PHOENIX — A monthslong hand recount of the count in Arizona’s largest county once again confirmed President Joe Biden won the 2020 election and the race was not “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, according to early versions of a report prepared for the Arizona Senate.
The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, that examined Maricopa County’s 2020 vote includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results. The data in the report also confirms that U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly won in the county.
The state Senate will receive the official results at 1 p.m. Thursday. Several versions of the draft report, titled “Maricopa County Forensic Audit” by Cyber Ninjas, circulated prematurely on Wednesday and Thursday. Multiple versions were obtained by The Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network.
The Cyber Ninjas and their subcontractors were paid millions to research and write the report by nonprofits set up by prominent figures in the “Stop the Steal” movement and allies of Donald Trump, but Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan said that would not influence their work.
The Republic examined draft reports which minimized election results and ballot counts. They instead focused on issues that raised questions about voter integrity and the process of voting.
Election analysts claim that these findings are false and based upon flawed data.
The draft report shows there was less than a 1,000-vote difference between the county’s certified ballot count and the Cyber Ninjas’ hand count.
The hand count showed that Trump received 45.469 fewer votes as Biden. According to county results, he lost by 45.109.
According to the draft audit report, the election results were not conclusive.
Maricopa County Board Chairman Jack Sellers said the overall results in the draft report confirm “the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters.”
“That should be the end of the story,” he said. “Everything else is just noise.”
The draft report comes in three parts adding up to about 110 pages. It includes recommended changes to state elections law and suggestions for how the county should correct certain election processes, including how to keep voter information updated, ballot handling, and voting machine security.
The Arizona attorney general should investigate a few of the concerns.
Tom Liddy (deputy Maricopa County Attorney) provided Thursday a copy to The Republic of a document received by the county.
Liddy stated that he couldn’t verify whether the document he had wasn’t an official Cyber Ninjas document, as the county didn’t receive it from the Senate. He declined to say who provided it to the county but said that someone dropped it off Wednesday at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
Benny White, an important Pima County elections consultant provided a line-by-line analysis of a draft report that he had received. It had no connection with the county.
The presidential and U.S. Senate results in the document provided to the county match with White’s copy. The Republic did not receive the copy that he had, but White verbally confirmed the results.
The third volume of the draft contained the Senate and presidential results from the recount. The first volume, the executive summary, focuses on pointing out concerns Cyber Ninjas and its subcontractors have with the county’s election, raising questions about whether there was election fraud and further casting doubt on the integrity of the process.
After they lost a court battle and had to hand over election materials to the Senate earlier this year, county officials did not participate in the audit and did not answer most of the questions the Senate’s contractors had about the county’s election processes. The contractors had no prior election experience, other than their involvement with the “Stop the Steal” movement.
Election consultants across the country warned that the results would not be released without their scrutiny. They said the methods were insecure and sloppy, and they were less likely to produce accurate results.
The draft report was already being dissected by those who had copies.
White said the Senate is raising bogus concerns in a way that will shift focus from the fact that the audit found Trump lost the election by numbers that closely matched the county.
“I’m outraged at what the Senate has done, what it is doing here,” Thursday, he stated. “They have not involved any election officials in this audit. They did not include any county officials.”
White is part of a three-man team dubbed “The Audit Guys,” who have analyzed election and voting processes nationwide. He said that his team is preparing a rebuttal to the report that will demonstrate section by section how the Cyber Ninjas got it wrong.
“The Ninjas don’t understand Arizona’s voting laws,” he said. “They don’t understand the structure of voting systems.”
He called out the draft report’s failure to provide specific breakdowns of the count in the report, including key voting elements such as boxes, batches, and precinct information that would allow experts to burrow into the data.
“We’ve demonstrated in the past that if they produce those counts, we are going to destroy those reports,” he said. “They have wasted $6-$7 million and months of people’s time on something that is just not credible.”