The truth behind the Arizona Senate “audit” of the 2020 election results is revealed in thousands of private text messages from Cyberninjaz CEO Doug Logan.
The document overturns allegations that the “audit” was a bipartisan effort to ensure the accuracy of the election results, and subverts claims by former President Donald Trump’s allies to restore him to office. It said it was part of a state-wide effort.
Logan’s message even counts the work of hundreds of volunteers who will spend two months at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in 2021, scrutinizing ballots and recording individual votes on more than 70,000 tally sheets. indicates that it is not possible.
Here’s an update on Logan, his writing, and a review of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million votes.
What is the reasoning behind Arizona’s ‘audit’?
In 2021, Senate Republicans announced they would commission a hand tally of all ballots cast in Maricopa County to address claims that the election was stolen from Trump. The Senate subpoenaed ballots and other election materials from counties.
Senate President Karen Huang has hired a cyber ninja to lead the handcount. Neither Mr. Logan nor his firm had any experience auditing elections, but Mr. Huang said at the time that he was “fully qualified” and “very experienced.” The review would have taken weeks and would have cost the taxpayer $150,000.
The implementation will take about two months and cost Arizona millions of dollars.
What “findings” did Cyber Ninja report to the Senate?
Logan announced the hand-counted results on Sept. 24, 2021, reporting that Joe Biden had won the Arizona presidential election. Logan’s tally was 994 votes behind the county’s official result.
Logan’s report stole Biden’s victory and raised a number of “anomalies” that continue to raise questions about the election process. That has led lawmakers, partisan contractors and allies of Trump to call for more audits, denial of voting machines and a new voter integrity law to prevent fraud at polling places.
Full text:‘Our Numbers Are Terrible’: Cyber Ninja CEO Admits Failure To Count Manual Votes
Do Logan’s private writings contradict his public statements?
yes. In hundreds of articles recently published in the summer of 2021, Mr. Logan admitted that he did not understand his own data. Days after his hand count ended, Logan admitted he had no way of tallying up the results.
“How plausible is this solution? I looped back and looked at all the aggregated data again. It’s pretty broken. Most of it doesn’t make sense.” In a text dated July 5, 2021, Logan wrote:.
Did Logan say “our numbers are screwed”?
he did Logan was still trying to collate his own data after submitting it to the Arizona Senate Republicans 11 days before his Senate hearings, but it didn’t work.
“Basically, our numbers look terrible when you read the summary document on the president vs. the Senate.” In a September 13th text message, he said:
What would be Logan’s reaction to this?
He has not responded to repeated requests for interviews from the Republic of Arizona. He declined to answer text messages or specific questions about his activities.
How did Cyber Ninja solve the numbers problem?
The text indicates that was not the case. For weeks, Logan tried unsuccessfully to tally the more than 70,000 votes recorded by volunteers who calibrated individual votes. He worked with a technical expert named Mike Piejota, but he couldn’t come up with a computer system that could read the marks.
“To get to the point, it is my opinion that current text recognition technology cannot be used to accurately process summary sheets.” In a July 6 text, Piejota wrote: “If you want to revisit your summary sheet in the short term, you’ll eventually have to consider a different approach. Other than extensive manual work, there’s no good answer.”
Logan replied a few minutes later. “I don’t mind if I have to handwrite batch numbers and such, as long as the tally is correct most of the time.”
Did the cyber ninjas make up the numbers?
Logan’s text shows how his team shifted away from trying to quantify hand numbers and explored other avenues to deliver plausible numbers to the Senate.
They first scanned the tally paper and counted the votes. They couldn’t get a software program to read the ticks. Then I focused on counting the total number of ballots, reviewing county electronic tally records, creating worksheets and databases, and weighing ballot boxes on scales.
Documents indicate that they failed in these efforts.
Is that why the Senate introduced machines to count ballots?
Neither Mr. Logan nor the Senate issued an official statement about the inability to quantify the results of the handcount.
Hand tally closed on June 25, 2021. Days later, Mr. Huang said the vote counts in Logan’s hands were far from the official results for Maricopa County. Huang said on July 8 that the Senate had purchased two mechanical counters as a means of “triple-checking” numbers.
She did not reveal the number Logan provided.
Was the Arizona ‘Audit’ Part of a Larger Election Plan?
Records show that when Logan was tapped to head the partisan “audit” of the Arizona Senate, he was already involved in coordinated efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in several battleground states. is shown from the text message.
Thousands of text messages sent to and from Logan show that Logan has been working closely with then-President Donald Trump’s allies to challenge the results in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. It shows that it was collaborating with
According to the documents, Mr. Hwang communicated privately with Mr. Logan in February 2021, likely at the recommendation of retired Army Colonel Phil Waldron, an ardent Trump supporter and election conspiracy theorist. be She publicly named Logan as Audit Lead on March 31, 2021.
