Arizona Fraudit

The GOP has hired a Florida firm best known for promoting Trump's Big Lie to handle its Presidential election "audit"

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In a move seemingly designed to inspire mistrust in the Arizona GOP, the Arizona GOP has hired a Florida firm best known for promoting Trump’s Big Lie to handle its Presidential election “audit.” (This after three earlier reviews of the state’s election results found no evidence to support Trump’s delusional claims of voter fraud.)

According to the AP, the party subpoenaed all 2.1 million ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County, along with the machines that counted them and computer hard drives. They gave the materials to Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based consultancy with no election experience run by a man best known for promoting Trump’s Big Lie about the election via hashtags and memes on Twitter.

As soon as Cyber Ninjas got their Ninja hands on the ballots, things quickly went downhill.

On Friday April 23, Jen Fifield, a reporter for the Arizona Republic tweeted that the poorly trained “counters” had been handed blue pens—which would be exactly what the counters would need to spoil a few ballots (maybe even enough ballots to make the now-deleted lies Cyber Ninjas owner Doug Logan posted on his Twitter account appear “true”).

Meanwhile, Morgan Loew, an investigative reporter at local station CBS5, was continuing to highlight the security concerns at the counting site. By Friday, things were so bad, an Arizona judge was forced to put a temporary halt to the proceedings.

The shenanigans continued over the weekend when Judge Christopher Coury, who had issued the halt, recused himself from the case less than 24 hours before a Monday hearing in which the lawyer for Cyber Ninjas submitted a request that the public and the media not be given any access.

Meanwhile, as 12 News reported, the Arizona GOP’s Senate audit liaison Ken Bennett cancelled his planned update to reporters, while continuing with a live video update to supporters via the “Arizona Audit Live Feeds Chat” on Telegram, a project being coordinated with Ron Watkins, alleged prophet of the extremist conspiracy movement QAnon.

The Arizona GOP’s new desire for secrecy comes despite the fact that they are, as 12 New reports, “spending at least $150,000 in taxpayer money for the audit.” In addition they are continuing to fundraise from “undisclosed sources,” who have so far contributed at least another $150,000.

Monday brought another new twist when Jen Fifield, the reporter who had exposed the “blue pens” problem, had mysteriously been removed from the list of approved observers.

Perhaps Cyber Ninjas is retaliating against Fifield for exposing their brazen malfeasance. Or maybe they are simply demonstrating that, despite being the company hired by the Arizona GOP to manage a complicated recount of millions of ballots, they are simply unable to coordinate a sign-up sheet on Google Docs.

Either way, all signs point to the Arizona GOP leaving a door open for themselves to eventually offer their own version of the “Sidney Powell defense.” Because no reasonable people could possibly believe the results of this ridiculous fraudit.