# Cyber Ninjas **Cyber Ninjas** was a small Sarasota, Florida IT-security consultancy with no election experience. In 2021 the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate hired it to run a "forensic audit" of the 2020 presidential election in [[Maricopa County]]: the [[2021 Maricopa County Presidential Ballot Audit]], the most prominent and most absurd of the post-2020 partisan reviews. Its own hand count found that [[Joe Biden]] had won the county by **360 more votes** than the official count. Within four months of delivering that result, the company was insolvent, held in contempt, and fined $50,000 a day for refusing to hand over its records. > [!note] Page split > This page covers the company: who ran it, who paid for it, where the money went, and how it collapsed. The review itself (timeline, findings, rebuttals) is on [[2021 Maricopa County Presidential Ballot Audit]]. The CEO is on [[Doug Logan]]. ## Background Cyber Ninjas was owned and run by [[Doug Logan]], a security tester who had previously worked for the software-security firm Cigital in Indiana. Sarasota's economic development corporation helped him relocate the company to Florida in 2014. Its government work before Arizona was modest: a three-year, $101,000 cybersecurity contract with the FCC in 2016. In April 2020 it took a pandemic relief loan of about $98,000, listing five employees. Logan was not a neutral pick. After the 2020 election he retweeted claims that "there was fraud," filed an affidavit in a Michigan election lawsuit, messaged Ron Watkins asking for "original source documents," and visited [[Lin Wood]]'s South Carolina home to meet people "working on the investigation into election fraud." He also wrote "Election Fraud Facts & Details," a document of debunked Dominion and Smartmatic claims for senators planning to object to the January 6 certification. It ended up on [[Sidney Powell]]'s website, and he confirmed to the Arizona Mirror that he wrote it. In June 2021, with the Arizona count underway, he was confirmed as the anonymous voice "Anon" in *The Deep Rig*, a film built around [[Patrick Byrne]]'s stolen-election thesis. ## The Arizona contract Senate President [[Karen Fann]] announced the hire on March 31, 2021. The company's bid was **$150,000**. The work was mostly subcontracted: - [[Wake Technology Services]] ran the hand count. A document obtained by the Arizona Mirror showed Wake had actually been hired by Sidney Powell's [[Defending the Republic]]. - [[CyFIR]], Ben Cotton's digital-forensics firm, examined the voting equipment. - [[Heather Honey]], a Pennsylvania election-denial activist, was a paid subcontractor listed as a "manager"; ProPublica reported she helped draft the final report. In 2025 she became DHS's deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. - [[Jovan Hutton Pulitzer]] was paid to test ballot paper for "kinematic artifacts." Logan later testified that he did most of the audit work himself, with one employee and subcontractors. ## Who paid In July 2021 the funders disclosed their totals. Because the money moved through nonprofits, the individual donors behind them stayed hidden. | Funder | Amount | Run by / linked to | |---|---|---| | [[The America Project]] | more than $3.2 million | [[Patrick Byrne]] | | [[America's Future]] | about $976,000 | [[Michael Flynn]] | | Voices and Votes | $605,000 | [[Christina Bobb]] of [[One America News Network]] | | [[Defending the Republic]] | $550,000 | [[Sidney Powell]] | | Election Integrity Fund for the American Republic + Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic | $280,000 combined | linked by the Arizona Mirror to [[Matt DePerno]] | The groups said the total was **about $5.7 million**. The Senate's own contribution was the $150,000 contract. Byrne's group was the largest single payer, at more than half the private money. Profits from *The Deep Rig* also went to it. > [!warning] Correction (2026-10-07) > An earlier version of this page said funding came from groups connected to [[Mike Lindell]]. Lindell does not appear in the July 2021 funder disclosure. The fifth group was linked to Matt DePerno. ## Where the money went Records released in May 2022 showed the review's operating costs reached about **$8.8 million**, including $5.2 million in payroll and labor. That was more than the $5.7 million raised. An accountant's report put Cyber Ninjas' loss at **more than $2.1 million** and noted that Logan never supplied balance sheets or cash-flow statements. As of September 15, 2021, the company owed subcontractors more than $1.9 million. Pulitzer's planned $2.1 million fee had been cut to $210,000. In November 2021 Logan told an interviewer he was about $2 million in debt. ## The records fight and the collapse Phoenix Newspapers (publisher of the *Arizona Republic*) and [[American Oversight]] sued for the review's records. Courts held that they were public records even though a private contractor held them, and the company still refused to produce them. - **January 6, 2022.** Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah held Cyber Ninjas in contempt and imposed **$50,000 a day** in fines starting the next day. The company's lawyer said it was insolvent and had laid off its staff, and a spokesman announced "Cyber Ninjas is being shut down." Hannah refused to treat the company as "an empty shell" and said the fines could be applied to individuals. - **A second company.** [[Akolytos]], with Logan as CEO, had been incorporated in Florida on **March 22, 2021**, nine days before the Arizona contract was announced. At a January 2022 deposition, Logan said Cyber Ninjas was selling off its assets and moving materials to Akolytos. Texts to Fann obtained by the AP showed his plan: sell the company's assets to pay its debts, eventually file for bankruptcy, and start a new company with the same employees, because "too much negativity around the name" made Cyber Ninjas unsellable. - **March 10, 2022.** The Arizona Supreme Court declined to hear the company's challenge to the fines, which had passed $3 million. - **May 10, 2022.** Logan's lawyers handed the records to the Senate, which released more than 1,000 pages. By then the fines had reached about **$4.3 million**, according to the Arizona Mirror. The same outlet later wrote that the company "declared bankruptcy"; see the registry note below. > [!warning] Correction (2026-10-07) > An earlier version of this page said the company "dissolved in January 2022" and that its records "were never fully disclosed." The January 2022 announcement was a shutdown and liquidation, with a successor entity already in place. A large set of records was produced in May 2022 under court pressure. > [!info] What the Florida registry shows (checked 2026-10-07) > **Cyber Ninjas Inc. was never dissolved.** Florida's Division of Corporations lists it (doc. P15000074944) as **ACTIVE**, with Douglas Jay Logan as "CEO & Principal Consultant" and annual reports filed every year from 2016 through **February 20, 2026**. The bankruptcy in the January 2022 texts was a *plan*. Every contemporaneous report (AP, Newsweek, the Washington Post) uses the future tense, and no filing turned up in any source checked. The Arizona Mirror's later "declared bankruptcy" could not be corroborated and is not asserted here. Its sister LLC, [[Akolytos]], is also active, with the same Sarasota mailing address and registered agent. ## Michigan and Georgia In August 2022, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's office asked for a special prosecutor to investigate post-election access to vote tabulators in three Michigan counties. The petition named Logan and Ben Cotton among those alleged to have broken into and tested the machines, with DePerno present. In August 2023 the special prosecutor charged DePerno and two others. Logan and Cotton were among the technical experts he declined to charge, saying they had been "deceived" by some of the defendants. Logan was also on security video at the Coffee County, Georgia elections office on January 18–19, 2021, days after that county's Dominion system was copied. The *Arizona Republic* identified him as unindicted co-conspirator "Individual 25" in the 2023 [[Trump Georgia RICO Case]] indictment. See [[Doug Logan]]. ## Copycat audits The Arizona review set off demands for similar "forensic audits" in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and elsewhere. Pennsylvania's [[Doug Mastriano]] and other out-of-state Republicans toured the Phoenix coliseum, and Wisconsin's taxpayer-funded review under [[Michael Gableman]] followed the same arc. None produced evidence of fraud. But the model did its political job: it kept the [[Stop the Steal]] narrative alive through official-looking proceedings that conservative media could cover as legitimate investigations. ## Analytical framework Cyber Ninjas represents the **institutional performance** function of Stop the Steal. The Arizona review was never designed to find fraud, and the company had no capability to do so. Its purpose was to create the appearance of an ongoing official investigation: footage of people counting ballots at tables that conservative media could broadcast as evidence that "questions remain." It also shows how **backfire-proof** Stop the Steal claims are. When the company's own count confirmed Biden's win, the movement did not fold. Supporters moved on to the report's "concerns" section, ignored the headline finding, or said the audit itself had been compromised. Like any unfalsifiable system, the conspiracy absorbed the contradicting evidence instead of being defeated by it. Third, it is a case study in the **privatization of democratic oversight**. A private company with no credentials, an openly partisan CEO, and donor money that federal law let stay anonymous got custody of the ballots and voting equipment of the fourth-largest county in the United States. When the public asked to see its work, it turned out to be a private company again: pleading insolvency and running up fines rather than producing records, while staying on Florida's active corporate registry the whole time. ## See also - [[2021 Maricopa County Presidential Ballot Audit]] · [[Doug Logan]] · [[Akolytos]] - [[Stop the Steal]] · [[Stop the Steal Timeline]] · [[Election Denialism]] · [[Disinformation]] - [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]] — what a statutory audit is, and why this was not one