# Jovan Hutton Pulitzer **Jovan Hutton Pulitzer** (born **Jeffry Jovan Philyaw**) is a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who became a figure in the post-2020 stolen-election movement. He was hired as a subcontractor on the [[2021 Maricopa County Presidential Ballot Audit]] to test a ballot-paper theory that was never shown to work. ## Before 2020 As Jovan Philyaw he was chairman and CEO of Digital Convergence, the Dallas company behind the **CueCat**, a barcode scanner shaped like a cat. It attracted roughly $185 million in reported investment, then failed commercially after a 2000 security flaw and privacy breaches. He changed his name after that. He later ran a patent-holding company, claimed more than 100 patents, and appeared as a treasure hunter on History's *The Curse of Oak Island* in 2016, claiming a sword found off Nova Scotia was evidence of Roman contact. ## Georgia After the 2020 election he appeared before Georgia state senators claiming flaws in the state's voting system, including a claim that he had hacked it. The Georgia Secretary of State's office rejected the claim, and [[Brad Raffensperger]] called him a "failed inventor and failed treasure hunter." ## Arizona [[Cyber Ninjas]] brought him onto the Maricopa review to apply what he called "kinematic artifact detection." He said it could tell from the paper itself whether a ballot had been mailed, folded or handled, and claimed to have tested it on more than 2 million ballots. No evidence was ever presented that the technique worked, had been used in an election before, or had been independently checked. - **Fee.** His planned $2.1 million fee was cut by 90%, to **$210,000**. - **Peer review, of a kind.** Shiva Ayyadurai, another researcher on the review, reviewed Pulitzer's report harshly and recommended against publishing it, calling its fraud claims "utter rubbish." The Senate left his theory out of its findings. - **Aftermath.** In January 2022 he threatened to sue the Arizona Senate, claiming it had infringed his intellectual property by sharing ballot images. In October 2022 he published a book on the technique priced at $250 a copy. He told a reporter the price was set high on purpose, so that he could make copies for himself while keeping others from buying it. ## Significance Pulitzer is the review industry's purest specimen: a claimed technology, unverifiable by design, sold at a premium to a movement that needed something that *looked* like forensics. Even the review's own team discarded his work. ## See also - [[2021 Maricopa County Presidential Ballot Audit]] · [[Cyber Ninjas]] · [[Doug Logan]] - [[Election Conspiracy Theories]] · [[Stop the Steal]]