What Is Karen Fann Hiding From The Public About Her GQP Sham ‘Fraudit’?

CNN reports Arizona’s sham ‘audit’ report due to GOP-led state Senate on Monday:

The company that conducted Arizona’s sham review of the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County during the 2020 presidential election is set Monday to deliver a report detailing their findings to the Republican state senators who ordered it up.

Elections experts in both parties have said for months that results of the so-called “audit” — conducted by the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, which had no experience auditing election results and is led by a man who has repeated wild conspiracy theories about election fraud — will not be credible.

Last week, the Court of Appeals ordered chief conspirator Karen Fann and her GQP coconspirators in the Senate to produce documents about their GQP sham “fraudit.” Appeals court: Senate, Cyber Ninjas must produce ‘audit’ records immediately:

The state Senate can’t duck Arizona’s public records law because some records were created by and are in possession of Cyber Ninjas, the company that GOP legislative leaders hired to conduct a so-called “audit” of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.

That means the Senate must immediately turn over a bevy of documents requested by American Oversight, a liberal watchdog organization. The group filed a public records request for internal communications between “audit” team employees and contractors, contracts between Cyber Ninjas and its various subcontractors, records showing who was paying for the “audit,” agreements with outside funders, and all invoices or other records showing payments to vendors and subcontractors.

The appellate ruling upholds an earlier decision by a trial court judge.

“Allowing the legislature to disregard the clear mandate of the (public records law) would undermine the integrity of the legislative process and discourage transparency,” which would run counter to the purpose of Arizona’s public records law.

Because the Senate hired Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity firm with no experience in auditing or elections that is run by an election conspiracy theorist, to perform an “important legislative function,” the records the private firm creates in doing the Senate’s bidding have a “substantial nexus to governmental activity.” That makes them public records, the judges wrote.

“The requested records are no less public records simply because they are in the possession of a third party, Cyber Ninjas,” they concluded.

The GQP Senators who hired this incompetent conspiracy theorist for their GQP sham “fraudit” are tying to hide what a fraudulent sham this whole clown show has been. Arizona Senate makes last-ditch effort to keep records of audit company secret:

Senate President Karen Fann is making a last-ditch effort from having to publicly release the records of the firm conducting the Senate-ordered audit of the 2020 election.

And the attorney for the Prescott Republican is doing it, at least in part, by telling the Arizona Supreme Court that judges can’t force her to cough up the documents now held by Cyber Ninjas.

“The right of a constitutional department of government to control its own records is the hallmark of institutional independence and the fulcrum of the separation of powers,” attorney Kory Langhofer is telling the justices. And he pointed out that, just weeks ago, the court said former House Speaker J.D. Mesnard had “absolute immunity” for what he did as part of his legislative job.

But Langhofer may have no better luck convincing the state’s high court than he did when he made similar arguments to the Court of Appeals. In a strongly worded ruling Thursday, they said he was misreading that immunity.

I’ve said before that this “stop the steal” lawyer who also represents the Arizona Republican party needs to be disbarred for filing frivolous lawsuits.

“Legislators are not afforded absolute immunity for all acts that are in any way related to the legislative process,” wrote appellate court Judge Maria Elenz Cruz for the unanimous panel. “Nor is legislative immunity intended to make legislators ‘super-citizens’ immune from all responsibilities.”

And she noted that lawmakers could have — but did not — exempt themselves from the public records law. Now, Cruz said, someone is suing to enforce that law.

“Legislative immunity does not prevent this action against legislators in their capacity as elected officials, or the legislature, for its failure to comply with statutory obligations,” she said.

What is Karen Fann so desperately trying to hide? Remember when we were assured that this GQP sham “fraudit” would be “transparent”? Just another fraudulent lie from the Big Lie Party.

Last week, Election experts launched a preemptive strike against the Arizona ‘fraudit’ findings:

Elections experts watching the Arizona Senate’s self-styled audit say Americans should take a deeply skeptical view of the conclusions reached by people they deemed inexperienced contractors using defective procedures for the purpose of intentionally undermining the results of the presidential election and continuing an ongoing fundraising effort.

The team conducting the so-called audit ordered by Senate President Karen Fann will submit its draft report on Monday. The Senate will have an opportunity to review the findings and recommend changes before the final report or any of its findings are released to the public.

Various critics of the election review, however, aren’t waiting for the Senate to release the findings to warn people to approach the findings with caution.

In a conference call hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Election Innovation and Research on Monday, a group of election experts and officials recounted a litany of problems they allege have plagued the audit, from substandard and constantly changing procedures to the motivations of the audit team and the people who are funding them.

