The intent of the Arizona Audit is not to determine an accurate count -- the intent is to undermine Democracy. Arizona Audit Declares Trump Won? That outcome is looking more and more likely. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/arizona-audit-recount-claiming-trump-won.amp Sitting in the press booth at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, several rows above where some two dozen tables of counters were retallying the 2020 presidential votes of the citizens of Maricopa County, Bennie Smith acknowledged something that has become readily apparent to most outside observers of the process that has come to be known as the “Arizona audit.” “They’re not trying to capture an accurate count,” said Smith, a Democratic Tennessee election official who had traveled to Phoenix to advise the auditors. In fact, Smith said he expects the end result to be “wildly different from the count.” Smith said he was advising the audit—a process specially ordered by the Arizona Senate and which began last month outside the county’s ordinary recount system—because he hopes to see a standardization of independent machine ballot audits of most U.S. elections. What’s going on in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, former home to the Phoenix Suns and commonly used these days for gun shows and high school graduations, is not that. Nor is it a hand recount done in accordance with the Arizona election procedures. Here’s how Arizona recounts are supposed to normally work: Two counters, under the eye of a supervisor, tally ballots in batches of 10 at a time. Their results must agree, and any discrepancies in each batch must be resolved by a bipartisan board before they are added to the count. Here’s what Smith had been watching inside the audit: batches of 50 ballots, swinging around on a Lazy Susan, as three people speed-read votes in the presidential race and the U.S. Senate race, which were won by Democrats Joe Biden and Mark Kelly. “Everybody’s got about three and a half seconds to watch two races,” Smith said. For many tables, it appeared to be less time than that. If he were on the floor trying to count ballots himself, Smith said, he believed he would be making mistakes under those conditions. “That table is rolling,” Smith says pointing at a particularly fast-counting group. “Me standing there for five hours, I would not say that it would be ideal.” To the uninitiated observer, this might seem alarming. But Smith assured me it was nothing to worry about—because, he said, “they’re not recounting the election.” What were the people busily counting election ballots doing, then? Over the course of three days in Phoenix, talking to participants and critics and watching the event unfold, I couldn’t get a coherent answer. The Arizona audit is a new kind of political ritual, whose purpose exists beyond reason or consensus or fact. More than six months after Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election was certified by Republican officials in Maricopa, Arizona’s largest and one of the largest in the country, this audit is what the Arizona Senate has decided is necessary to resolve continued accusations by the former president and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen. Acceptance of error—of alternative facts, as it were—is built into the process: If two counters have the same total, but the third counter disagrees by one or two votes, then the two matching counts become the official tally, overruling the discrepancy. According to observers of the audit, this happens often. Around the audit site, the political fault lines are multiplying—not merely between Trump supporters and Biden supporters, but between the local Republican officials, who are responsible for election results being verifiable and making sense, and the state Republicans, who are chasing a myth. The irregularities in the numbers are the least of it. “They destroyed the election,” former County Recorder Adrian Fontes said of the Senate auditors. “And I think that they did it on purpose.” The statement might sound like partisan hyperbole from a former elected official with an ax to grind. But in the past week, similarly damning calls were issued by every major Republican elected official in Maricopa County. In a meeting on Tuesday, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers said plainly, “It’s time to be done with this craziness,” as he and the county’s other top elected officials, who had previously tried to work with the Republican state senators, signed a letter calling for an end of the audit. On Thursday, the Democratic secretary of state said that Maricopa County could no longer safely use the voting equipment that had been handed over to the audit. The Republican-controlled county board went along with the audit plan initially because the