The QAnon Cyber Ninjas Don’t Know How to Count Ballots? I’m Shocked!

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Coming Attraction: The Cyber Ninjas “fraudit” team announces their ballot count doesn’t match the ballot count of Maricopa County – this was always the plan, and the end result they were hired by the Arizona Senate Republicans to produce.

The Arizona Mirror reports, Fann says audit team, Maricopa County have different ballot totals:

The number of ballots counted by the Arizona Senate’s self-styled audit didn’t match Maricopa County’s official total from the 2020 general election, which prompted the election review team to acquire machines for a new tally, Senate President Karen Fann said in a radio interview on Tuesday.

“They haven’t released a number yet,” Fann told conservative radio host Mike Broomhead in an interview on KTAR. “However, we do know that those numbers do not match with Maricopa County at this point.”

Voters cast 2,089,563 ballots in the general election in Maricopa County, according to the county’s official canvass.

Fann’s revelation comes as the election review team prepared to begin a new count of the ballots. The audit team finished its hand count of votes in the presidential and U.S. Senate races in late June, when the Senate’s contract at Veterans Memorial Coliseum ended. But the team moved the ballots to the nearby Wesley Bolin building at the old state fairgrounds near downtown Phoenix, where other work continued.

The Senate obtained two paper counting machines that will tally the total number of ballots, without recounting the results of any races. Fann told Broomhead that the new count would begin Tuesday.

Official results certified President Joe Biden defeating former President Donald Trump by 10,457 votes statewide and Democrat Mark Kelly beating Republican incumbent Martha McSally by 78,806 ballots. In Maricopa County, Biden won by 45,109 votes and Kelly won by 80,193 votes.

If the new tally finds a different number of ballots than the audit’s hand count, it could call the results of that recount into question. It’s unclear how the audit team would proceed if the two counts are different.

You are missing the point: they want the counts to be off because they want to create doubt that any election results can be trusted as accurate. It is all about undermining free and fair elections. This is why Republican state legislators, and only Republican state legislators, after a post-election “audit” can declare the winner of an election. Surprise! It will always be the Republican candidate. This was Rep. Shawnna Bolick’s bill that went nowhere this year, but will be back in the “suppression session” after this Cyber Ninja Circus leaves town (Bolick is now running for Secretary of State so that she can ensure Republican victories).

Election administration experts have been harshly critical of the procedures used by Cyber Ninjas, the company Fann hired to lead the audit team, and its subcontractors used to count ballots, and have expressed concerns that the contractors leading the review have oftentimes exhibited a lack of basic knowledge about election procedures.

The audit team set up nearly four dozen tables, each of which contained turntables with two stands for the ballots. Three-person teams of audit workers counted the votes in the presidential and Senate races as the ballots rotated past them on the turntables, with the totals being recorded, first in batches of 100 but later in batches of 50.

In a June report by the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit organization that describes itself as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing free, fair and secure elections, University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden and former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, described the audit’s ballot counting practices as a troubling departure from widely accepted best practices in which judges jointly review each ballot. Unlike the Arizona audit procedures, in which the ballots were moving sideways past the judges, that “stacking method” gives judges adequate time to review stationary ballots.

Jennifer Morrell, a nationally renowned election procedures expert who served as an audit observer for Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Washington Post in May that the audit’s counting procedures allowed for “a shocking amount of error.”

“At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling,” Morrell wrote.

Cyber Ninjas and its subcontractors came into the audit with almost no experience working in election-related matters. What little experience they had came after the 2020 general election, when several of the companies worked directly with the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to legitimize baseless and often debunked allegations that the election was rigged against Trump.

Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan promoted election fraud conspiracy theories on social media in the weeks after Trump lost to Joe Biden, and he compiled information for U.S. senators to justify overturning the election results.

Logan also appeared in a conspiracy theorist film riddled with falsehoods about the 2020 election and directed by a man whose previous work claimed work claimed aliens were behind 9/11. Audit leader Doug Logan appears in conspiracy theorist election film.

Maricopa County officials laid the blame for the mismatched ballot totals at the audit team’s feet, arguing that it was Fann’s contractors who must have erred.

Republican Jack Sellers, the chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors, said he wasn’t surprised that Fann’s audit team, which he called “woefully underqualified,” reached a different tally than the “experienced professionals” in the county’s elections department.

“They’ve cycled through processes and procedures, chasing conspiracy theories while volunteers with no elections experience tried to accurately count votes as they spun by on turntables. Elections experts from across the country have said this method is flawed and will produce incorrect results,” Sellers said in a statement provided to the Mirror.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, also a Republican, also attributed the disparate counts to human error by the Cyber Ninjas team. He speculated that the audit team members may have included ballots that shouldn’t have been counted, such as spoiled ballots, test ballots and the original copies of ballots that were duplicated because the tabulation machines couldn’t read them. Or, he said, they could have omitted ballots that should have been counted.

