Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say

[muriel_volestrangler]

In Fulton, the FBI took the actual ballots cast in the county’s 2020 election, which had been kept in secure court storage facilities. In Maricopa, a federal grand jury subpoenaed digital data related to a partisan audit of the county’s vote, according to Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, the subpoena’s recipient.

This material — which may have included scans and photos of ballots — was stored by the Senate, not the county. Maricopa County destroyed the original ballots after two years, as state law requires.

The firm hired by Senate Republican leaders to run the audit, the Cyber Ninjas, was funded by and took direction from Trump allies. Its leader, Doug Logan, privately admitted in text messages obtained by journalists via public records requests that its ballot recounts were “screwy.” County leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, and nonpartisan outside observers documented several ways Logan’s team had failed to follow procedures to prevent tampering. (Logan didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Several election experts, including some who watched the Arizona audit in person in 2021, said any investigation based on the Cyber Ninja data would be fatally flawed.

https://www.propublica.org/article/maricopa-county-arizona-election-records-fbi

Inevitably, "flaws" will be in favour of the Republicans, authoritarians, fascists and Nazis. "Cyber Ninjas" were a byword for dodginess.

Logan also had links to, and regularly communicated with, prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists like former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Trump’s former national security advisor, Mike Flynn, according to documents obtained by American Oversight.

Byrne, who aided Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election, was a key funder of the Cyber Ninjas’ audit. Though the Arizona Senate agreed to pay Cyber Ninja’s $150,000 in state funds, it soon became apparent that the effort would cost far more — and Byrne stepped in as a chief fundraiser.

Byrne started the group Fund The Audit through his nonprofit political group The America Project and raised $1.7 million for Cyber Ninjas — which included his own money and donations he solicited from far-right supporters, according to the Arizona Mirror.
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Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and renowned election denier who’s currently running for Minnesota governor, said he was funneling money to conservative groups in Arizona who were involved with fundraising for the Cyber Ninjas audit. Other far-right figures who ponied up their own cash to help fund the audit included former Trump lawyer and OANN reporter Christina Bobb and the QAnon-supporting Trump lawyer Lin Wood.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/fbi-maricopa-county-audit-trump-election-conspiracies/

Cyber Ninjas, firm that conducted Arizona election ‘audit’, shuts down

Cyber Ninjas, the firm that was contracted by Arizona Republicans to carry out a widely-criticized review of 2.1m ballots cast in the presidential election, is shutting down amid a legal battle seeking to force the company to make documents from the review public.

A judge fined the company $50,000 a day on Thursday – 50 times the amount requested by plaintiffs – for failing to comply with a court order to turn over public records, in a lawsuit brought by the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic newspaper.

During the same hearing, a lawyer representing Cyber Ninjas, Jack Wilenchik, begged the judge to allow him to withdraw from representing the firm. He said he had not been paid for his work and that the company was insolvent.
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“The court is not going to accept the assertion that Cyber Ninjas is an empty shell and that no one is responsible for seeing that it complies,” he said, according to the Arizona Republic.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/07/cyber-ninjas-arizona-election-audit