Trump-friendly Republicans hired a group to investigate the 2020 election results in Arizona’s largest County. They spun lies about double voting, deleted data and other malfeasance in an investigation that neglected basic facts about how elections work.
Cyber Ninjas, a firm that was hired by Arizona Republican lawmakers to investigate 2020 election fraud, released Friday’s report. It found nothing that could have legitimately challenged the victory of President Joe Biden. It instead tried to portray routine electoral practices in Maricopa County, which were irregularities or sinister attempts to deny Donald Trump another term, as errors, irregularities, or sinister.
Despite its biased analysis, the report still showed more votes for Biden that he was officially certified to have won in the County last year.
Here are some claims made by Doug Logan, Cyber Ninjas CEO, during a hearing for its report to be presented on Friday.
LOGAN claims election results were deleted from Maricopa County’s election management software: “So someone went into an application and they selected to run something that would clear any records in the system that generated the official results, the day prior to an audit began.”
FACTS: The data was not deleted; it was only moved. Officials from Maricopa County made copies of the data, and then archived them before removing it form the election management software.
The county released a statement via Twitter that stated, “We have backups of all Nov. data and those archives weren’t subpoenaed.” Officials from the county said that data cannot be stored on the election management software indefinitely. The county stated that “Cyber Ninjas do not understand the business of election management.” “We cannot keep everything on the EMS server, because it has storage limitations.”
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LOGAN: “23.344 people voted in Maricopa County when they shouldn’t have or wouldn’t normally have access to” because they moved.
THE FACTS: This is not the case. Logan compared the names of voters to a commercial address database, and not a voter database. Logan found that 2334 people reported having moved before the October ballots were distributed. Despite the fact that the review seems to suggest something wrong, election officials noted that voters such as college students and military personnel can legally vote at their registered address while moving to temporary locations.
Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary-of-state in Kentucky, stated that “a competent reviewer would not make a claim such as that.”
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LOGAN
FACTS: This is not unusual and it is not indicative of wrongdoing. Logan’s file, also known as EV33 shows two entries in the returned ballot when a voter’s mail ballot contains a signature discrepancy.
Election officials will contact the voter if he or she sends in a ballot that has a missing signature or a blank one. Election officials stated that if the discrepancy can be resolved, they will enter a second record into the EV33 file.
“The proper conclusion to draw is that the early voter team was performing their statutory responsibility by reviewing signatures of all returned mail-in votes,” Maricopa County responded to Logan’s claim.