Kelly Townsend former House Elections Committee chair who had a long history in Arizona platforming claims of rigged voting machines dating back over a decade to 2010 when she led the Suprise Arizona Tea Party meeting, publicly pushed for a forensic audit on her social media beginning in 2017 and Townsend played a substantial role in spreading conspiracies surrounding Sharpies and a conspiracy that counterfeit ballots were flown in on planes which Townsend promoted widely on her various social media in late 2020 leading to the audit. Townsend led a Stop the Steal rally promoting
Sidney Powell outside the Arizona Capitol on November 14, 2020, and was a named witness in Powell's legal filings which a judge cited as being filled with unfounded claims. That day, Arizona Senate Democrats filed a lawsuit to stop the audit. The next day Judge Christopher Coury agreed to suspend the audit for three days until the contractors presented documentation on how they would conduct the audit. The suspension was conditioned on the Arizona Senate Democrats posting a $1 million bond to cover the cost that the delay could cost the Arizona State Senate Republicans. But because the Arizona State Senate Democrats refused to post the bond, the suspension did not go into effect. By May 5, Arizona Senate Democrats reached a settlement with the Arizona Senate Republicans to allow independent elections experts to observe the audit. The agreement authorized
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs to file suit against Cyber Ninjas for
breach of contract if the company did not live up to the agreement. Former
Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican, had been designated as the State Senate's liaison to the audit. On May 5, 2021, Hobbs sent a letter to Bennett, detailing additional concerns with the way the audit was being conducted. Her letter cited the audit's disclosed procedures (departures from and ignorance of
best practices for hand recounts) and the reports of the observers sent from the Secretary of State's office (including sloppy handling of ballots). Also on May 5, the
United States Department of Justice sent
Karen Fann, president of the Arizona State Senate, a letter expressing concerns that the audit might violate federal laws. One concern was that the law requires election officials to maintain custody of all voting records for up to 22 months. Another concern was that the
statement of work for Cyber Ninjas authorized Cyber Ninjas to knock on voters' doors to ask them if they had voted in the 2020 elections, which might amount to voter intimidation and constitute a violation of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. After the Department of Justice threatened to sue over this plan, Cyber Ninjas agreed not to do it. The auditors also requested the county provide
network routers, though election security experts said this presented a security threat and there was no evident reason the auditors needed them. Bennett said auditors needed the routers to see if the election management system (EMS) was connected to the internet during the election, though a county official said the auditors already had other means to perform that check. Independent forensic audits before and after the election found the system was not connected to the Internet, and county officials said it never had been. Sellers said it might cost as much as $6 million if the county had to replace the routers because their integrity could no be longer assured after they were given to the auditors. The County Board of Supervisors voted on July 14 to spend $2.8 million to replace voting equipment that the auditors had accessed.
June 2021 On June 2, Hobbs issued a report detailing observations made to that point by election observers from her office, alleging various infractions on the part of the auditors. These included leaving security gates open, leaving confidential materials unattended, and bringing "prohibited items including cellphones and pens with black or blue ink" to the counting floor. In particular, black and blue ink pens are prohibited because they can be used to modify ballots that were cast. The objectivity of the audit has been called into question due to the involvement of Logan. Additionally,
Anthony Kern, a former Republican state lawmaker who was present at the
2021 storming of the United States Capitol, was seen tallying votes. Former Republican Secretary of State Ken Bennett continued advising the audit, and Hobbs, the current Secretary of State, criticized Bennett's efforts, saying he needs to "either do it right, or don't do it at all." On May 17, the board held a hearing and sent Fann a twelve-page letter to dispute her allegations of wrongdoing by county officials. Republican board chairman Jack Sellers stated that the allegations were actually due to the incompetence of the auditors and accused Fann of an "attempt at legitimatizing a
grift disguised as an audit." Fann, however, continued to support the audit, and sent the Board of Supervisors a four-page letter stating that "serious issues" had arisen during the audit. Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman
Kelli Ward released multiple videos about the audit, in which she criticized the Board of Supervisors and raised "the possibility of placing the validity of the entire 2020 election into question." Townsend continued pushing for legislative changes that gave legitimacy to Logan's findings including allegations that election workers should be arrested and Arizona voters should stay committed to election denialism, a claim Townsend reiterated on stage at a Florence, Arizona Trump rally in January 2022. A poll conducted at the end of March found that 78.3% of Arizona Republicans believed "that there was significant voter fraud in the 2020 United States Presidential Election which compromised the integrity of the election." It was reported in June 2021 that a Cyber Ninjas subcontractor had transported copies of voting systems data to a supposed "lab" in
Bigfork, Montana. The exact nature of the data and what efforts had been taken to keep it secure was unclear. A
CNN reporter traveled to the location listed in property records for the subcontractor and found a cabin in a wooded non-commercial area. In late June 2021, the
Monmouth University Polling Institute reported that a majority of Americans viewed this and similar audits as "partisan efforts to undermine valid election results". The auditors announced on June 25 they had finished counting and photographing the 2.1 million ballots, and Bennett stated a final report would come in weeks or months. On July 9, Fann announced the Senate would conduct another ballot count as a check on the work done by Cyber Ninjas and the earlier count by county election officials.
