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Tina Peters, the elections clerk from Mesa County (Colorado) went rogue, creating a “disk-image” of the election server, and posting that image to the public Internet. Conspiracy theorists have been analyzing the disk-image trying to find anomalies supporting their conspiracy-theories. A recent example is this “forensics” report. In this blogpost, I debunk that report.
I suppose calling somebody a “conspiracy theorist” is insulting, but there’s three objective ways we can identify them as such.
The first is when they use the logic “everything we can’t explain is proof of the conspiracy“. In other words, since there’s no other rational explanation, the only remaining explanation is the conspiracy-theory. But there can be other possible explanations — just ones unknown to the person because they aren’t smart enough to understand them. We see that here: the person writing this report doesn’t understand some basic concepts, like “airgapped” networks.
This leads to the second way to recognize a conspiracy-theory, when it demands this one thing that’ll clear things up. Here, it’s demanding that a manual audit/recount of Mesa County be performed. But it won’t satisfy them. The Maricopa audit in neighboring Colorado, whose recount found no fraud, didn’t clear anything up — it just found more anomalies demanding more explanation. It’s like Obama’s birth certificate. The reason he ignored demands to show it was that first, there was no serious question (even if born in Kenya, he’d still be a natural born citizen — just like how Cruz was born in Canada and McCain in Panama), and second, showing the birth certificate wouldn’t change anything at all, as they’d just claim it was fake. There is no possibility of showing a birth certificate that can be proven isn’t fake.
The third way to objectively identify a conspiracy theory is when they repeat objectively crazy things. In this case, they keep demanding that the 2020 election be “decertified”. That’s not a thing. There is no regulation or law where that can happen. The most you can hope for is to use this information to prosecute the fraudster, prosecute the elections clerk who didn’t follow procedure, or convince legislators to change the rules for the next election. But there’s just no way to change the results of the last election
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Read the original article: Fact check: that “forensics” of the Mesa image is crazy