The Ongoing 2020 Election: Maricopa County Recount

[Very Tired]

I can't wait to see where all these conspiracy theorists go by the time the next election rolls around. They got to keep up their 'Trump Won' narrative, but at the same time, they don't want to discourage their base from going out to vote. And why want any of the kool aid drinkers vote? Biden is in office now, it'll be so much easier the 2nd time around to rig the elections!

[Breccia]

I can't wait to see where all these conspiracy theorists go by the time the next election rolls around. They got to keep up their 'Trump Won' narrative

I dunno man, four years is a really long time to dangle shiny objects in front of the rabid fanbase.

Besides, we all know the real issue: a lame-ass, limp-dick, IMPOTUS-inspired excuse to pass voter suppression laws. The recounts don't need to find anything. They just need to exist.

[Breccia]

Report is due Monday.

Let's have a summary piece.

A 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.

Prediction #1: Cyber Ninjas will tell the public "we found massive fraud but can't show you yet".

Republicans in the state Senate launched the review of the county ballots in April in an effort to find irregularities that could support former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. The lawmakers did so despite the fact that the ballots had been counted and audited twice already. Courts in Arizona and other 2020 battleground states have rejected dozens of election suits as judges found no evidence to support claims of fraud.

A broad coalition of government and industry officials called the presidential election “the most secure in American history.” Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, said, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

In Arizona, the number of problematic ballots reported was nowhere near Democrat Joe Biden’s winning margin of 10,400 votes.

The state Senate president, Republican Karen Fann, insists the review was meant only to determine whether Arizona’s election laws were good enough.

Prediction #2 (and this is an old one): the AZ Senate, while not disclosing the Cyber Ninjas report to the public, will say AZ's election laws were not good enough, and will make changes based on information that is known to be bad. What few Democrats on the AZ Senate object, even though they have the report and know the information is bad, will be handwaved.

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.

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.

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Republicans in the state Senate launched the review of the county ballots in April in an effort to find irregularities that could support former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. The lawmakers did so despite the fact that the ballots had been counted and audited twice already. Courts in Arizona and other 2020 battleground states have rejected dozens of election suits as judges found no evidence to support claims of fraud.

A broad coalition of government and industry officials called the presidential election “the most secure in American history.” Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, said, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

In Arizona, the number of problematic ballots reported was nowhere near Democrat Joe Biden’s winning margin of 10,400 votes.

The 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.

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“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.

Prediction #3: The AZ Senate will invent a reason not to do this, that somehow magically doesn't involve the fact that the Cyber Ninjas found nothing. "This is an emergency, we need to act," they'll say, "we don't have time to do this correctly when there's conspiracy theories we like better and bad information we need to hide."

BIASED FUNDING SOURCES

The review was funded almost exclusively by groups led by prominent Trump supporters active in the 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.”

Prediction #4: we will not find out who the unknown backers of Cyber Ninjas are for years. Not until the damage is done.

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.

Prediction #5: The report contains these very disproven points, with no proof of any of them.

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

An author named Pulitzer. Fucking eyeroll.

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.

Prediction #6: Cyber Ninjas will claim this "restricted" access was good enough to prove he was never cheating, and will hide his methods from not just public inquiry but even from a Senate cross-examination. He just won't explain how he found his "fraud", knowing he will not be held in contempt.

And finally:

Prediction #7: Even if I'm even partially right, some Arizona Democrat will leak the report, in a desperate and possibly illegal attempt to delay or deflect from the damage it will do. By publicly exposing the sham and the shame, they will try to keep Arizona from making any changes based on lies, fraud, lack of evidence dressed as evidence, and conspiracy theories.

Which won't matter, because the AZ Senate doesn't have to listen to the public. Their new job is to shut down the public.

In other words: Arizona will end up saying "We know we have no fraud and no crime, but we're going to pretend there was", and they're going to do it in broad daylight, and they're going to get away with it. They will simply stop representing the people or the public trust, because that's no longer important to them.

[draynay]

Well, I'm convinced.

The only way you become a former treasure hunter is if you already found all the treasure, so yeah, very convincing.

[Ivanstone]

An author named Pulitzer. Fucking eyeroll.

The CueCat patents are held by Jeffry Jovan Philyaw, who changed his name to Jovan Hutton Pulitzer after the failure of CueCat.

Also known as Commander Pulitzer.

[DarkTZeratul]

The only way you become a former treasure hunter is if you already found all the treasure, so yeah, very convincing.

It couldn't possibly be because you wasted a whole bunch of time and money and didn't find any treasure and gave up.

[Edge-]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...president-says

Cyber Ninjas can't deliver their report on time.