July 2021 On July 14, two House Democrats,
Carolyn Maloney and
Jamie Raskin, opened an investigation into Cyber Ninjas, sending a letter to Logan requesting documents and records of any communications between the company and Trump or his allies, as well as information on who was funding the audit. The next day, a Maricopa County judge ruled that all information relating to the audit were public records, including communications between the audit participants and information about who was financing the audit, rejecting an argument by Senate Republicans that information held by Cyber Ninjas and other private contractors were not subject to the Arizona public records law. The judge found that government officials could not shield information about their official activities by farming it out to private companies. Another judge and an appeals court agreed, and in September the
Arizona Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Senate Republicans, requiring the documents to be released.
July 15 hearing on preliminary findings On July 15, preliminary findings were presented by Doug Logan, Ken Bennett, and Ben Cotton in an Arizona Senate hearing led by Arizona Senate member Warren Petersen and Arizona Senate president Karen Fann. During the hearing, Logan incorrectly asserted the county had 74,243 "mail-in ballots" that had no record of being sent to voters, County officials and election experts said Cyber Ninjas had misinterpreted data files when examining mail-in ballot figures, leading to an incorrect conclusion. Tammy Patrick, who had been a federal compliance officer for Maricopa County elections for eleven years, said the auditors had examined early versions of the data that the county had provided to political parties to aid their get-out-the-vote efforts, but those early versions were not intended to and did not reflect the final official tallies. Neither county officials nor Arizona Senate Democrats were permitted to participate in Logan's presentation.
Post-hearing developments Soon after Logan's presentation, Trump released three statements in which he made multiple false assertions regarding the findings. He falsely claimed the 168,000 ballots Logan had identified had been printed on illegal paper and were unofficial. He also characterized as "magically appearing ballots" the 74,243 mail-in ballot discrepancy that Logan had incorrectly found. Trump asserted that "all the access logs to the machines were wiped, and the election server was hacked during the election", though there was no evidence to support the claim. The county said that months before the election an individual had inappropriately downloaded publicly-available data from the county website; a forensic audit by two firms months before the election found the election management system was
airgapped from the website and the internet. A July Associated Press investigation found that Arizona election officials had identified 182 ballots out of 3.4 million cast statewide that were sufficiently problematic to be referred to investigators for further review. Four of those incidents had led to charges, two against Democratic voters and two against Republicans. A spokesman for Arizona Republican attorney general
Mark Brnovich had said in April that 21 active investigations were underway, though he did not indicate how many related to the November 2020 election. Fann expressed confidence in Cyber Ninjas, asserting "they are working with a number of other contractors that have experience in audits and in their expertise in their own fields."
The Arizona Republic had reported in June that none of the contractors involved in the audit were certified by the federal
Election Assistance Commission, while two firms that had conducted forensic audits for the county before the election were certified. In late July, Bennett confirmed that he was being shut out of the auditors' second ballot count because he questioned the lack of transparency in the processes being used, which he characterized as "hide-the-ball-from-me stuff". He said he believed an independent group should have conducted the second count after the auditors' first count did not match the official results. He added he had "indirectly...allowed some information that was supposed to be private to get out," referring to partial ballot count data given to an outside election auditing firm which found the Cyber Ninjas second count was a 99.9% match with the official count. The CEO of the outside firm said that if the difference was extrapolated to all 2.1 million ballots, the count would differ by 124 votes. Trump chief spokesperson Liz Harrington often tweeted about the audit and, on July 26, she appeared on
Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News to falsely assert that Logan's analysis meant there were 275,000 "potential fraudulent ballots." On July 26, the Republican Senate issued new subpoenas for the envelopes bearing signatures for mail-in ballots, as well as for all routers, and passwords and log-in information for the ballot tabulation devices. County officials had previously told the auditors that access to such equipment was unnecessary and posed a security threat, including possible access to sensitive information in the county sheriff's office. Senate Republicans and the Board of Supervisors reached a settlement on September 17 in which the demand for routers,
network logs and the voter registration database would be withdrawn in exchange for the Board dropping its effort to recoup from the auditors the $2.8 million that had been authorized to replace voting equipment that had been potentially compromised by the auditors. The settlement called for a
special master to arrange for an independent technology team to examine the routers and answer questions about how they were used in the 2020 election and how they will be used in future elections. The results of the examination, led by former Arizona Republican congressman
John Shadegg, were released in March 2022, finding that the county's ballot tabulation system was never connected to the internet or any external devices. The team found there were actually no routers involved that required inspection and there was no evidence any data had been deleted or tampered with. On July 27, Twitter suspended the audit's official account for violating rules regarding platform manipulation and spam. Cyber Ninjas released a summary of its major donors on July 28, indicating $5.7 million was raised from five groups associated with individuals who had cast doubt on the presidential election, including Byrne, Flynn, and Powell, as well as OANN personalities
Chanel Rion and
Christina Bobb.
August 2021 Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich stated that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors violated state law by not complying with election audit subpoena. The Maricopa Board of Supervisors, in response, said that there was no violation, since the Senate lacked the power of enforcement when not in legislative session. Concurrently, on August 3, a county judge enforced a previous ruling from July wherein he rejected the argument from Senate Republicans that they were immune from suits to release their audit records, ordering the records released immediately; the order was expected to be appealed to a higher court. On August 25, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah ordered Cyber Ninjas to preserve all records of their audit for later public release.
September 2021 On September 23, 2021, Maricopa County claimed that the report from the audit would show that Biden had indeed won the county.
The New York Times has reported that draft versions of the report it had seen showed Biden to have won slightly more votes and Trump to have won slightly fewer than the official count had.
October 2021 On October 12, 2021, independent auditors reported that the audit had missed 15% of the paper ballots. This finding was based on detailed information provided to the Senate. The ballot counts were based on machines which counted the stacks of paper ballots. ==Controversy==