What is an Arizona audit?
The Arizona audit, also known as the Maricopa County ballot paper audit for 2021, was a review of ballots cast for Maricopa County in the 2020 presidential election in Arizona. It was started by Republican voters in the Arizona Senate and carried out by private companies. The audit, which was started in April 2021, sparked controversy because of the extensive prior attempts by the President and his allies to rig the election as well as allegations of rule-breaking and irregularities in the recount, leading to accusations that the audit was a disinformation campaign.
According to reports by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times as well as Charles Cooke of National Forum, Trump had told affiliates that based on the audit’s findings, he would be reinstated.
Early in March, the Maricopa County presidential election 2020 results were submitted for audit by the Boston-based Clear Ballot Group to the Arizona state Senate.
In its thirteen years of operation, the firm has carried out more than 200 of these audits. Vice president of the Clear Ballot Group, Keir Holeman, addressed the Republican-controlled Senate, saying “Our level of comparative data is unrivaled.” He claims there was no response.
Selected Cyber Ninjas
Instead, the senate selected Cyber Ninjas, a small cybersecurity company with offices in Florida, which had never conducted an election audit and had not submitted a formal offer for the job. President Karen Fann claims she doesn’t remember how she came across the firm, but according to her detractors, one qualification stuck out: The CEO of Cyber Ninjas tweeted in favor of rumors that Trump, and not Democrat Joe Biden, became the winner of Maricopa County and Arizona.
Characterization of the procedure
Instead, the senate selected Cyber Ninjas, a small cybersecurity company with offices in Florida, which had never conducted an election audit and had not submitted a formal offer for the job. President Karen Fann claims she doesn’t remember how she came across the firm, but according to her detractors, one qualification stuck out: The CEO of Cyber Ninjas tweeted in favor of rumors that Trump, and not Democrat Joe Biden, became the winner of Maricopa County and Arizona.
Characterization of the procedure
Election specialists characterize the procedure being conducted by the unproven, little-known cybersecurity business as being so seriously defective that it borders on the strange. Critics claim that its main objective appears to be testing improbable ideas rather than merely recounting votes, which directly contradicts the nation’s democratic traditions.
Vote counters with experience have observed the process with disbelief. Maricopa County would need to restore all of its voting machines, according to Democratic State Secretary Katie Hobbs of Arizona, who stated last week that the auditors’ findings have irrevocably compromised the security of that equipment. In contrast to prior election audits within Arizona, representatives of each major party are not present at each table to observe the counting, according to experts, who also point out that the review is not doing a traditional recount.
Defenders of Cyber Ninjas claim that they are developing a model for a recount of the result in each of the crucial states that Biden won. Similar actions have already been requested by Trump allies in Georgia. And because the Arizona investigation is unique, the firm’s critics who claim that they lack election experience are unfounded, according to its supporters.
The state’s most populous county, Maricopa County, has previously undertaken two audits that identified no issues with the count. The Senate demanded the third vote at the prompting of Trump backers and summoned more than two million votes from the county.
The Senate leader did not create a formal proposal request as is customary for government contracts when she began hunting for an election firm to handle the work. Fann claimed that after reaching out to many businesses, she and her team received two bids: one for $450,000 from Ballot Group and the other for $500,000 from Intersec Worldwide, a cybersecurity company. Fann claimed that the Intersec concept was better, but she objected to the $8 million prize.
Fann, however, had access to a loose web of computer security specialists who had started to participate in pro-Trump electoral conspiracies.
Although the Senate approved the payment of $150,000 in public funds to Cyber Ninjas, it is unclear how much additional the audit will take and who will be footing the bill. In April, the pro-Trump America Television Network earned $150,000 in one day and has since kept up its fundraising efforts. Byrne has also begun a fundraising campaign with an organization that claims to have raised $1.7 million of its $2.8 million fundraising target. Both parties will not be required to reveal donors or credit for how the funds were used, and Logan has chosen not to provide specific financial information.
On October 7, 2021, the US House Committee for Oversight and Regulation held a public hearing on the audit. In her letter inviting Logan to the meeting in September, committee chairperson Carolyn Maloney stated that she had not gotten the Internet Ninjas materials she had demanded from Logan in July. Logan had denied the invitation. Gates, Sellers, and Bennett were present. Bennett said that there were multiple instances where election laws or regulations “were or may have been” broken. He reiterated the false assertion that documents had been deleted; Gates clarified that this was a result of auditors hunting for the data in the wrong location. We don’t understand who won the national vote in Arizona, falsely said Republican member of the committee Andy Biggs of Arizona.
CONCLUSION
County election officials issued a final report in January 2022 that said almost all of the auditors’ assertions were untrue or deceptive. The following day, Cyber Ninjas declared its closure after a Maricopa State judge fined the company $50,000 for each day it defied a months-old court order to turn over documents. Logan persisted in fighting the release of the order of the records as the total fines by March had reached $2 million.
Arizona Attorney G.Mark Brnovich, a Republican seeking the Senate in 2022, declared in April 2022 that he had not discovered any evidence of election fraud in 2020 after a six-month inquiry.