Senate, Fontes said, “had given these guys guarantees it wasn’t going to be a shit show.” Instead, the state Senate ended up handing nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots to a previously unknown company called “Cyber Ninjas,” whose CEO has claimed the election may have been manipulated by a firm with ties to the former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez (who is dead). “We’ve changed course,” Stephen Richer, the current county recorder who unseated Fontes in the last election, told me of the local Republican response. That course correction appears to have come too late. Up close in Arizona, it’s clear that the Cyber Ninjas are doing exactly what their CEO, Doug Logan, has accused election officials of doing: miscounting the 2020 election. If and when that new and inaccurate result is made public as part of an official audit report, local leaders believe the consequences will be grave. “I think a small mushroom cloud will go up over Maricopa County if the Cyber Ninjas report that Donald Trump really was the winner of the election,” Richer says. The joke about Adrian Fontes in the Phoenix-Tempe area is that when he rigged the 2020 election in Maricopa County, he forgot to fix his own race. Those who have accused him of treason don’t think it’s so funny. Just outside the audit site was a small tent of supporters holding signs in favor of the audit. One was a banner depicting the swing states in the 2020 election as a series of dominoes, with the header “May Arizona be the first Domino to Fall.” Another declared that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors “are enemies of the nation.” I broached the joke about Fontes with some of the audit supporters around the tent. “It’s a team effort,” said Joe Medina, a middle-aged Mexican American Trump supporter and self-described Christian, who wore a T-shirt with a Grand Canyon emblem. “He could be one of the fall guys.” Medina and others at the audit site were convinced the audit is likely to prove corruption that they are certain occurred during the 2020 election. At that point, “justice” will demand somebody serve a prison sentence. “Treason is a pretty bad crime,” Medina said. Kelly Smith, who traveled from Orange County, California, to attend the audit and carries a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum in a holster as he walks around between the Coliseum parking lot and the tent encampment to guard against antifa, says that Joe Biden belongs in Guantánamo Bay. It’s been treated in the national press corps almost like distant history, but it was only five months ago that a group of similarly minded Trump supporters stormed the Capitol of the United States assaulting police officers and hunting for public officials. “What’s going on right here is dangerous,” said Kirk Vandermiller, a counterprotester standing across from the audit supporters with his own signs. At about midday and in 99-degree heat, Vandermiller set up on the opposite side of the street from the pro-audit tent with a two-sided replica road construction sign, one side reading “ELECTION FRAUD IN PROGRESS” and the other “SORE LOSER ZONE.” After Vandermiller put out his signs, one of the women in the pro-audit tent put out a new sign that looked freshly spray painted, which read “WINNER ZONE.” “They’re living in a fantasy,” Vandermiller said. “Adults live in reality, children live in fantasy, and this is a movement of people with childlike minds.” As I began to head for the audit site, someone from the pro-audit side shouted at Vandermiller: “What are you afraid of?” --- This is a major talking point of the pro-audit side: If election officials and Democrats had nothing to hide, they wouldn’t oppose the process. What’s going on in the actual audit site, though, leaves plenty to worry about. First, the public has no idea who is paying for the audit. The Arizona Senate put up $150,000 in funding, but the cost for the audit is reported to run into the millions of dollars. The Cyber Ninjas are raising that money from anonymous third parties. What little we do know about the auditors themselves does not bode well for an impartial count. The counters have been drawn mainly from the ranks of the grassroots Republican Party, and the few who have been identified publicly are self-described partisans. One of the workers who spoke with CNN, Elouise Flagg, was straightforward about her perspective. “I think Donald Trump won the election—firm believer,” Flagg told the network. “I hope we come to a point where we’re happy with the results and truth is told.” Another auditor was a former Republican state legislator named Anthony Kern who participated in “Stop the Steal” events, was photographed on the steps of the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot, and had been fired from a law enforcement job