A new review by veteran election experts of the “laughable” Cyber Ninjas Arizona ballot audit reports that it was an even bigger sham than previously known, with the auditors completely missing 16,000 votes in a rechecked sample.
The recount — which nevertheless confirmed Joe Biden won — was wildly inaccurate, according to a review of it conducted by Larry Moore, founder of the non-partisan Boston-based Clear Ballot Group, Arizona Republican data analyst Benny White, and Clear Ballot’s retired chief tech expert Tim Halvorsen.
“The discrepancies are so large that they cannot just be brushed aside,” Moore told The Arizona Republic. “The reality is they just made up the numbers.”
This “blows apart everything that’s happened in the past nine months. Anybody with a hand calculator and five minutes could figure it out,” he added.
The analysts — who are known as the “audit guys” in election circuits — on Friday released their findings of the Cyber Ninjas’ audit, which was conducted on behalf of the Arizona legislature to analyze the 2.1 million votes of Maricopa County, which Biden won.
In just one of a series of jaw-dropping errors by the Cyber Ninjas outlined in the report, a check of 40 ballot boxes found that the Ninjas’ hand count was short by nearly 16,000 ballots — roughly a third of all the ballots contained in the boxes. The Cyber Ninjas hand-counted ballots in a total of 1,600 boxes, which could mean they missed hundreds of thousands of votes.
The Cyber Ninjas had claimed that its hand count nearly matched certified election results; it did not, the review noted. Nor did it match a machine count of votes arranged by the company’s employer, the state Senate.
That discrepancy alone renders any statement by the Ninjas about votes in Maricopa County “meaningless,” the report declared.
The Cyber Ninjas concluded in its report last month that Biden did indeed win the presidential election (the operation even found 99 extra votes for him), but still raised several questions challenging the integrity of the Maricopa County election process.
The analysts characterized Cyber Ninjas’ claim that Trump actually had 261 fewer votes than previously counted a “shiny object” meant “to convey believability to an otherwise unbelievable hoax.”
In short, noted the analysts: “Having zero experience in election audits, the Ninjas’ announcement that they had confirmed, to a high degree of accuracy, the election results of the second largest county in the country is, we believe, laughable.”
Republican State Senate President Karen Fann, who was charged with supervising the Cyber Ninjas’ multi-million-dollar operation, discounted the review as “a lie that borders on inflammatory.” She told the Arizona Republic that she wasn’t interested in reading the report.
She had previously characterized Cyber Ninjas’ work as the “most detailed, demanding, and uncompromising election audit that has ever been conducted.”
Cyber Ninjas spokesperson Rod Thomson told The New York Times: “We stand by our methodology and complete final report.”
The audit was significantly funded by Donald Trump-supporting conspiracy theorists — including Trump’s ousted national security adviser and pardoned felon Michael Flynn, lawyer Sidney Powell ($550,000) and two correspondents from the right-wing One American News Network — who have touted the fiction that the presidential election was “rigged” against Trump.
The Arizona vote was certified last year by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey after several official recounts failed to find any irregularities. Biden beat Trump by 10,457 votes in the state, edging out Trump by more than 2 percentage points ― about 45,000 votes ― in Maricopa County.
