Truth, Inspiration, Hope.

Arizona Election Audit Confirms Biden Won, but Leaves More Questions Than Answers

Neil Campbell
Neil lives in Canada and writes about society and politics.
Published: September 27, 2021
A contractor working for Cyber Ninjas, who was hired by the Arizona State Senate, transports ballots from the 2020 Presidential Election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on May 1, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona. The audit concluded Biden defeated Trump, but called into question serious issues with tens of thousands of ballots.
A contractor working for Cyber Ninjas, who was hired by the Arizona State Senate, transports ballots from the 2020 Presidential Election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on May 1, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona. The audit concluded Biden defeated Trump, but called into question serious issues with tens of thousands of ballots. (Image: Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images)

As the largest audit of the 2020 Presidential Election came to an end on Sept. 24, confirming Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the battleground state of Arizona, both a portion of the audit’s findings and the circumstances surrounding the company who conducted it have left more questions than answers. 

Sept. 24 saw the Arizona GOP-led audit of the state’s largest county and one of America’s largest voting districts, Maricopa County, conclude unfavorably for proponents of the theory that Dominion Voting Systems were used to fraudulently secure a Democrat win in a historically Republican swing state.

https://www.scribd.com/document/527503039/20210919-Maricopa-County-Forensic-Audit-Volume-I-Executive-Summary

Cyber Ninjas, a company contracted by the Arizona GOP to conduct the audit despite having no federal accreditations or elections audit experience, basically confirmed the election day results, finding 99 more votes for Biden and 261 less for Trump in their endeavor.

According to Ballotopedia, the official count for the Nov. 3, 2020 Presidential Election shows Biden defeated Trump in Arizona by a very slim margin of 1,672,143 votes to 1,661,686. Biden primarily edged out his win against the former President through Maricopa County. The county’s Recorder’s office website reports in its Final Summary of the election that Biden gave Trump the edge by a score of 1,040,774 to 995,665.

Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson scooped 51,465 votes across the state, 31,705 of which were cast in Maricopa. 

Cyber Ninjas described their efforts in the report as, “The most comprehensive election audit that has been conducted.” 

“It involved reviewing everything from the voter history for the election, to retallying all 2.1 million ballots by hand, to performing forensic photography and review of the ballot paper, to conducting cyber forensic imaging and analysis of the provided voting equipment. This extensive process involved over 1,500 people who contributed a total of over 100,000 hours of time over the course of more than 5 months from when setup began, to when this report is completed.”

While the audit did confirm Biden’s victory, the auditors nonetheless called into question the veracity of nearly 58,000 ballots, for reasons ranging from voters who voted from a prior address to duplicate ballots that reused serial numbers. 

A summary of ballots with issues and their counts - Maricopa County Cyber Ninjas Election Audit
A summary of ballots with issues and their counts. (Image: Cyber Ninjas Maricopa County Audit, Volume III – Results Details)

In the largest question mark on the list, 23,344 mail-in ballots were “cast under voter registration IDs for people that should not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved, and no one with the same last name remained at the address,” including 15,035 absentee ballots cast by voters who moved prior to the state’s registration deadline and 6,591 voters who moved out of Arizona prior to the deadline.

The inquiry also found 10,342 ballots cast “with the same first, middle, last name and birth year.”

Cyber Ninjas also found 9,041 ballots that involved a situation where one ballot was sent to a voter, but 2, 3, or even 4 were returned by the same voter and counted in the election. 

As for each category of discrepancies, Cyber Ninjas only provides an occam’s razor explanation for how the anomaly may have occurred, recommending the Arizona Attorney General investigate or new legislation be passed to plug the loophole.

The audit did not tally how the ballots in question cast their votes or consider how they may have influenced the outcome of the election.

The examination also found several marked issues with the security and integrity of Arizona’s use of electronic voting machines, such as Dominion’s Election Management System database having been purged, deleted election files, corrupted ballot images, missing ballot images, cybersecurity best practices violations, and subpoenaed equipment not being provided.

A summary of issues with Dominion Voting Systems’ hardware and software rollout-Maricopa County Cyber Ninjas Election Audit
A summary of issues with Dominion Voting Systems’ hardware and software rollout. (Image: Cyber Ninjas Maricopa County Audit, Volume III – Results Details)

On Sept. 24, at the formal Senate hearing on the auditor’s results, Senate President Karen Fann referred the case to Attorney General Mark Brnovich, “We are asking him to open up a formal investigation so that he can pursue and seek additional information, additional facts, perhaps get some of these missing things that we were never able to get, verify all this information, and take the appropriate actions of anything that is necessary to do,” she said.

In a statement published on his website, Donald Trump said the audit “shows incomprehensible Fraud at an Election Changing level,” calling on Arizona to decertify its election results. Likewise, at a Sept. 25 Save America rally, Trump told a crowd, “We won on the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn’t believe.”

Cyber Ninjas: ally or controlled opposition?

The question of how such an extensive and long-running audit, apparently a partisan affair launched by Trump’s party, the GOP, and funded by several of the former President’s biggest supporters and purporters of election interference theories, managed to uncover tens of thousands of ballots with severe and suspect shortcomings, but did little more than gloss over the issue, is yet to be answered.

