What next?

Benny White, J.D.

September 18, 2021

The Senate is scheduled to receive a report of some sort from the Cyber Ninjas on Friday, September 24. This will be another press extravaganza designed to continue to disinform the public about elections generally and the 2020 General Election in Maricopa County. Many claims will be made. Most will probably have no evidence and will be difficult to verify.

We think the Ninjas will say they found more votes for Donald Trump and there are several areas where they continue to have questions because they have not been given all of the information they need from the Maricopa County officials.

I will address a few areas we suspect they will try to tell the public where they found problems.

Duplication

The Ninjas were confused about ballots that were duplicated; they were not sure which ballots to count or did not trust the duplication process. The Secretary of State reported that instead of counting the ballots that were duplicated and were actually counted in the official results the Ninjas decided to count the original ballots that had some sort of defect that prevented them from going through the vote counting machines.

Here is a table that shows the actual number of ballots that were duplicated during the entire election:

You can see there were a total of 27,457 ballots that were duplicated and included in the official results. These included mail and early ballots that were duplicated by the election boards before they went to the central count room where the ballots were tabulated. The remaining 7,436 ballots were those that were rejected by the tabulators for some reason and had to be duplicated.

There is no mystery here. There are clear, detailed public records available that account for each of these ballots.

Electronic Adjudication of Ballots By Adjudication Boards

The next area the Ninjas will probably complain about is the process of electronic adjudication. Electronic adjudication allows an expedited and accurate process of resolving ambiguous vote marks and determination of write-in vote marks. Maricopa County is the only county in Arizona that employs electronic adjudication, in part due to the size of the voting population and the number of ballots cast in their elections.

Here is a table that accounts for every ballot that underwent electronic adjudication:

This table shows that there were 2,089,563 total ballots counted. We have public records that confirm that each of these ballots were cast by a qualified voter and the daily records of ballot tabulation of Early, Provisional and Election Day ballots exactly matches the official results.

Much was made initially about the high percentage of ballots that required electronic adjudication. There were 235,392 ballots (11.27% of total ballots cast) that were reviewed by adjudication boards. The vast majority were contests (102K) for which no changes were made, the reason being that the oval was identified as being ‘ambiguous’ (an insufficiently filled in oval), and the adjudicator examined the oval and decided that the weak mark was actually vote intent. The weak mark was allowed to stand without changing anything. Finally, 132,139 ballots needed some sort of modification to resolve which whether the write-in mark was for a qualified candidate, which qualified write-in candidate should receive a vote, whether it was really an overvote or undervote.

11,954 of these electronically adjudicated ballots involved the Presidential Elector contest. There may have been other contests that had some issue with vote marks but the table below shows exactly what the issues were, how they were resolved and what the results were:

This data shows us a few very important things. First, the vast majority of these ballots (6,611) were marked for unqualified write-in candidates. Secondly, these adjudications awarded additional votes to all three Presidential candidates with Biden receiving 2,069 to Trump’s 1,516.

There is a detailed record for each one of these ballots, the actions taken and identification of the election board involved and the time the action was taken. In addition to those records that were produced at the time the action was taken there is a complete record of the adjudication action included with every digital image of every ballot no matter whether some ambiguity was resolved or not.

We anticipate that the Ninjas will once again demonstrate that they don’t know what they are doing. They will talk about counts that we will show are wrong. They will talk about various problems they have discovered. Most of these will be about things involving election administration and operation of the election systems which they did not understand when they started and haven’t learned about over the last six months.

They attempted to create a different result that would show Donald Trump won Arizona and they have failed.