Full text:Arizona ‘Audit’ leader exchanged messages with dozens of ‘Stop theft’ party members, texts reveal
When did Logan start strategizing with Trump’s allies?
Less than two weeks after Mr. Trump lost the November 2020 election, Mr. Logan hired a pro-Trump attorney in South Carolina, Lynn, to plan how to challenge the election results in battleground states. Documents and court records reveal that he was invited to Wood’s plantation grounds.
Logan testified during last year’s Georgia public election lawsuit that he spent about six weeks at the plantation from Nov. 14 to Dec. 24, rubbing shoulders with members of Trump’s legal team and other supporters.
Who on Team Trump helped Logan?
Stakeholders at the strategy meeting included Trumpworld conspiracy theorists, cyber experts, lawyers, retired government officials and some Republican state legislators.
The group includes Trump attorney Sidney Powell, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, former National Security Agency official Jim Penrose and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. , which included former Army Captain Seth Keschel.
All will then participate in the Maricopa County ballot review. According to texts and court records, they raised millions of dollars for Logan’s “audit,” helped write reports, and provided logistical support.
Are the authorities investigating Logan?
Documents and court records show Logan was involved in multiple voting device breaches in Georgia and Michigan in the weeks leading up to the Arizona “audit.”
In January 2021, they were caught on surveillance cameras heading to a campaign office in Coffee County, Georgia, and officials said voting equipment had been compromised. No charges were filed there.
Logan is under investigation by Michigan officials in April 2021 for illegally accessing and dismantling a voting machine as part of a plan to prove the election was rigged. He was not charged there.
How did Republic get Logan’s text messages?
The Republic requested emails, text messages and all other communications from Cyber Ninja and the Senate in June 2021. When they refused, the Republic sued, alleging violations of the Arizona Public Records Act.
In January 2022, a judge ordered Logan to surrender all records and communications related to the audit and fined the company $50,000 a day until it complied. Current fines total more than $5 million.
Is Logan still holding the record?
yes. Logan haphazardly and non-sequentially put together documents and submitted them in different formats, breaking threads and making them difficult to retrieve.message, Released in November and December 2022 and February and March 2023, they were not organized chronologically or in any other discernible order.
And while Logan published more than 39,000 text messages, he edited another 3,000 without explanation, clearly violating a court order.
How did you make sense of 39,000 text messages?
An independent team of nationally recognized data analysts known as auditor We built software to untangle and organize your messages.
Auditors have long challenged Logan’s voting review to be ‘fictional’, and after a thorough analysis of the data in 2021, they concluded that Logan’s ‘results’ were grossly inaccurate and hoaxed. attached.
After consolidating the text into a searchable database, auditors determined that Logan had omitted approximately 4,000 messages from his side of the conversation at one time and duplicated 5,500 on multiple occasions. They identified missing messages that Logan did not hand over, blank and redacted text, and references to his system of messaging.
Who are Auditors?
The auditor is Larry Moore, founder of Boston-based election technology firm Clear Ballot Group. Benny White, Distinguished Data Analyst for the Pima County Republican Party. and Tim Halvorsen, retired Chief Technology Officer of Clear Ballot.
Their stated mission is to “expose election disinformation and confront those who use their power to spread it.”
Why will hand count still matter two years from now?
Logan’s findings allowed Trump’s allies to claim that the vote had been compromised. The immediate result was to further instill distrust in voting machines and encourage partisan calls for counting paper ballots, manual recounts, and “audits.” He also called for the abolition of early voting.
With the 2024 elections just around the corner, many partisan officials are claiming, without evidence, that fraud is pervasive in machine-counted ballots. They argue that the only way to prevent fraud is to count ballots by hand.
Also keep an eye on Cochise County. Cochise County attempted to delay election certification until 2022, when Republican officials commissioned a full manual tally, but was blocked by a court.
In April, a judge fined two Cochise County supervisors $37,000 in legal and court costs for failing to follow state election procedures.
How much did the Arizona ‘audit’ cost taxpayers?
So far, taxpayers have owed about $5 million. That includes $518,000 Maricopa County spent in a dispute with Senate Republicans over access to voting equipment and related records, and $3.2 million to purchase new voting machines. The Senate is spending at least $1.1 million, about half of that on legal fees.
In addition to public funds, Cyber Ninja received at least $6.7 million from private donors. The company said it lost at least $2 million last year, according to a financial report shared with the Senate.
Cyber Ninja has since gone out of business
Robert Anlen is an investigative reporter for The Republic.please contact him robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8694. follow him on twitter @robertanglen.