But why?

Because the founder has a bad case of covid, so do two other members of the five-person team.

Procrastinators unite?

[Huehuecoyotl]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...president-says

Cyber Ninjas can't deliver their report on time.

But why?

Because the founder has a bad case of covid, so do two other members of the five-person team.

Procrastinators unite?

Because they're still figuring out how to phrase "the democrats were so good at their blatant fraud that they've managed to erase all trace of it" without a) sounding like fucking idiots and b) opening themselves up to lawsuits.

[gondrin]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...president-says

Cyber Ninjas can't deliver their report on time.

But why?

Because the founder has a bad case of covid, so do two other members of the five-person team.

Procrastinators unite?

Maybe they should release their test results, then someone hire a team of people to audit those result because there might be a false positive.

[Shadowferal]

Procrastinators unite?

Hmf...later when I feel up to it.

[Zaydin]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...president-says

Cyber Ninjas can't deliver their report on time.

But why?

Because the founder has a bad case of covid, so do two other members of the five-person team.

Procrastinators unite?

This is all the proof I need to figure they found jack shit to back up their claims and are now desperate to stall to avoid admitting it and admit that they wasted months and millions of dollars on nothing.

We all know that if they had found any evidence with even a shred of credibility to back up their bullshit they would have paraded it in front of every camera they could find by now.

[Breccia]

Surprising nobody, AZ election officials are decrying the now proven sham of an "audit", one even suggesting the term "audit" was objectively false.

Despite frequent references to this review as an audit, the exercise undertaken by the Arizona Senate’s Florida-based contractor, Cyber Ninjas, fails to meet industry standards for any credible audit, much less for an election audit. The Senate’s contractors demonstrated a lack of understanding of election processes and procedures both at a state and county level.

Nobody stole Maricopa County’s elections. Elections in Maricopa County aren’t rigged.

I believe in the court system. I believe in facts and logic. I believe that Maricopa County has many safeguards against widespread fraud. I believe in the simple, straight-forward, data-backed explanation that Trump lost many Republican voters in affluent areas. Accordingly, I know Joe Biden won Maricopa County.

Those are just two bits from separate, scathing, bipartisan reports from high-ranking AZ elected officials.

Meanwhile the CEO responded something like this:

These cough cough elected and experienced cough officials have no cough hack cough idea what they're cough cough doing. Cyber Ninjas have cough wheeze cough been following the same common-sense rules of cough logic and safety that cough cough HRHRMMHM cough that led me to catching COVID

[BronzeCondor]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...president-says

Cyber Ninjas can't deliver their report on time.

But why?

Because the founder has a bad case of covid, so do two other members of the five-person team.

Procrastinators unite?

Reading is hard:

"In addition to the illnesses, it wasn't until Thursday that the Senate received the images of the ballot envelopes from Maricopa County and are hoping to have those analyzed as soon as possible to incorporate those results in the final report," Fann said.

[unfilteredJW]

Reading is hard:

This is some weak shit right here.

[BronzeCondor]

This is some weak shit right here.

But is it wrong?

[PhaelixWW]

But is it wrong?

Absolutely, because it's not the reason that the report isn't finished. This report was supposed to take a few weeks... back in, what, April?

[BronzeCondor]

Absolutely, because it's not the reason that the report isn't finished. This report was supposed to take a few weeks... back in, what, April?

Maybe that was the expectation before Maricopa wanted to play games. Why did it take them so long to give them the ballot envelope images?

[Edge-]

Maybe that was the expectation before Maricopa wanted to play games.

Which organization is months behind on their "audit", has zero documentation about it and the chain of custody, shipped results out of state without authorization, and was searching for god-damned bamboo fibers in ballots, again?

Because I don't think that was Maricopa county, who had to spend millions on new machines since they had no way of knowing the machines inspected weren't compromised as there weren't proper election observers.

You don't seem to know what "game" is being played.

[BronzeCondor]

Which organization is months behind on their "audit", has zero documentation about it and the chain of custody, shipped results out of state without authorization, and was searching for god-damned bamboo fibers in ballots, again?

Because I don't think that was Maricopa county, who had to spend millions on new machines since they had no way of knowing the machines inspected weren't compromised as there weren't proper election observers.

You don't seem to know what "game" is being played.

I guess the ballot envelope images got lost in the mail, silly me.

[Edge-]

I guess the ballot envelope images got lost in the mail, silly me.

No, Maricopa was just kinda done playing Cyber Ninja's pathetic games. They are not deserving of serious treatment or credibility.

Again, they were looking for bamboo fibers in ballots and using blacklights looking for secret Trump watermarks. These people are fundamentally unserious.