Ben Cotton — the founder of CyFir, a digital forensics and cyber risk solutions company — told Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Senate Judiciary Chairman Warren Petersen that he discovered the missing file directory while reviewing the Master File Table.

The MFT, he explained during a special meeting of the state Senate, is a "record of all of the directories and the files that are contained in that partition and a pointing — and a pointer to where that data resides on the hard drive."

The database directory from the D drive of the machine "EMSPrimary" [Election Management System] had been deleted, he confirmed.

"In the course of performing that MFT discovery, I discovered a MFT that clearly indicated that the database directory was deleted from that server," Cotton said