David Becker, the center’s executive director, called Cyber Ninjas, the Florida cybersecurity company that Fann hired to lead the review team, and its CEO, Doug Logan, inexperienced and biased. Logan and his company had no elections-related experience, and Fann hired him despite his public assertions that the election was rigged against former President Donald Trump.

“We’re seeing the losing candidate in the presidential race and this ecosystem of grifters that have surrounded him continue to lie to supporters who are sincerely disappointed in the outcome, probably in an effort at grift,” Becker said.

Becker described the “audit” as an effort to raise money — including by extending similar reviews into other swing states won by President Joe Biden, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and to undermine public confidence in the election, which Trump and many of his allies have falsely claimed was rigged.

“This has been a half-baked effort by a firm that’s completely unequipped to have anything to do with election work. And the result of this effort was fully baked from the beginning. The Ninjas are likely going to intentionally cast doubt on the outcome, even though it’s been verified and confirmed more than any election in Arizona history,” Becker said.

Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent Republican election attorney, noted that the “audit” was almost entirely funded by outside groups that have promoted conspiracy theories about the election. Anyone examining the review’s findings should keep in mind that those funders, who provided almost $5.7 million — dwarfing the $150,000 the Senate paid — are the real audience for the report, not the public, Ginsberg said.

“The outside funding sources is really important to concentrate on in terms of talking about the legitimacy of the ‘audit’ results,” he said.

“It’s not an audit”

Various experts said it would be inaccurate to call the election review an audit in the first place, based on what they said were a lack of professional standards and practices.

Ray Valenzuela, Maricopa County’s director of election services and early voting, and Jennifer Morrell, a former elections official and partner at Elections Group who has served as an observer at the audit for Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, described the election review’s policies and procedures, which Cyber Ninjas only released after being sued, as highly problematic and likely to result in inaccurate recounts counts. The “audit” team chased wild conspiracy theories about ballots with bamboo traces and secret watermarks, and ignored best practices requiring bipartisan review teams for recounts.

Others alleged that the “audit” team has failed to follow proper chain-of-custody procedures, to the point that a court would likely reject the county’s ballots and other election materials as evidence were an issue to arise in court.

“This is an unofficial election review, a partisan review, whatever term you want to use. But it’s not an audit,” Morrell said. “Election audits are defined in statute. Those processes and policies and procedures are described, they’re documented, they’re conducted by election officials using best practices.”

[B]enny White, a Republican election data analyst who was the GOP nominee for Pima County recorder last year, said he and the founder of the Boston-based election services company Clear Ballot Group made several offers to Fann to assist with the recount, but she refused.

White said his company’s analysis found small deviations in four of the boxes and one with a more sizable miscount of 18 ballots.

White also questioned whether the results of the machine count would be accurate, saying the machines are designed to count new pieces of paper that slide easily over each other, not ballots that have been folded and handled repeatedly. And Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer noted that, rather than have a third party check the work, the machine count was conducted by the Cyber Ninjas.

“We’ll go through any report that they put out, line by line by line, and point out where they’re wrong, because they’re going to claim that their results are different from the official results. And we’re going to say, well, that’s because you’re wrong. You went about it incorrectly. You produced incorrect results,” White said.

[H]obbs and Richer took aim at the pending “audit” report in their own preemptive rebuttals.

Hobbs, a Democrat who is running for governor, highlighted several previous audits and examinations from both before and after the election that showed accurate counts and no problems with the election equipment. Her report also noted many of the problems that Morrell and other election experts saw while working as observers for the Secretary of State’s Office.

“It is clear that any ‘outcomes’ or ‘conclusions’ that are reported from the Senate’s review, by the Cyber Ninjas or any of their subcontractors or partners, are unreliable,” Hobbs’ report concluded.

Richer, who defeated a Democratic incumbent in the November election, released an open letter to his fellow Republicans on Thursday urging them to reject spurious voter fraud claims and accept that Trump lost the election.

The Associated Press adds, What’s wrong with Arizona’s 2020 audit? A lot, experts say:

The cybersecurity firm plucked from relative obscurity to conduct an unprecedented review of ballots in Arizona’s largest country is readying to present its findings to Republican lawmakers.

Experts say there should be little anticipation about the revelations from the Maricopa County audit — and whatever those revelations are, they cannot be taken seriously.

“There are too many flaws in the way this review was conducted to trust it,” said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky who was the coauthor of a paper outlining the extensive problems.

Grayson cites a series of red flags, from biased and inexperienced contractors to conspiracy-chasing funders and bizarre, unreliable methods.

The report by Cyber Ninjas, a small cybersecurity firm based in Sarasota, Florida to lead the audit, is scheduled to be handed over Monday, but the findings will not immediately be made public.