for lying to a supervisor and placed on an official misconduct list. Kern’s name was also on the ballot as an official elector for Donald Trump—under normal Arizona audit procedures, it is illegal to count a vote when your name is on the ballot. Kern was ultimately removed as a counter because of “optics,” Senate liaison Ken Bennett told reporters in the press pool when I was at the coliseum. And then there are those hasty counting procedures, which seem almost designed to create errors. Despite Smith’s insistence that this recount was not a recount, the audit supporters and the rest of the Republican base seem ready to view it as exactly that. Bennett, the former Arizona secretary of state who is now the leader of the audit, said this count—and he called it a “count”—is being conducted to look for “more than acceptable variance” from the official tally. “More than acceptable variance” is 0.3 percent, or Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state, Bennett told me. In Maricopa County, that would be a change of 6,268 ballots, or approximately one error toward President Donald Trump every third batch count. Again, the count allows up to two discrepancies per batch between the two official counters and a third “off” counter. “This has been designed in a way to create this doubt and to be able to put out misinformation and not be honest with the public about what they found,” Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told me. “A really key piece of any audit is that you can replicate your results, and they’re creating results that are not going to be replicable by anyone else who wanted to do the same thing again.” Adrian Fontes agrees. “I can guarantee you right now they will not find the same numbers because they’re not performing the same acts,” he says. “Worse yet, spinning these Lazy Susans around and only giving these folks three seconds per ballot and then discounting one of the three folks, and those numbers, means that they’re going to get wildly different numbers that are going to be wholly unverifiable.” --- “We didn’t do so bad,” said deputy audit liaison John Brakey in the press booth, on one of the final days before the audit suspended its operations so that Veterans Memorial Coliseum could host a week of high school graduations. “We didn’t qualify for Bizarro Watch, so that’s a win!” Brakey was discussing his and Ken Bennett’s appearance on The Daily Show the night before. “All Chinese ballots are on bamboo? Is it because soy sauce would be too obviously racist?” Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper asked Brakey and Bennett on national television. “I consider it a victory because we survived it,” Brakey said. The bamboo question had been trailing Brakey ever since he first reported to a local member of the Arizona press that the audit was indeed looking through high-resolution digital cameras for traces of bamboo in the ballots. “They shot the messenger,” Brakey muttered at one point. “The rest of my life they’re going to talk about this.” Down below, cameras were snapping photos of ballot after ballot, still looking for bamboo. But it was never Brakey’s idea, he wanted the press to know. It was another member of the audit team, Jovan Pulitzer, who came up with the notion that you could prove or disprove Chinese influence in the election by hunting for bamboo traces on potentially smuggled ballots. Brakey spoke at length about Pulitzer, describing him as a charlatan. He also shared with reporters an email dossier that describes Pulitzer as a “con artist who is a master of hoaxes and fraud” and a “failed treasure hunter.” Back in December, Pulitzer said that he could use forensics to try to detect bamboo in suspected Chinese ballots; in March, he declared that “my technology and intellectual property is assisting one of the most impressive and qualified audit teams ever assembled.” Bennett subsequently confirmed Pulitzer would be involved in the audit. The bamboo hunt, though, had become such a national embarrassment that Pulitzer himself tried to disown it during a conversation with me. “I don’t lend any credence to that story,” Pulitzer said of the claim that China had flown in tens of thousands of ballots to Maricopa County via a South Korean airplane to swing the election for Biden. Pulitzer told me that he’s a scientist merely trying to help “to tell whether that story is true or made up bullshit.” Like Brakey, he says, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” As for the South Korean jetliner story, “if that’s found to be fraud, then I’m all for taking a piece of bamboo and whipping the shit out of that person for making up that bullshit story, because that is just un-freaking-forgivable,” Pulitzer said. “But right now, nobody knows. And, so, one way to tell is by looking at the fibers of the paper.” No