Like Sellers, Richer, who wasn’t in office at the time of the election, said the audit team used a process that is “inherently subject to high error rates” and changed those practices multiple times since the audit began. He also speculated that audit workers could have made mistakes while typing information about vote totals into their computers.

“The county stands by the machine count – including the total number of ballots counted – performed by the high-priced tabulation equipment. These machines underwent a series of checks to make sure they read ovals correctly, but also to make sure they read the number of ballots correctly,” Richer said.

The Republic’s Laurie Roberts has the appropriate level of sarcasm. Fann says auditors’ ballot count doesn’t match county’s tally? I, for one, am shocked:

I, for one, am shocked that a cybersecurity company with no actual experience auditing elections — other, that is, than a CEO who promotes election conspiracy theories — has come up with a ballot count that’s different from the county’s official tally of 2,089,563 ballots cast.

So now we are left to wonder what to believe:

The count taken by the Cyber Ninjas, who have taken our ballots for a spin, subjected them to UV rays and 5G photographs and offered them up for an appearance on The Deep Rig, a documentary about the supposedly stolen election that starred one of the audit’s chief financial backers?

Or the count taken by the county’s elections professionals, conducted in accordance with state law and in full public view of bipartisan observers?

Fann is now planning to conduct her own ballot count, beginning on Tuesday. She’s shelled out another $30,000 to the buy paper counting equipment.

Note: Senator Fann is using taxpayer money to pursue Republican “Stop The Steal” fever dreams. Taxpayer money should not be used. Every one of the Republican Senators who authorized this GQP sham “fraudit” should be personally liable for indemnifying every dollar of the public’s money spent on this partisan fraud.

Which will do precisely nothing to address the coming train wreck, when the Cyber Ninjas inevitably announce that fraud was afoot and Donald Trump was robbed. (Or, in the alternative, that fraud was afoot but we couldn’t find it because the county Board of Supervisors blocked us.)

Here’s a prediction: 40% of the state’s voters will absolutely believe it, and the rest will get a good laugh out of the whole thing.

There is a way to minimize the coming carnage. Get someone with expertise in election audits to check the ninja auditors’ work.

Surely, that is something Fann would consider essential, given that her goal is to “restore confidence” in our elections. Just under 41% of the state’s likely voters, most of them Republicans, apparently don’t have any. They wholeheartedly support Fann’s audit, according to a poll by HighGround Inc., a Republican political consulting firm.

Which leaves her with 55% who don’t.

No word on whether she gives a rip about their confidence level.

As it turns out, a bipartisan trio of retired election analysts has offered their own analysis of Maricopa County’s vote.

Republican Benny White is a longtime election analyst in Pima County who has consulted on audits in three states. Democrat Larry Moore and independent Tim Halvorson are both retired executives from Clear Ballot, a Boston-based election and auditing firm.

The three of them did their own analysis of Maricopa County’s results using the cast vote record, a county database that contains every vote cast in every race.

Their conclusion: Trump lost not because of stolen votes but because of turned-off voters in wealthy Republican enclaves, people who took a pass on Trump. They can show their work, precinct by precinct.

In June, White sent a letter to Fann, offering a challenge.

Pick a box of ballots, any one of the 1,600 boxes, they said, and we will provide an accurate count of each race on the 1,000 or so ballots inside, to be compared with the ninjas’ hand count of the box.

“If they were going to present the results of this audit or so-called audit as something that had credibility, that had reliability, that voters could look at and say there is some truth…,” White told ABC 15’s Garrett Archer. “They need to have some way of verifying what they’re doing is complete and accurate.”

Curiously, the offer was summarily rejected.

On Monday, White and company  renewed their offer.

It seems like a reasonable idea, comparing their computerized analysis of each box of ballots to the ninja auditor’s hand count.

And very much in keeping with the thinking of Fann, who on Tuesday explained once again why she embarked upon her audit of the election.

“Why wouldn’t we want to look at it, just to make sure that our electoral system is safe and secure?” she told Broomhead. “What is more sacred to the American public other than our religious beliefs and our Second Amendment right to defend ourselves. Isn’t election integrity right up there with those as well?”

Indeed it is.

And if the goal here really is to “restore confidence” [that was a lie], what better way to go about it than to have people who actually know what they’re doing verify the work of the ninja auditors?

If our partisan hack Attorney General was actually doing his job, all 16 Republican senators who authorized this fraud would be charged with election interference, ballot tampering, destruction of ballots, and destruction of election equipment, at a minimum. They should all be personally liable for restitution, i.e., the cost of the election equipment Maricopa County now has to replace.

And where is the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division? DOJ threatened legal repercussions, what are they waiting for? President Biden appointed an “A Team” of lawyers, but they are still sitting on the sidelines.

I have said repeatedly that all 16 Republican senators should be forced to resign from office en mass for this assault on American democracy with their ridiculous QAnon “fraudit.” Not one of them should ever hold political office again for their malfeasance in office.

Only you the voters can hold them accountable.