The Arizona fraudit is off the rails

An unsupervised driver transported copies of ballot data in a truck to a cabin in the community of Bigfork in northwest Montana, several media outlets reported.

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The audit of 2.1 million votes in Maricopa County is hugely controversial. The audit was ordered by state Senate Republicans, and only involves races won by Democrats. The partisan review by the Cyber Ninjas company, which has no experience with elections, is headed by conspiracy theorist Doug Logan, a promoter of the “Big Lie” that the election was rigged. He posted messages months ago that “hundreds of thousands” of new votes would inevitably be found for Donald Trump.

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In one off-the-rails operation, Cyber Ninjas operatives are seeking evidence of bamboo fibers in ballots as proof that China interfered with the election. One of the auditors actually appears on the same ballots he’s reviewing as both a failed GOP candidate and an elector for Trump.

Election officials have warned that large numbers of the unsecured ballots may already have been altered or trashed, and are now completely unreliable — and that manipulation of voting machines has rendered them unusable for future elections.

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Arizona Republic journalist Jen Fifield discovered that the cabin now holding the records is the residence of Ben Cotton, founder of digital company CyFIR, which is a subcontractor of the company running the recount. CyFIR’s parent company, Cyber Technologies, also run by Cotton, appears to have the same address in the Montana woods, which was tracked down by CNN this week.

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The Arizona vote was certified more than six months ago by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey after several recounts failed to find any irregularities.

  HuffPo

This is going to be a nightmare for months, if not years, to come.

Also...

In recent weeks, GOP lawmakers from at least 16 states have flocked to Phoenix for a first-hand look at a controversial, partisan "audit" of the 2020 vote in Arizona's largest county.

The visits look to be a harbinger for similar exercises yet-to-come in those other states -- and a potential revenue stream for, among others, the Arizona effort's main contractor: Cyber Ninjas.

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Though the Florida-based cybersecurity firm has existed in some form since at least 2014, before last November's election, it hadn't done election auditing.

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Go to the address for Cyber Ninjas' Legal Department, listed on its audit contract with the Arizona Senate, and you'll wind up at a rented mailbox in a UPS Store in Sarasota, Florida.

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Cyber Ninjas exists mostly in virtual reality, with its chief executive, Doug Logan, also serving as, well, pretty much everything.

On recent calls to the company's automated answer line, pressing "3" for sales led to the answering message for Logan. So did pressing "4" for human resources. And pressing "5" for purchasing. And "6" for the general mailbox.

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Logan himself has strenuously avoided speaking to reporters since taking part in an April 22 press conference just before the audit began. At that conference, he refused to answer questions about how he'd repeated and amplified various debunked election-fraud conspiracy theories on social media, such as this retweet unearthed by the Arizona Mirror, for example: "I'm tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. It happened, it's real, and people better get wise fast." He'd also provided, in a Michigan election lawsuit, an affidavit alleging vulnerabilities in one county's system for tallying votes; state and county officials disagreed, identified a slew of problems with the analysis. And Logan repeated disproven claims in a paper he wrote for Republican US senators objecting to Congress's Jan. 6 certification of President Joe Biden's election win.

But Logan, and the Arizona Senate's audit liaison, Ken Bennett, argued at that press conference that Logan's own opinions don't matter, and that people should trust in the integrity of the audit process he's overseeing.

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"It's hard to say anything bad about the guy. He's a lovely person. He's just nuts now," said Tony Summerlin, who has been friends with Logan for 15 years, and said he helped him win a cybersecurity contract with the Federal Communications Commission five years ago.

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Logan and his company have a trail of positive reviews posted on his LinkedIn page for cybersecurity consulting work in the private sector. He and Cyber Ninjas also received a three-year, $101,000 federal cybersecurity contract with the Federal Communications Commission in 2016, and subsequently, Summerlin said, worked for the Universal Services Administrative Company, a private-public partnership under the FCC that provides broadband services to underserved communities and schools, among other work. None of that previous consulting appears to have any ties to election-related matters.

In April 2020, Cyber Ninjas received a Covid assistance loan for $98,322, saying in its application it then had five employees.

Logan, in materials for a cybersecurity conference in Chicago last November, described himself as a father of 11 children and a "Follower of Jesus Christ."

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[W]ithin days of Trump's election loss, Logan was messaging Ron Watkins. The recent HBO documentary "Q: Into the Storm," pointed to Watkins as either being "Q" or at least a key promulgator of the QAnon conspiracy theories that helped animate many of those who stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6.

Watkins is the former administrator of the internet message-board website 8chan, now 8kun, effectively QAnon's home base.

In a series of archived tweets from a now-deleted account between Nov. 12 and December, first reported by The Daily Beast, Logan messaged Watkins, "I'd love to chat if you have a chance;" asked Watkins for links to "original source documents;" and tagged Watkins on his exchanges with attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who filed numerous lawsuits challenging Biden's victory and baselessly claiming electoral fraud.

Wood also told a reporter for Talking Points Memo that Logan had visited his home in South Carolina to meet with others "working on the investigation into election fraud."

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Summerlin said Logan recently contacted him to ask for his help, saying that the Universal Service Administrative Company had terminated Cyber Ninjas' contract. Neither Logan nor the USAC responded to questions from CNN about the alleged contract termination.

"He said, 'it's wrong they're terminating me,'" Summerlin said. "I said, 'don't be an idiot, of course they're terminating your ass, you work at will.' I said, 'if you get a government contract any time after this, I'll be amazed."

  CNN

Or, on the other hand, he may get lots of red state government work. Republicans have lost their damned minds. We can stop pretending our elections are any less of a sham than any third world country.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.