Just to keep readers up to date on the recount in Maricopa County, AZ, now we have this:
The Pennsylvania-based IT company that was in charge of running the hand recount of Maricopa County ballots is no longer involved in the audit.
The contract with Wake Technology Services, Inc. ended May 14, the original completion date for the hand count, and the company chose not to renew its contract, according to Randy Pullen, an audit spokesperson and former state GOP chair.
“They were done,” he said. “They didn’t want to come back.”
Wake TSI was the subcontractor that developed and oversaw the procedures for recounting the county’s nearly 2.1 million ballots, working under Cyber Ninjas, the state Senate’s main contractor performing the overall audit of the county’s general election results. [azcentral]
Just a normal business incident, or more a symptom of a toxic environment? Well, based on this:
Ryan Macias, former acting director of testing and certification at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission who has observed the audit for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, said Tuesday that this represents the “continuation of the mismanagement and constant change which we have been observing since the beginning.”
Smells like the latter, although whether Macias is unbiased or not has some bearing on that conclusion.
It’s probably premature to suggest Wake is getting out before the lawsuits from either side begin to fly, but that’s what I’m expecting. Either those thousands of missing votes will fail to appear and the Republicans will sue Cyber Ninjas and their contractors, or they will magically appear and the Democrats will sue for fraud.
Wake should never have accepted the contract.
