Questions raised about audit of Arizona vote
In early March, a Boston-based vote-counting firm called Clear Ballot Group sent a bid to Arizona’s state Senate to audit the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County.
The firm has conducted more than 200 such audits over 13 years in business. “Our level of comparison data is unmatched,” Keir Holeman, a Clear Ballot Group vice president, wrote to the Republican-controlled Senate. He never heard back, he says.
Instead, the state Senate hired a small Florida-based cybersecurity firm known as Cyber Ninjas that had not placed a formal bid for the contract and had no experience with election audits. Senate President Karen Fann says she can’t recall how she found the firm, but her critics believe one credential stood out: Cyber Ninjas’ chief executive officer had tweeted support for conspiracy theories claiming Republican Donald Trump, and not Democrat Joe Biden, had won Maricopa
County and Arizona.
Now the untested, little-known cybersecurity firm is running a partly taxpayer-funded process that election experts describe as so deeply flawed that it veers into the surreal. Its chief aim, critics say, appears to be testing far-fetched theories, rather than simply recounting votes — an approach that critics say is directly undermining the country’s democratic traditions.
Experienced vote counters have watched the process in shock. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said last week that Maricopa County will need to replace all of its election machines because their security has been permanently compromised by the auditors. Experts note the review isn’t following standard recounting procedures and, unlike with other election audits in Arizona, members of each major political party are not at each table observing the counting.
Cyber Ninjas’ defenders say they’re creating a template for a reexamination of the election in every battleground state Biden won. Criticisms about the firm’s lack of election experience are hollow, its advocates argue, because the Arizona audit is unprecedented.
The man running the operation, Cyber Ninjas Chief Executive Officer Doug Logan, declined through his spokesman to be interviewed. He has answered questions from reporters in public only once, during a contentious news conference last month.Maricopa County has already conducted two audits, which found no problems. At the urging of Trump supporters, the Senate insisted on a third and subpoenaed more than 2 million ballots from the county.
When the Senate leader went looking for an elections firm to do the work, she did not put together a formal request for a proposal, as is typical for government contracts. Fann said she and her staff reached out to several firms and got two bids back — the one from Clear Ballot Group for $450,000 and the other from a cybersecurity group called Intersec Worldwide for $8 million.
Fann said she could not recall who had referred her to Cyber Ninjas. The Senate agreed to pay Cyber Ninjas $150,000 in state money, but it is not clear how much more the audit will cost and who is paying for it. The proTrump One America News Network raised $150,000 in a single day in April and has continued to ask for donations. Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive officer of Overstock.com started a fundraising drive with a group that says it has raised $1.7 million with a goal of $2.8 million. Neither will have to disclose donors or account for how the money is spent, and Logan has declined to detail financial information.