020 - Election Management System Database Purged
  • MC had a micro view by "cleaning" the server to perform logic tests. The macro view would have been to step back and reschedule the logic test to preserve forensic evidence on the drives, which was destroyed by the cleaning.
• MC EMS 2020 - Election Files Deleted
  • "Since these files are not associated to the tabulation files stored on the EMS server, they are not backed-up or archived." Valuable digital forensic evidence was lost from MC generous purging of files.
• MC EMS 2020 - Corrupt Ballot Images
  • 263,139 ballot images were reported as "unreadable." MC randomly "opened" some ballots from the designated time period to refute the allegation. Opening a document is different than assessing its readability. Additionally, no sampling size was stated in the report so no confidence level could be statistically derived.
• MC EMS 2020 - Missing Ballot Images
• MC EMS 2020 - Failure to Follow Basic Cyber Security Practices
  • MC asserts that they are not required to follow Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published guidelines because of their "air gapped" system.
• MC EMS 2020 - Subpoenaed Equipment Not Yet Provided
  • MC was not going to provide any additional information beyond what was described in the litigated settlement agreement.
• MC EMS 2020 - Anonymous Logins
  • MC asserted that the anonymous logins did not affect election results. The bigger issue is why would any IT department allow anonymous logins for any digital or networked equipment.
• MC EMS 2020 - Dual Boot System Discovered
  • It appears that MC had knowlege of a Dual Boot System prior to Cyber Ninjas discovery. In fact, it appears that the requested PacketWatch to remove any mention of the Dual Boot System from their report based on the details MC had readily available to discredit the significance of the Dual Boot System, but none of those details were in PacketWatch's report.
• MC EMS 2020 - Operating System Logs Not Preserved
  • Operating System logs for Windows security event logs are overwritten to save digital space, which eliminated forensic evidence.
• MC EMS 2020 - Internet Connections to the EMS
  • Cyber Ninjas apparently wanted to examine the routers as objective evidence to support or refute claims of internet connectivity. MC withheld the equipment because it wasn't part of the court's settlement agreement.

• Allegation #4, Maricopa County Withholding Audit Data (2020)
  • The uncooperative tone is clearly displayed by the MCBOS and MCBOS member Bill Gates.
• Allegation #5, Pima County Embedded 35,000 Votes (2020)
• Allegation #6, Unknown Published Election Fraud Flyer (2020)