matter how deeply you go into the audit, it’s always supposedly being done on someone else’s behalf—someone sincerely (if unverifiably) concerned about whether the generally accepted facts of the election are really facts. The messengers are just conveying the message, even if they do it over and over again. As recently as April, Pulitzer published a 30-minute video on his YouTube page endorsing separate theories that China had smuggled ballots into a different state, titled “The China Connection With Georgia Elections? Is There One? PROVE IT!” (Of the Georgia smuggled ballot claim he endorses and the Arizona smuggled ballot claim he disowns, Pulitzer said, “They have nothing to do with each other.”) Pulitzer, for his part, refused to answer questions about how, specifically, his “technology and intellectual property” were being used in Arizona, what consulting he did with Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, and whether or not he’s going to be responsible for conducting the bamboo paper analysis, citing a nondisclosure agreement. He also wouldn’t discuss what compensation he is getting from the Arizona audit or who might be paying him. He has, however, been pushing for government-backed audits across the country through crowdfunding efforts. “Being an auditor myself, Jovan’s price is insane, like insane, it’s so small,” said one New Hampshire resident who’s been supporting a local audit effort, offering an endorsement of Pulitzer’s services. Indeed, Pulitzer has become somewhat of a folk hero among those who see the 2020 election as having been stolen from Donald Trump. He even has his own anthem. It is titled “Warrior” and the opening lyrics go like this: You fight for free and fair elections/ invented scan the ballots of kinematic artifact detection/ you love to read aloud, travel, and explore/ you’re a fearless braveheart patriot, who’s opened doors/ you’re our courage, you’re our voice, Jovan we thank you for what you’re fighting for/ you’re our warrior. One of the architects behind the audit push in Arizona, Liz Harris, spent one day earlier this month running the song on loop over footage of the audit site on her YouTube channel. --- Back in the audit site, it was very hard to tell how the paper analysis techniques supposedly invented by Jovan Pulitzer were being used. What you could see at the site were a handful of crews set up at tables with high-definition cameras. One person would hand a ballot to the cameraperson, who would snap a photo of one side, then flip the ballot and snap the other side, and then hand it to a third person who reviewed it and put it in a new stack. Observers for the secretary of state’s office said that these crews were looking for what they considered anomalies in ballots and elevating those “suspicious” ballots for secondary “examination.” Such anomalies, according to these observers, include Election Day ballots that may have been folded in half by a voter, or the appearance of food stains a voter might have left on his or her ballot from Cheeto fingers. (Pulitzer described the notion of stained ballots being flagged as “standard operating procedure,” though the official Arizona elections manual states “if a ballot is slightly defaced or soiled, the board must include this ballot in the hand count.”) Above the audit site, when I asked Senate liaison Ken Bennett about the paper analysis area, he insisted what’s happening is simply evidence collection, and there was no actual labeling of suspicious ballots taking place. “I don’t see any of that happening,” Bennett told me. “This is data collection, data analysis.” Bennett then pointed down at the floor at a camera setup. “I don’t think there’s any decision-making,” Bennett said. “You see the person, she flips it twice, hands it to the next, guy, he takes one picture, bang, it’s in the box, man.” After this conversation, I followed up with two of the current secretary of state’s observers, and they said definitively, contrary to Bennett’s account, that labeling of ballots has been happening on that floor. In fact, Cyber Ninjas’ attorney, Bryan Blehm, gave the observers access to the physical key being used by the photography team to categorize ballots. According to secretary of state observers Ryan Macias and Jennifer Morrell, the camera teams were applying color-coded Post-it flags to the ballots to demarcate “suspicious” ones that needed to be elevated to “paper examination two.” “Bryan Blehm, the attorney for Cyber Ninjas, told me that I could take a copy of the key and write down all of the categories,” Macias told me. “A blue flag equaled ‘folded or unfolded’—I wrote down verbatim the words that were there—yellow was ‘missing security feature.’ Orange was ‘presidential selection mark.’ Pink was ‘weight and texture.’ Green was ‘other.’ And they couldn’t describe to me what ‘other’ meant.” Macias saw these keys at photography tables throughout the arena. Morrell observed audit team members applying these categories in some strange ways. “I heard them sort of mention, ‘Oh this has a stain on it, is it a normal stain? This doesn’t seem right,’ ” she told me. “I heard discussion a few times where they flagged ballots as being suspicious that they thought shouldn’t have been folded and were folded.” These are obviously merely “human idiosyncrasies,” Morrell said. “I think if you ask any election official, they’ll tell you voters will fold ballots however they want,” she said. When I asked Bennett—who is, again, the former top election official in the state of Arizona—about all this in a follow-up phone call, he again simply denied knowledge of what was happening in his own audit site. “I was not unaware of any categorization or raising of a level happening at those tables. I have to confirm with Mr. Logan, but I was not aware of what the SOS observers are claiming to have been told by Mr. Blehm,” he said. “That’s news to me.” I asked Bennett if he thinks that Election Day ballots that may have been folded deserve to be labeled as suspicious. “To me it’s not necessarily suspicious,” he said. For his part, Jovan Pulitzer told me that flagging a ballot with “some funky origami shape to it” would be “standard operating procedure in any inspection.” Ultimately, this paper analysis process adds another way for auditors to ultimately claim the official election count was incorrect and that Trump may have won. Even if the recount itself isn’t wildly off, at the end of the day there will be a pile of suspicious Cheeto-stained and folded ballots that could match or exceed the very slim margin of Biden’s victory. “Right, yep, that’s exactly right,” Morrell told me when I broached this possibility with her. “That’s the big unknown, but I think we all know that’s what the outcome will—that’s exactly what it will look like.” --- “There’s no positive outcome for this,” Morrell said of the audit after her time observing. That perspective is spreading. After the official Arizona audit Twitter account accused Republican County Recorder Stephen Richer and his staff of illegally deleting an elections database—and Donald Trump repeated the claim—Richer started to finally push back against what he called “unhinged” accusations and “insane lies.” “This is not what we had hoped,” Richer told me of how the audit has been going. “I don’t know how this ends positively.” Richer told me he wanted to “see if we can get some more Republicans in Arizona to join the bandwagon because otherwise this is just going to linger into 2022 if we don’t get a critical mass of people to say enough.” I asked him if, outside of Maricopa County, he expected to see any support from other members of the Republican Party. Richer fell silent for eight seconds. When he finally spoke, he said haltingly, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I … 50-50. “The path of least resistance is to just sort of either ignore it or to say, ‘Well, I don’t know what happened there but we should continue looking at these things,’ ” Richer acknowledged. “If enough of us just came out and said flat ‘no’ then I think that would be nipped in the bud.” With the Senate president holding a hearing during the audit’s off week once again endorsing the work of Doug Logan, and with the audit set to resume on Monday, it seems unlikely that Trump’s claim the election was stolen in Arizona and across the country will “be nipped in the bud.” Fontes points to Liz Cheney losing her leadership post in Congress for her refusal to indulge Trump’s election fantasies and sees all this as predictable. “You know, once you get on that Trump train, if you get off, it ain’t stopping for you,” Fontes told me. “If you get off, it’s gonna be because somebody shoved you.” And if the recount looks like a circus to the people who have to deal with it directly, it looks more like a model to Republicans elsewhere seeking a way to keep the election in doubt. As national Republicans have purged dissenters and rejected a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters have called for similar audits of the elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. A Republican candidate for governor in Georgia has promised to initiate an Arizona-style audit if he wins office next year, while crowdfunders continue to push local officials to do a Pulitzer audit in New Hampshire. Even if some of these states don’t ultimately go through with these audits, the continued challenges to the 2020 election results are giving cover for Republican legislatures across the country, including in Arizona, to pass laws actively suppressing the vote. As things stand in Arizona now, though, the next domino should be easier to topple.