[T]he state Senate president, Republican Karen Fann, insists the review was meant only to determine whether Arizona’s election laws were good enough.

Still, leaders of the review have a history of making misleading claims about their findings, and those claims are amplified by Trump and his allies.

A look at what election experts cite as the top troubles with the election review in Maricopa County:

BIASED CONTRACTORS

Fann selected Cyber Ninjas even though it had no prior experience in elections and never submitted a formal bid for the work. Its owner, Doug Logan, had tweeted support for conspiracy theories claiming Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Logan deleted his Twitter account before his Arizona contract was announced.

“I’m tired of hearing people say there was no fraud,” read one tweet that Logan retweeted. “It happened, it’s real, and people better get wise fast.”

The auditors recruited workers from Republican activist groups and did not live up to promises to screen them for biased social media posts. A former Republican state lawmaker who was at the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was spotted counting ballots for several days. His unsuccessful state House race was on thousands of the recounted ballots.

For a time, the official Twitter account tied to the audit leaders published attacks on Democrats and journalists covering the process. The account was later banned for violating Twitter’s rules.

Standard election reviews are conducted by bipartisan teams following rigid procedures designed to prevent bias and human error from corrupting the results, said Jennifer Morrell, a former Utah elections official and partner at The Elections Group, a consulting firm.

“They’re done in a way that’s observable, that’s independent, that’s public,” Morrell said.

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BIASED FUNDING SOURCES

The review was funded almost exclusively by groups led by prominent Trump supporters active in the Big Lie movement to cast doubt on the 2020 election results.

As of July, five groups had raised nearly $5.7 million for the effort. Among those leading the fundraising groups are Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor; Sidney Powell, a onetime Trump lawyer who filed a number of baseless lawsuits challenging election results; Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of Overstock.com; and correspondents from the pro-Trump One America News Network.

The money from pro-Trump groups dwarfs the $150,000 contributed by the Arizona Senate, which commissioned the audit and hired Cyber Ninjas. Funding the audit with cash from interested parties who would like to see the effort replicated in other states raises serious doubts about the validity of the findings, said Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican election attorney.

“The audience is the funders,” Ginsberg said. “The outside funding sources is really important to concentrate on in terms of talking about the legitimacy of the audit.”

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INACCURATE CLAIMS

The findings discussed publicly so far have fallen apart under scrutiny, but not before taking hold with Trump and many of his supporters who believe his false claims of fraud.

The auditors claimed a database directory was deleted from an election management server, alleging the potential illegal destruction of data.

But after Maricopa County’s technical staff explained how the hard drives on the servers were arranged, the audit’s lead digital analyst, Ben Cotton of the firm CyFIR, acknowledged that he had located all of the allegedly deleted files.

Logan has made a variety of claims about supposed irregularities that he said merited further research. He claimed there were thousands of mail ballots for which there was no record of a ballot being requested, and alleged that problems with paper and printers could allow for errors in counting ballots marked with Sharpies. Trump parroted the claims as evidence the election results are tainted. But all of them were wrong.

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CONSPIRACY HUNT

The auditors appear to be chasing down bizarre conspiracy theories.

Jovan Pulitzer, an inventor and former treasure hunter, has said technology he calls “kinematic artifact detection” was being used to look for altered ballots.

Pulitzer is the author of a series of books on lost treasures, including one titled “How to Cut Off Your Arm and Eat Your Dog.” In 2000, he developed a barcode scanner called Cuecat that purported to link print magazine ads to the internet. It was later named one of the 50 worst inventions of all time by Time magazine.

One audit leader, John Brakey, said they were looking for evidence of bamboo in the ballot paper. That apparently was an attempt to test a theory that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Asia.

For a while, auditors held ballots under ultraviolet lights to look for watermarks. Maricopa County ballots do not contain watermarks, but some adherents of the Q-Anon theory believe Trump secretly watermarked ballots to catch fraud.

Cyber Ninja’s Logan has said, citing no evidence, that he believes the CIA or its former employees may be involved with “disinformation” about election fraud, according to the Arizona Mirror. The website reported Logan’s comments were made in “The Deep Rig,” a conspiratorial film claiming the election was stolen from Trump.

Logan gave the filmmakers access to restricted areas of the Arizona ballot-counting operation, including the secure area where ballots were stored.

Every Republican in the Arizona Senate who authorized this GQP sham “fraudit” to promote Trump’s Big Lie and to undermine American elections should be forced to resign from office, and failing that, not one of them should ever hold a public office ever again. The voters of this state must hold these Sedition Party Big Lie grifters accountable for their actions.