What the Hell Is Going on in Arizona with this New “Recount”?

Whatever it is, it isn’t normal or proper.

My home state of Arizona has always had its share of crazy, from Governor Ev Mecham who served just one year before being impeached and removed for misuse of funds and obstruction of justice, to the censoring of Cindy McCain and Jeff Flake by the state GOP for insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. But the “audit” of election results that is now underway, begun more than five months after the election and promising a hand recount of the 2.1 million votes cast in the state’s largest county of Maricopa, takes things to a whole new level.

Trump supporters outside the Maricopa County election offices. Credit: Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

First, some background. On election night, GOP heads exploded when Fox News called the state for Biden, making it impossible for Trump to claim he had won outright even as votes continued to be counted in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. The math simply no longer worked for Trump. The GOP in Arizona also went apoplectic, and MAGA crowds began materializing outside the county election offices as the count slowly continued. In the end, it turned out that Fox News and the math of it all were right: Arizona went to Biden by 10,457 votes.

A series of lawsuits then began, with the Trump Campaign filing a complaint alleging an incorrect rejection of “over votes,” which occur when ballots are marked with more than the options allowed. Voting machines are designed to alert when this happens, giving the voter the chance to request a new ballot or proceed with the one that’s marked incorrectly. The Trump campaign claimed that those who chose to proceed were entitled to a manual inspection of their ballots later, and further claimed the voters were told by poll workers to cast their original ballots rather than request a new one. In total, there were 4,816 overvote ballots (making it mathematically impossible, by the way, for Trump to prevail) and only 180 were involved in the lawsuit. 

So what’s the deal with the latest audit? And weren’t the three audits already conducted, performed by different federally approved firms, sufficient to put this to rest? Apparently not, based on the death threats the Maricopa County supervisors continue to after they resisted GOP party subpoenas for the 2.1 million ballots, 385 voting machines and records of poll books and voting machine passwords, as reported in the New York Times. 

The gist of the audit is as audacious as it is dangerous. Trump and a bevy of election “truthers” want to dig up something for the base showing that there was actual fraud taking place back in November, in part because so many in the GOP believe that lie and in part to further call into question the legitimacy of the election. To this end, the state GOP has hired a private firm with no experience counting or auditing ballots to handle this. The company is a Florida-based firm called, rather bizarrely and troublingly, “Cyber Ninjas.” 

The head of the Cyber Ninjas team conducting the “audit,” a man named Doug Logan, is hardly unbiased. The Arizona Republic reported that Logan had posted conspiracy theories about the election on Twitter as late as January, on an account that has since been deleted. 

And according to the Arizona Mirror, Logan once drafted an eyebrow-raising document for senators who planned to object to the certification of the election results on Jan. 6. That document promoted disproven and baseless conspiracy theories about Venezuelan software, Hugo Chavez, and election rigging by Dominion Voting Systems, the very company whose ballot tabulation machines Logan and his team are supposed to be inspecting. “Kraken” conspiracy theorist and former Trump team attorney Sidney Powell shared the document on her website in a section called, “Evidence of Fraud – 2020 Election.” Confronted with this apparent bias and the falsity of the claims, Logan has stood behind them. “Some of it is based on my own research, but quite a bit is information I got from other people but personally vetted,” Logan said.

The “audit” process so far has failed to follow any semblance of fairness or normalcy. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has requested that the state attorney general investigate the Arizona Senate’s handling of it, citing a lack of transparency about security of ballots. She noted that some of the legislature’s most extreme partisans have had unlimited access to the coliseum where the votes are being reviewed, even as it remained unclear whether reporters and impartial election experts will be allowed to observe the proceedings. One of the “non-partisan” observers, it turns out, is the One American Network, an unabashedly pro-Trump propaganda channel. Trump himself has been on the sidelines cheering the audit process on and calling for there to be security around the workers.

A reporter for the Arizona Republic, Jen Fifiled, even raised concern that the auditors in the coliseum had blue pens in their possession. This was in violation of the rules, which allow only red pens, because voting machines can read blue or black ink. There would be no way to know if ballots were tampered with. When this was pointed out to Logan of Cyber Ninjas, he simply said they “would work on this.”

Greg Burton, the executive editor of The Arizona Republic, released a statement on Friday saying that “Senate leaders have let a partisan, conspiratorial broadcast outlet and ragtag crew of proTrump auditors subvert transparency and undermine free and fair elections in Arizona.”

Days into the audit, it still isn’t clear who is actually doing the counting, what it will cost, who will pay for it (though OAN is leading a fundraiser for it), or what rules will be followed. Democrats have filed a lawsuit to halt the audit, claiming that the companies hired by the Senate to run it do not have proper procedures in place to: 1) safeguard and keep track of the ballots and voting machines, 2) ensure the ballots and machines aren’t altered or tampered with, and 3) ensure there is bipartisan oversight of the audit.

The judge offered to halt the audit if Democrats would post a $1 million bond. They declined. A hearing in the lawsuit is scheduled for today.