‘This Was Not About Finding the Truth’

On Thursday, five months after Arizona Republicans initiated a partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots from the 2020 presidential election, the firm hired to carry out the recount released its report. The report failed to provide any evidence of a stolen election and actually found 360 more votes for President Biden. Meanwhile, election experts warn that the faux “audit” that led to the error-riddled report was “dangerous” and a “disinformation campaign.”

The audit began on April 23 and was conducted by Florida cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, a company that does not specialize in election security and whose CEO has a history of promoting baseless claims of voter fraud. The report was supposed to be released in August, but was delayed after Cyber Ninjas President Doug Logan and two members of his team contracted COVID-19.

Even though the partisan report makes clear that Biden won Arizona, David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research is careful not to describe the report as “confirming” anything at all. “It confirmed nothing,” he said. “It was not designed to confirm anything and it was not conducted by people who understood what they were doing. It was completely untransparent; it was completely unnecessary.” The election, he said, was confirmed a long time ago by Democratic and Republican election officials, and certified by a Republican governor. 

Maricopa County officials reviewed the draft report in advance of its official release on September 23, tweeting that the “draft report from Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win.” Maricopa County officials added that “Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.”