The Audit Guys Publish Vote Counts in Preparation for a Real Audit

Larry Moore

September 16, 2021

Today, the Audit Guys provide additional data to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, her contractor, the Cyber Ninjas, and the media. With this “September 16th spreadsheet“, the Ninjas can easily verify the accuracy of their vote-counting methodology before they release their report to the Senate. The September 16 spreadsheet updates the July 12 spreadsheet, which has enabled the Ninjas to test the accuracy of their ballot-counting methods for the past two months.

To recap:

In mid-May, 2021, we began to develop the capability to provide an independent audit of the Ninja’s unorthodox recount procedures.  That is because the Ninjas seemed unaware that they would not be able to conduct an audit. Why?

An audit compares two independent results based on the same data.  Maricopa counted votes by precinct; the Ninjas counted votes on ballots in storage boxes.  It would have been challenging for the Ninjas to count ballots and votes by precinct; Maricopa has 743 precincts and, on average, storage boxes contain 1,274 ballots and 374 distinct precincts.  

Drawing on public data, we devised a method (see Appendix F of our report) to recast the official results to compare the official vote counts to votes counted by ballot storage box.

On July 12, the Audit Guys sent an email to Senator Fann, Ken Bennett (Senate liaison), and Kory Langhoffer (counsel to the Senate) containing a spreadsheet that listed the 1,634 boxes containing exactly the 2,089,563 ballots reported in the officially certified election results. Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, should welcome this data because, on July 15, he publicly expressed confusion over which ballot storage boxes should be counted out of the 1,691 boxes delivered by Maricopa County in response to the AZ Senate’s subpoena. See Logan’s testimony at 1:23 here.

In addition, the July 12^th spreadsheet contained the ballot counts for each of the 1,634 boxes. One day later, on July 13, Senator Fann announced that the Ninja’s hand count of ballots did not match the official ballot count. The difference, although never revealed, was sufficiently significant to justify purchasing two high-speed paper counters at the cost of $30,000 to create an independent ballot count.

What is new in the September 16 spreadsheet? Two additional items which the Ninjas can use to check their results.

First, it contains the count of ballots in 24 boxes which Ken Bennet provided the Audit Guys. This ballot count, performed on high-speed paper counters, matched the official ballot counts at 99.94% level of accuracy. It will be interesting to compare the hand count to the offical results and to the Ninja’s machine count.

Second, the September 16 spreadsheet provides box-level vote count for Jo Jorgensen, the third-party candidate for President.  

With the names of 1,634 boxes to be counted, ballot counts for each box and vote counts for one candidate, it should be relatively easy for the Ninjas to see how close their ballot counts are to the official results.

Once the Senate complies with our public record request, we will compare ballot and vote counts from the Ninjas hand count and machine count to the official results.