The Cyber Ninjas

The Cyber Ninjas

As far as embarrassing con jobs go, the Arizona Senate GOP’s ongoing “audit” of the vote in Maricopa County in the 2020 elections is cream of the crop.

Republicans are obsessed with somehow proving Trump was robbed of a second term by fraud, and Trump himself has been particularly focused on baseless claims of massive irregularities in the Arizona vote count. His minions have happily obliged him by waging war on Maricopa County election officials, who have repeatedly shown the county’s results to be accurate. In March 2021, Republicans in the state Senate contracted with a previously little-known outfit called “Cyber Ninjas” to recount the county’s votes.

Cyber Ninjas is run by a conspiracy theorist, Doug Logan, who believes the true margin of Trump’s victory in the state may have been as wide as 200,000 votes. The audit they are carrying out is an obvious farce; Cyber Ninjas has employed untrained Trump supporters as volunteers to comb ballots for traces of nefarious Chinese bamboo, deploy junk science to prove the way certain ballots were folded should invalidate them, and hunt for hidden watermarks that don’t exist. Observers looking into the audit have reported Cyber Ninjas operating with no clear procedures and a near-total disregard for the security of either voters’ personal data or the ballots themselves.

The Senate GOP has responded to these claims by threatening election officials with subpoenas for access to even more information, such as county router logs and direct access to voting machines. According to Vice, the GOP official overseeing the audit, former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, seems to have had some kind of falling out with Fann over leaks and was shut out of the building where it is occurring. Bennett expressed concern that if proper controls were not in place Cyber Ninjas might “force balance” their numbers, which is an accounting term for practices that amount to cooking the books.

The eventual cost to the state of Arizona might amount to a whopping $9 million to replace any voting machines and routers that might land in Cyber Ninjas’s hands, as Maricopa County officials won’t be able to have confidence the firm didn’t expose the equipment to dangerous malware. Meanwhile, in late July, Cyber Ninjas disclosed it had pulled in a cool $5.7 millionfrom private donors, including $3.25 million from former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and $605,000 from a group established by One America News propagandist Christina Bobb. Wonder what the profit margin on that is.