# 2021 Maricopa County Presidential Ballot Audit The **2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit** was a review of the 2020 general election in Arizona's largest county, commissioned by the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate and run by [[Cyber Ninjas]], a small Florida cybersecurity firm with no election experience. Its supporters called it a "forensic audit." It was not an audit in the sense election law uses the word. It had no statutory basis, no fixed method, and no power to change a result. Its own hand count found that [[Joe Biden]] won the county by **360 more votes** than the official canvass. That number is the most-cited fact about the review and the least important one. The review's real output was nine months of activity that kept the [[Stop the Steal]] narrative alive, a list of "concerns" that the county and later the state's Republican attorney general found almost entirely baseless, and roughly $2.8 million in voting equipment the county had to replace. > [!note] Page split > This page covers the review itself: its timeline, process, findings, and aftermath. The company that ran it, its money, and its collapse are on [[Cyber Ninjas]]. The CEO is on [[Doug Logan]]. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | Dec 2020 | Senate President [[Karen Fann]] and Judiciary Chairman Eddie Farnsworth subpoena [[Maricopa County]] for ballots, ballot images, and voting equipment. The county refuses and goes to court. | | Feb 26, 2021 | Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Timothy Thomason rules the subpoenas valid and orders the county to turn the materials over. | | Feb 2021 | The county's own audits of its [[Dominion Voting Systems]] equipment, run by the federally accredited labs [[Pro V&V]] and SLI Compliance, find no hacking or vote-switching. | | Mar 31, 2021 | Fann announces that Cyber Ninjas will lead the review. Its bid is **$150,000**. | | Apr 23, 2021 | The hand count of nearly 2.1 million ballots begins at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the state fairgrounds. Only the presidential and U.S. Senate races are recounted. | | May 5, 2021 | Pamela Karlan of the [[Department of Justice]] Civil Rights Division writes to Fann. She warns that planned door-to-door canvassing of voters could amount to voter intimidation, and that leaving ballots with private contractors may breach federal record-keeping law. Fann replies that canvassing is "indefinitely" deferred. | | May 14–24, 2021 | Counting pauses because the coliseum was booked earlier for high school graduations. [[Wake Technology Services]], which ran the hand count, leaves when its contract ends and is replaced by StratTech Solutions of Scottsdale. | | May 2021 | Secretary of State [[Katie Hobbs]] says she will not recertify any equipment handed to the Senate's contractors, citing "grave concerns" it may have been compromised. | | Jun 2021 | The hand count ends. Paper examination continues elsewhere. | | Jul 14, 2021 | The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors votes 5–0 to spend **$2.8 million** replacing the subpoenaed equipment, leased from Dominion. The county later files a $2.8 million notice of claim against the Senate. | | Late Jul 2021 | Senate liaison [[Ken Bennett]] is barred from the site after sharing count data with an outside analyst. He says he will resign, then stays after his access is restored. | | Sep 24, 2021 | Cyber Ninjas presents its report to the Senate. The hand count finds Biden **+99**, Trump **−261**: a net gain of **360 votes** for Biden. | | Jan 5, 2022 | Maricopa County presents its point-by-point rebuttal ("Correcting the Record"). | | Feb 22, 2023 | Attorney General [[Kris Mayes]] releases the findings of her predecessor [[Mark Brnovich]]'s investigation. Brnovich had withheld them. | ## Who did what - **The sponsor.** [[Karen Fann]] commissioned the review and signed an indemnification agreement covering county equipment "damaged, altered or otherwise compromised" in the Senate's custody. [[Warren Petersen]], then Judiciary chairman, received the auditors' briefings alongside her. - **The liaison.** [[Ken Bennett]], a former Secretary of State, was the Senate's man on site nearly every day. - **The prime contractor.** [[Cyber Ninjas]] and its CEO [[Doug Logan]]. Among its paid subcontractors was [[Heather Honey]], who helped draft the final report and in 2025 became DHS's election-integrity official. - **The subcontractors.** [[Wake Technology Services]] ran the hand count until mid-May. [[CyFIR]], the digital-forensics firm of Ben Cotton, examined the equipment and logs. [[Jovan Hutton Pulitzer]] was hired to test his "kinematic artifact detection" theory on ballot paper. - **The money.** Outside groups led by [[Patrick Byrne]], [[Michael Flynn]], [[Christina Bobb]], [[Sidney Powell]] and associates of [[Matt DePerno]] paid about $5.7 million. See [[Cyber Ninjas]] for the breakdown. - **The broadcaster.** [[One America News Network]] had embedded access, and its host [[Christina Bobb]] raised money for the review on air. ## What the report claimed The draft and final reports led with "concerns" rather than the count. The three largest: - **23,344** early ballots supposedly cast by people who had moved, based on a commercial change-of-address database. - **10,342** "potential voters" who supposedly voted in more than one county, matched on name, middle initial and birth year. - **9,041** voters who supposedly returned more ballots than they received. The report itself conceded there could be legitimate explanations. An earlier claim, presented to Fann and Petersen in July, said 74,000 votes had been cast with no record of a ballot request. Those were in-person early votes, which need no request. The final report called the figure "unintentionally misleading." ## The rebuttals **Maricopa County, January 5, 2022.** County election staff went through 75 claims and found 38 inaccurate, 25 misleading and 11 false. Of the 53,304 ballots Cyber Ninjas called "questionable," the county found **37** possible double votes, which it referred to the attorney general. That is fewer than 100 suspicious ballots out of about 2.1 million. On the equipment side, CyFIR had claimed about 37,000 security events over two days in March. The county's logs showed 385. Recorder [[Stephen Richer]] and Board chair Bill Gates helped present the rebuttal. Gates: "It's been debunked." **The attorney general, 2022–2023.** Brnovich, a Republican, sent investigators through the review's claims about database matches, internet-connected tabulators and deleted data. A memo from his Special Investigations Section found nearly all of them unfounded and "no evidence of election fraud." Brnovich did not publish it. Mayes released it on February 22, 2023. ## Analysis > [!tip] What this review was, in the vault's terms > **The institution did the work, not the proof.** Nothing the review found was needed for it to succeed. A legislative subpoena, a coliseum and a cable network made "the audit is still going" true every day for five months. That was the product. **It was none of the four audit designs.** Every state's statutory audit is either a fixed-percentage sample, a [[Risk-Limiting Audit]], a procedural review, or a full hand count run by election officials under a written rule, before or after certification ([[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]]). This review was a fifth thing: a full hand count run by a contractor chosen by one party, under rules it changed as it went, with no deadline and no binding effect. That is why the "it confirmed Biden" headline changed nothing. A process with no power to bind cannot settle anything, whatever it finds. **The cost landed on the county.** The review's most lasting effect was on [[Chain of Custody]]. Equipment that left official custody could no longer be trusted, so taxpayers paid to replace it. That was the cost of letting a partisan contractor touch it, regardless of anything the contractor did. **It exported a template.** Republican legislators from other states, including Pennsylvania's [[Doug Mastriano]], toured the coliseum. Wisconsin's taxpayer-funded review under [[Michael Gableman]] followed the same arc: no finding of fraud, millions spent, and the sponsors eventually firing their own investigator. ## See also - [[Cyber Ninjas]] · [[Doug Logan]] · [[Karen Fann]] · [[Ken Bennett]] · [[Jovan Hutton Pulitzer]] - [[Stop the Steal]] · [[Stop the Steal Timeline]] · [[Election Denialism]] · [[SharpieGate]] - [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]] · [[Risk-Limiting Audit]] · [[Chain of Custody]] - [[2020 Presidential Election]] · [[Maricopa County]]