Journalists’ Roundtable: 04-23-21: Senate Audit Begins

This weeks Journalists’ Roundtable has local journalists Luige del Puerto and Laurie Roberts discussing the big story of the week including the audit of presidential election ballots.

This week’s Journalists’ Roundtable covered:

• Senate Audit Begins

Senate Audit Begins:

Laurie Roberts- “Well from their perspective an independent audit is going to bring out the truth, from my perspective absolute chaos  by people who don’t know what the heck they’re doing. The most interesting thing to come out today, at least this morning, was The Arizona Republic/ AZ Central had a reporter who was able to be one of the first of the “official observers” which is of course not the job in her journalist or protesting if that’s the only way we can watch this thing, but she gets in there and immediately notices that the counters are using blue pens and she says, “You can’t use blue pens.” Don Logan, who is the head of the Cyber Ninjas, is the man who has tweeted out pro-Trump conspiracy theories before he got the contract to do this “independent audit”.  He says, “Oh yes we can use blue pens” and she pointed that out to him that everybody knows that you use red pens when around ballots because the ballot machinery can read the blue ink. All you have to do is got to vote for say Trump there and you wanted to add one for Biden you just add another little  piece of blue ink and, and the ballot subsequently would be thrown out its. Its a recipe for disaster and its an indication that these people don’t know what there doing because their not elections experts.”

Luige Del Puerto- “We know that the Arizona Democratic Party sued to stop this audit they had to put up a one million dollar bond, assuming that they do that this audit is paused up until Monday. Just to kind of dog tail what Laurie had mentioned earlier, our reporter was kicked out. She had signed up as an observer which Laurie has mentioned is problematic by itself. She was not on the observer list and the reason for that was that she had signed up on the Google sign up sheet from a few days ago  and what happened was that Google shut down the whole system and it deleted presumably all of the sign-ups including hers. The problem of course is that our reporter also signed up via the Google sheet and she was able to get in but our reporter Kira Has wasn’t able to get in. Ken Bennet actually tried to help her and got her inside, and then she had another exchange with one of the organizers. They pointed out to her or told her she’s not on the observer list and shouldn’t be here and so ultimately she was kicked out.”