The county leased new machines after Hobbs said the old machines would be decertified because of chain of custody issues. The county board said this week it wants the state Senate to pay $2.8 million to replace voting machines the Senate subpoenaed. The board - and Dominion Voting Systems, the election vendor for the county - has refused to comply with recent subpoenas from the legislature, effectively daring the state Senate to find the board in contempt, with some Republicans in the closely-divided chamber saying they don’t support the Cyber Ninjas-led review. The Republican-controlled county board has also been engaged in a protracted battle with the state Senate. “Because it lacks the essential elements of a bona fide post-election analysis, the review currently underway in Maricopa County will not produce findings that should be trusted.” “The Cyber Ninjas review suffers from a variety of maladies: uncompetitive contracting, a lack of impartiality and partisan balance, a faulty ballot review process, inconsistency in procedures, an unacceptably high level of error built into the process, and insufficient security,” Grayson and Burden wrote in their June report. Other election experts have previously torn into the Arizona review as unprofessionally run, including a report from former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican, and Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In her prebuttal, her office wrote that “any ‘outcomes’ or ‘conclusions’ that are reported” from the state Senate’s process must be disregarded, and called on the state’s political leaders to “proclaim that the 2020 General Election was fair and accurate.” “We’re sort of just bracing for impact” for the Cyber Ninjas’ conclusions. “This isn’t a real audit,” Hobbs said, noting that the schedule for the Arizona review has constantly shifted.
Hobbs, who is also running for governor next year, was critical of the Cyber Ninjas-led effort in an interview earlier this week. It has been funded by a nonprofit run by a correspondent for the far-right One America News Network and a former tech CEO who has poured millions into promoting Trump’s lies about the election. Officials have said they were checking for bamboo fibers in ballots, a nod to a fringe theory that ballots were smuggled in from Asia. Cyber Ninjas’ owner is a supporter of former President Donald Trump and has promoted conspiracy theories about the election.
The state Senate calls the Cyber Ninjas’ work an “audit,” a label almost universally rejected by election officials and experts because the Arizona effort has poorly defined processes and an embrace of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.įrom the jump, the review in Arizona has been plagued by disorganization and in-fighting. “Please look into it before taking whatever the Cyber Ninjas produce as gospel.” “The only thing that has been consistent about this endeavor has been missed deadlines and having to walk back statements,” Richer said at a Thursday press briefing organized by the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with election administrators. Julie Fischer, a “deputy Senate liaison” for the effort, told POLITICO that the contractors’ report - the firm leading the effort is called Cyber Ninjas - is expected to be submitted to the state Senate on Monday, and a hearing will be scheduled after that.Įlection officials in the state have opposed it nearly every step of the way, including Richer, Hobbs and the GOP-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. The process was initially supposed to take 60 days, but has stretched on well past that.
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