Brace for Disinformation: Here Comes the Cyber Ninjas Report

Running through the motivated reasoning and amateurish behavior of the GOP's selected Maricopa County auditors.

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The company conducting an unofficial audit of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, was expected to turn in its report to the Arizona State Senate on Monday. In advance of its public release, election officials are pushing back on voter fraud claims and other conspiracies they expect to make an appearance in the report. The audit itself has been the subject of several debunked voter fraud claims.

For some background: Arizona certified its election results with President Joe Biden beating Donald Trump by more than 10,000 votes on November 30. The state conducted multiple official audits of the results, none of which found evidence of widespread voter fraud. Arizona State Senate Republicans called for a further review anyway. A judge issued subpoenas for ballots and other election materials in response to a request from Senate President Karen Fann. The unofficial, Republican-led election review of all 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots and 400 voting machines began April 23.

Senate Republicans, led by Fann, hired Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity firm with a history of promoting baseless voter fraud claims, to conduct the audit. Cyber Ninjas doesn’t specialize in election security or vote counting. Earlier this year, a Michigan resident listed Cyber Ninjas CEO as an expert witness. Logan then falsely claimed there was fraud in Antrim County after the county inadvertently misreported votes in an unofficial vote tally. 

The election review has no official end date, but Cyber Ninjas were expected to deliver its full report to the Arizona Senate this week. That delivery date for the complete report has been delayed, however, after Fann announced that Logan and two members of the five-person audit team have contracted COVID-19. In advance of the release, election officials and experts are emphasizing that what took place was less an audit than a partisan effort to undermine election integrity.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Thanks, Khaya. You’re on the frontlines against the firehose of excrement.

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  2. ExploreOK

    I read Stephen Richer's letter. It was great. Has everything anyone would need to know.

    Prediction:

    AZ Republicans will not be popular in that state for a long time to come regardless of whether they choose to pander to the conspiracy theorist wing. They lose those voters if they don't pander. They lose center-right and educated voters if they do pander.

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  3. Vic

    I've been a skeptic that there is anything here, but at this point I have to say with the passage of time I've just lost interest. We have a fiasco of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, now with deadly consequences, resulting from incompetent leadership in Washington from the president on down through his administration, the Dems in Congress trying to pass trillions in new spending for everything they can think of, attempted massive federal takeovers of election laws and procedures in the sovereign states, dereliction at the southern border, etc. Has it occurred to anyone that even if miraculously Trump was found to have won Arizona he STILL would have lost the election in the electoral college. I respectfully suggest that we conservatives need to keep our eyes on the ball, and not waste time and effort on these kind of pointless exercises when the building is burning around us.

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    DougCLE

    I, for one, cannot wait to see what wonderfully byzantine labyrinths of "indisputable proof" they've concocted over the past few months. Wheee, what fun!

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      Kevin C. Smith

      PCAPs!

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        DougCLE

        That's the ticket! They need to look at the PCAPs!

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          Kevin C. Smith

          Soon, it’ll all be revealed soon.

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  5. Alex DeLarge

    It's lame that TD has predetermined that anything bad for Democrats in the report will by definition be "disinformation." It kinda shoots your alleged objectivity for when you inevitably do your post-report "fact check" declaring all inconvenient facts to be "debunked."

    Good propaganda requires at least the pretense of objectivity. You guys aren't even very good at propaganda.

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    BestUsedCarSales

    The Cyber Ninjas used their time to fashion the paper ballots into shurikens which they will use to silently still all those who deny Trump's ascendancy.

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    Bill Nelson

    As a resident, we have long since ignored these people.

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      Pat Riot

      If past elections are any indication, you or most of your neighbors will vote for the people who approved of this again.

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        Bill Nelson

        Probably. There should be some way to make sure people vote correctly. Or perhaps the opposition is less attractive.

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          Pat Riot

          They all watch Fox News 24/7 which means nothing else matters.

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    rlritt

    Excellent article. Its a shame these people are so invested in lies and disinformatio.

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  9. Will

    "Describing the various ways Maricopa County’s tabulation process is designed to prevent fraud, Valenzuela noted that the Maricopa County ballot tabulation center is a secure facility with restricted access."
    If only it was 8 months ago, we could have had Trump's crack team of lawyers holding a press conference in front of another landscaping company and talking about how the Dispatch had confirmed Venezuela's involvement in Arizona ballot counting.

    Suffice to say I'm losing my faith that any amount of evidence or lack thereof is going to overcome the motivated reasoning I still see from my "stop the steal" friends/family/acquaintances, and I'm already dreading the amount of garbage that is going to be shared when this "audit" is finished.

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  10. Raincheck

    Amazon to watch the evolution of the GOP. They are now undermining faith in free and fair elections in the United States, doing work Russian misinformation campaigns could only have dreamed of.

    All because one crazy old man lost an election.

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      Pat Riot

      It wasn't "all" because of that: Republicans have been spreading lies about our election system for *years* to justify voter suppression. All Trump did was take the baton and run it another 100 meters down the track.

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