In a July 29 article published by ABC affiliate Action News, the outlet found that while the Arizona Senate contributed only $150,000 towards the cost of conducting the audit, certain entities that led the vanguard in the election fraud movement, groups and individuals that would normally be considered supporters of President Donald Trump, contributed $5.7 million.

According to the article, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne’s The America Project paid $3.25 million, America’s Future, which lists Michael Flynn as Chairman, paid $976,000, and Sydney Powell’s Defending the Republic gave away $550,000. In another notable donation, attorney Matthew DePerno, who was lawyer of record in the dubious Antrim County Georgia lawsuit and audit, paid $280,000 toward the effort.

More than money, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan said the groups had also “provided operational support and advice pivotal in executing the audit.” Logan revealed the amount raised and the donors on the day of a deadline issued by the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Logan himself appears to be far from unbiased. He appeared as an anonymous character in an election fraud film titled The Deep Rig, which premiered in June. In the film, Logan appears as a silhouetted character known as “anon,” revealing his true identity half way through the film. The CEO is joined by co-stars Patrick Byrne and Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who represented Donald Trump in some post election litigation efforts.

Patrick Byrne, a man who was, at face value, one of Donald Trump’s largest supporters, often pointing the finger at the Chinese Communist Party as being the culprit of election interference, was revealed to have paid $10.4 million for slightly more than $4 million worth of property in Arizona in a Sept. 9 article by the Sarasota Herald Tribune

Bryrne, who boasts having an education from Beijing Normal University, bought a bundle that included six separate deals, such as paying $3.35 million for a $1.5 million residential home in Oaks Club, and $2.5 million for a 10,000 sq. ft. piece of commercial property appraised at a little over $654,000.

In August, the Arizona Court of Appeals ordered the Arizona Senate to hand over all documents pertaining to the audit, including internal communications between auditors and contractors, copies of contracts, and financial information to American Oversight, a left-wing non-profit who sued the state. 

Nonetheless, Cyber Ninjas declined to comply with the court order and produce the documents at the bequest of Fann, saying it would only release “full financial statements,” communications with the Senate, and policies and procedures used by its subcontractors. 

Attorney Jack Wilenchuk, who represents the firm, was paraphrased as saying “staffing records, as well as internal communications and communications with subcontractors, are private records,” according to Arizona Mirror.

A real conspiracy

If there was a real conspiracy to swing Arizona from a red state to a blue state in order to ensure Donald Trump could not secure a second term, perhaps it can be found in a warning published in December of 2019 by Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-born, U.S. based researcher on how Chinese Communist Party-associated groups have worked tirelessly to alter America’s political landscape

The article, titled Bay Area Pro-China Communists Aim To Flip Arizona ‘Protect’ Nevada In 2020, documented how Liberation Road, which Loudon described as “the main representative of the American Maoist movement,” a group which he says more or less controls San Francisco’s Bay Area political circle, organized a project called Seed the Vote with the expressed purposes of flipping Nevada and Arizona.

Loudon notes Seed the Vote’s supporters and founders are Liberation Road cadres and members of various Bay Area communist organizations, including education team member Calvin Cheung-Miaw, who Loudon says is, “A leader of the Left Inside Outside Project, a national alliance of Liberation Road, LeftRoots, Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, and Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism established to further infiltrate the Democratic Party and defeat Trump in 2020.”

One of Seed the Vote’s leaders, Jason Negron-Gonzales, wrote in a Dec. 5, 2019 article titled Introduction to Seed the Vote published on the Organizing Upgrade website, self described as a site promoting “Strategy for Left Organizers,” boasting, “Last month we saw further losses for the right in Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania – the result of sustained organizing by hundreds if not thousands.” 

“That work didn’t start this year; it’s the culmination of many years of work. None of this was spontaneous. When we organize, we can win. When we step up to fight, we can win.”

“Seed the Vote is a project in the Bay Area attempting to create a vehicle to do just that,” explained Negron-Gonzalez. “We want to leverage the experience, capacity, and expertise of organizers and activists in California in support of long-term organizing in our neighboring states. Our goal is not just to push Trump out of office, but to help shift the balance of power in the states where we are working…”

The article noted the left feared a Trump 2020 victory, “So we launched Seed the Vote. Our practical focus is centered on bolstering 2020 electoral efforts to defeat Trump and the GOP in two key states, Nevada and Arizona.”

Negron-Gonzalez said Seed the Vote was “building infrastructure and recruiting” for the purposes of deploying “several hundred Bay area activists to work with partnering unions and community-based organizations in Nevada and Arizona.” 

The entity also sought to “connect volunteers with remote call-in and text efforts from the Bay Area,” in order “to register voters, protect voting rights and increase turnout in key constituencies in November 2020.”

Loudon looked at the CCP’s viewpoint pragmatically, “China’s communist leaders could risk hundreds of billions of dollars trying to defeat Trump in a trade war. Or risk hundreds of millions of lives (including their own) in a shooting war of indeterminate outcome. Or they could defeat Trump by encouraging their U.S. communist “franchise” to spend a few million dollars flipping three or four Southern and Southwestern states to the Democrat column—all under the radar.

Which option would you choose if you led the Communist Party of China?”