Promotion of that BIG LIE is what lead to the violent insurrection on the Capitol that resulted in the deaths of 5 individuals. Later, it lead to the car ramming of a guarded gate of the Capitol police...resulting in another death. People want transparency...it must be accepted when transparency occurs and not a continuation of the BIG LIE just because they didn't find what they wanted to support their misinformation / false narratives of the BIG LIE. As stated, the ethnic communities are the biggest voting block of America and its growing. Piss them off with the BIG LIE and bullshit laws...they become more determine to vote no matter the road blocks put up in front of them and regardless to the repetitive audits. Arizona Fraudit I predict Arizona's next audit will occur between August 2021 - May 2022. Last of all, Arizona elected officials that states after the audit is complete...they will need to replace the tamper machines to ensure transparency / integrity of future elections (e.g. mid-terms 2022)... These elected officials are now getting death threats against them, their spouses and children. As I've keep stating...the BIG LIE does in fact result in violence and the insurrection was the first verification of such. People trying to whitewash the facts are obvious not being transparent. wrbtrader
Let's take a closer look at the clowns known as CyberNinjas... Experts or ‘grifters’? Little-known firm runs Arizona audit https://apnews.com/article/donald-t...ion-recounts-c5948f1d2ecdff9e93d4aa27ba0c1315 In early March, a Boston-based vote-counting firm called Clear Ballot Group sent a bid to Arizona’s state Senate to audit the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County. The firm has conducted more than 200 such audits over 13 years in business. “Our level of comparison data is unmatched,” Keir Holeman, a Clear Ballot Group vice president, wrote to the Republican-controlled Senate. He never heard back, he says. Instead, the state Senate hired a small Florida-based cybersecurity firm known as Cyber Ninjas that had not placed a formal bid for the contract and had no experience with election audits. Senate President Karen Fann says she can’t recall how she found the firm, but her critics believe one credential stood out: Cyber Ninjas’ chief executive officer had tweeted support for conspiracy theories claiming Republican Donald Trump, and not Democrat Joe Biden, had won Maricopa County and Arizona. Now the untested, little-known cybersecurity firm is running a partly taxpayer-funded process that election experts describe as so deeply flawed it veers into the surreal. Its chief aim, critics say, appears to be testing far-fetched theories, rather than simply recounting votes — an approach that directly undermines the country’s democratic traditions. “If I give you 20 M&Ms, and you want 30, you can keep counting it, but you did not get 30 M&Ms,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a former Department of Justice voting rights attorney and elections expert. “This is not an effort to find the truth.” Experienced vote counters have watched the process in shock. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said this week Maricopa County will need to replace all of its election machines because their security has been permanently compromised by the auditors. Experts note the review isn’t following standard recounting procedures and, unlike with other election audits in Arizona, members of each major political party are not at each table observing the counting. The auditors are checking for bamboo fibers to test a theory that tens of thousands of fake ballots were shipped from Asia. A onetime treasure hunter who claims to have invented a new method to automatically spot ballot fraud says his technology is being used in the review. It’s become too much for some Republicans. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, all but one of whom are Republicans, this week accused Republicans in the Senate of having “rented out the once-good name of the Arizona Senate” to “grifters.” “Your ‘auditors’ are in way over their heads,” the board wrote in a letter. Cyber Ninjas’ defenders say they’re creating a template for a re-examination of the election in every battleground state Biden won. Trump allies have already called for similar operations in Georgia. And criticisms about the firm’s lack of election experience are hollow, its advocates argue, because the Arizona audit is unprecedented. “This is an audit like none that has ever been performed,” said Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive officer of Overstock.com who has been raising money for the audit. “This audit is an audit check for all forms of mischief.” The man running the operation, Cyber Ninjas chief executive officer Doug Logan, declined through his spokesman to be interviewed. He has only answered questions from reporters in public once, during a contentious press conference last month. “There’s a lot of Americans here, myself included, that are really bothered at the way our country’s being ripped apart right now,” Logan said. “If we go through here and we don’t find any fraud, I will be ecstatic.” Maricopa County has already conducted two audits, which found no problems with the count in the state’s most populous county. At the urging of Trump supporters, the Senate insisted on a third and subpoenaed more than 2 million ballots from the county. When the Senate leader