American Oversight Scores Two Court Victories in GQP Sham Fraudits In Arizona And Wisconsin

American Oversight in press releases reports COURT ORDERS ARIZONA SENATE AND CYBER NINJAS TO IMMEDIATELY TURN OVER ‘AUDIT’ RECORDS:

In a ruling released on Friday, the Arizona Superior Court in Maricopa County ordered the Arizona Senate and contractor Cyber Ninjas to immediately release to American Oversight documents related to the Senate’s partisan “audit” of 2020 presidential election ballots cast in Maricopa County.

This is the first time that the court has directly ordered Cyber Ninjas, the lead contractor responsible for the election review, to release documents in response to American Oversight’s public records lawsuit.

“The court has confirmed that public officials can’t avoid accountability by outsourcing questionable activities to private contractors,” said Heather Sawyer, Executive Director of American Oversight “Despite the year-long effort by the Arizona Senate and the Cyber Ninjas to shield their partisan election ‘audit’ from scrutiny, the public will soon have transparency and accountability for this dangerous effort to undermine confidence in Arizona’s election results.”

Previous court orders have put the responsibility of producing documents on the Senate alone, instructing the Senate to obtain copies of any records held by Cyber Ninjas. The Senate has repeatedly argued in court that it has been unable to compel Cyber Ninjas to comply with requests for documents, although the firm has begun turning over batches of records within the past several months.

The ruling by Judge Bradley Astrowsky orders the Senate and Cyber Ninjas to comply with Arizona’s public records law and “immediately provide [American Oversight] with access to (or copies of) any and all documents with a substantial nexus to the audit activities, including all public records” identified in American Oversight’s second amended complaint, filed in December of last year. However, the order specifically excludes the roughly 1,000 documents that the Senate has claimed should be withheld from the public under a claim of legislative privilege. The status of those documents is currently pending before the Arizona Supreme Court.

This latest ruling came nearly a year after an Arizona court first found that documents held by the Senate’s contractor Cyber Ninjas qualified as public records and were subject to release under Arizona law.

The order released today in Arizona follows one just a few hours earlier from our litigation seeking answers from Wisconsin's partisan election review. https://t.co/QeZcuS6AHA

— American Oversight (@weareoversight) July 16, 2022

And in Wisconsin, COURT RULES VOS VIOLATED PUBLIC RECORDS LAW, ORDERS RESPONSE TO AMERICAN OVERSIGHT’S REQUESTS WITHIN 20 DAYS:

In American Oversight’s year-long effort to obtain records related to the Wisconsin Assembly’s partisan election investigation, today Dane County Circuit Court Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn issued a decision holding that Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos “not only untimely delayed responses to record requests, but that his responses have also failed to include countless records, either willfully or because of neglectful office-wide practices which might have caused the loss of records.”

Bailey-Rihn ordered Vos to fully respond to each of American Oversight’s records requests “within twenty days.”

“It’s ironic that Speaker Vos claimed an investigation was necessary to instill confidence in the election outcome, but then has done everything in his power to prevent Wisconsinites from learning the whole truth,” said Melanie Sloan, American Oversight’s senior adviser. “Vos is not above the law and American Oversight is gratified to see him held accountable for violating Wisconsin’s public records law.”

Today’s ruling came in American Oversight’s second lawsuit seeking records from the election review. The watchdog group sued Vos in October 2021 over his failure to respond to public records requests for documents — including communications and contracts with contractors conducting the review.

The court’s order reads in part:

“I conclude that Vos violated the public records statutes in three ways: First, Vos provides no reason and no evidence to explain why a response delayed for six months was ‘as soon as practicable.’ Second, Vos failed to respond to the request for records ‘from November 3, 2020’ by instead producing records from an unasked-for time period. Third, based on the undisputed evidence of Vos’ ineffectual records practices, I can draw no reasonable inference except that Vos did not search for records in the first instance.”

Through this lawsuit as well as two others, American Oversight has obtained hundreds of pages of records from Vos, the Wisconsin Assembly, and the Office of Special Counsel. Those records have revealed, among other things, that the election investigation headed by attorney Michael Gableman has failed to uncover evidence to support the false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Expense records also show that the investigators have spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on questionable travel, including to Arizona’s sham “audit” of Maricopa County and to election-denier Mike Lindell’s August 2021 “cyber symposium” in South Dakota.

View today’s decision and order here.

More information about American Oversight’s ongoing investigation into Wisconsin’s partisan election review is available here.