August 17, 2021

Larry Moore

Yesterday, Arizona Senate President Karen Fann tweeted that the “audit companies are preparing a draft report to present to the Senate.”  Without sufficient detail described below, their report, at best, will be meaningless; at worst, propaganda and disinformation.

Let’s be clear. Whatever went on in the Veterans Memorial Auditorium from April 23 to June 30 was not an audit. It was a recount.  The original count was audited three times. This recount needs to be audited.

What is an audit? 

Since 2013, the company I founded, the Clear Ballot Group, has conducted over 200 independent election audits of all major federally certified voting systems, including Dominion’s.  Here’s my definition of an election audit.

An election audit compares the official count with an independent count based on the same data (e.g.., the physical ballots or their ballot images).

The more independently computed points of comparison that match, the more confidence we can have that the original count was accurate. Typically, there are two types of comparisons: ballot counts and vote counts.

We show our cards first

On July 12, concerned that continuing to call their recount an audit would lay the foundation of another round of disinformation,  we sent Senator Fann, with copies to the press, an open letter with an attached spreadsheet that makes an actual audit possible.

While there were 1,691 storage boxes delivered under subpoena, our spreadsheet contained just the 1,634 storage boxes containing ballots counted in the official results. It also contained ballot counts for 1,634 storage boxes derived from official results and based on public data.

Knowing which boxes to count is critical because there were 57 boxes delivered to the Senate under subpoena that contained various other election materials that were not official ballots.  Examples are spoiled ballots, originals of ballots requiring duplication (e.g. braille ballots, large format ballots, damaged ballots, and ballots submitted by overseas voters), or pre-marked test decks used to test the voting system machines. 

None of these other materials were in the official results. Why were they delivered in the first place? Because the Senate’s subpoena did not distinguish between boxes with counted ballots and other boxes that federal law requires to be retained for 22 months.

In a July 15 public hearing, chaired by Senators Fann and Peterson,  the Ninja’s leader, Doug Logan, expressed confusion over which storage boxes should be counted (see discussion at 1:23). In his statement, he has laid the foundation to say in his report to the Senate, “We have found tens of thousands of ballots that were not counted. The county refused to answer our questions, nor did they provide all the information we subpoenaed. What are they hiding?”

What happens next? We demand transparency.

We have no faith that Doug Logan’s report to the Senate will be a model of transparency and completeness. After all, before his Senate contract he flatly stated there was fraud in Maricopa and during his testimony on July 15, he spouted disinformation that was amplified by former president Trump less than 24 hours later.

Accordingly, we have filed a public records request for the raw data from the hand and machine counts.

The Senate is currently fighting all attempts to prevent the release of the information held by the Ninjas.  American Oversight is leading the litigation, which may go all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court to resolve.

Having provided the list of boxes that should be counted and the ballot counts by box, we have raised the ante.

The table below summarizes the spreadsheet mentioned above updated to include the vote counts for the 24 boxes provided to us by Ken Bennett on the day before he was denied access to the machine ballot count operation.

We will provide the remaining vote counts when the Senate publishes their vote counts for all 1,634 boxes.

Our audit will provide thousands of points of comparison which can help resolve significant discrepancies in a matter of minutes. It will: compare the reformulated official results to the Ninja’s hand-count at:

4,902 points of comparison of ballot counts (3 voting methods x 1,634 boxes), and

24,510  points of comparison for vote counts [3 voting methods x 1,634 boxes x 5 candidates (3 in the presidential race, 2 in the U.S. Senate race)]

Stay tuned…