went looking for an elections firm to do the work, she did not put together a formal request for proposal, as is typical for government contracts. Fann said she and her staff reached out to several firms and got two bids back — the one from Clear Ballot Group for $450,000 and the other from a cybersecurity group called Intersec Worldwide. Fann said she preferred the Intersec proposal, but balked at an $8 million price tag. In an interview, she said she could not recall who had referred her to Cyber Ninjas. “To be honest with you I can’t even tell you exactly what path led me there,” Fann said. But Fann had tapped into a loose network of computer security experts who had become active in pro-Trump election conspiracy theories. In a self-published book written this year, Byrne dubbed the group “cyber ninjas” — a term used by so-called “white hat” hackers who defend against online intrusions. Byrne told AP that, in December, he and Logan “crossed paths in a few places.” But Byrne said he wasn’t involved in the audit bid and does not know Logan well. Logan, 42, in December had tweeted and retweeted references to the conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked to switch votes from Trump. “The parallels between the statistical analysis of Venezuela and this year’s election are astonishing,” Logan tweeted, with a #StoptheSteal hashtag that referenced the pro-Trump movement seeking to overturn the election. Logan also served as an expert witness in a pro-Trump lawsuit raising conspiracy theories about the election in Antrim County, Michigan. Another cybersecurity professional who filed an expert witness affidavit in that case, Ben Cotton, was a partner on the Intersec proposal. Cotton’s own firm, CyFIR, which did not respond to a request for comment, is now a subcontractor on the Arizona audit. The Senate agreed to pay Cyber Ninjas $150,000 in state money, but it is not clear how much more the audit will cost and who is paying for it. The pro-Trump One America News Network raised $150,000 in a single day in April and has continued to ask for donations. Byrne has also started a fundraising drive with a group that says it has raised $1.7 million with a goal of $2.8 million. Neither will have to disclose donors or account for how the money is spent, and Logan has declined to detail financial information. Byrne’s organization is also involved in recruiting volunteers. The audit’s liaison with the Senate sent an email to local Republicans last week asking for more volunteers and referring them to the website of Byrne’s organization’s to apply. Byrne said his group simply refers volunteers to Cyber Ninjas for “vetting.” The email was first reported by The Arizona Republic. Logan started Cyber Ninjas in 2013 in Indiana after working for two years for a cybersecurity firm called Cigital, according to his LinkedIn profile and Cyber Ninja press releases. He moved his firm from Indiana to Sarasota in 2014, according to the Cyber Ninjas website, which quotes Logan describing the firm as a “Christian company.” Last year, when Cyber Ninjas received $98,000 in federal COVID relief money, it claimed five employees. At a public presentation last week, Logan cited as part of his qualifications that his firm “worked with some of the largest names in the financial services space.” Two of the companies he lists as former clients in his expert witness statement, Citibank and JP Morgan Chase, said through spokespeople that they have no record of hiring Cyber Ninjas. Logan’s scant public record before the audit was a history of volunteering for the U.S. Cyber Challenge, a training event for internet security amateurs and professionals. In 2015, Logan received an award from the security firm SANS for his volunteerism with the event, John Pescatore, the SANS employee who oversees the award program, said Logan was cited mainly for designing an online “capture the flag” game where players try to hack into an opponent’s base. “It takes a lot of work,” said Pescatore of Logan’s volunteering. A spokesman for the U.S. Cyber Challenge did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Logan is not the only person associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 election who is working on the audit. Jovan Pulitzer, an inventor who unsuccessfully pushed for a post-election audit in Georgia, has said his technology is being used to detect altered ballots. Pulitzer is also a former treasure hunter and 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.
I'm fine with letting it play out and you should be too. If it's bogus, it will come out after the report hits and it can be dealt with at that time. In the meantime, there's hope that other states will get the ball rolling with audits. It's obvious that the election was stolen, we just don't know exactly where and exactly how. This needs to be uncovered for the sanctity of future elections.
One thing as well to note is that the election was actually stolen well before any ballots were cast with the court cases,changes in law, instant and late registration, ballot harvesting and mailing ballots to all folks whether they requested them or not.
So much media trying to create a narrative..it seems coordinated Not one story that evenly addresses the open question that is being investigated Is the media trying to protect The Big Lie
But you people were in charge.... how did you allow an election of all things to be stolen on your watch ? . ?