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US House Democrats launch investigation on State Senate audit

Election generic
Posted at 3:41 PM, Jul 14, 2021
and last updated 2021-07-14 18:41:42-04

PHOENIX — The US House Committee on Oversight and Reform announced that an investigation is being launched on the Arizona State Senate led audit of the 2020 election.

Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) along with the chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Rep. Jaime Raskin (D-MD), sent a letter to the Senate’s head contractor Doug Logan requesting “information about Cyber Ninja’s participation in an “audit” of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County,” it reads.

The communication explicitly lays out three main drivers in their decision to request information from Logan. It begins with the committee citing “Cyber Ninjas’ Lack of Election Audit Experience.” It notes that after the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved two separate audits conducted by “two nonpartisan firms with expertise in voting systems,” that the State Senate chose to conduct their own audit and hire Doug Logan’s firm, Cyber Ninjas along with several other subcontractors. It states, “Although Cyber Ninjas claims to have been part of prior election audits in Michigan and Georgia, officials in those states denied that the company participated in those audits.”

The second portion of the letter describes what the committee calls “Cyber Ninjas’ Sloppy and Insecure Audit Practices,” and details issues that have surrounded the audit, such as having red pens on the counting floor when Arizona statute forbids them since election equipment is designed to capture marks made with black and blue pens. It also describes items raised in an earlier letter from the US Department of Justice letter sent to the state senate concerning plans to conduct a door-to-door canvass of 2020 voters, a practice the DOJ noted as “raising concerns regarding potential intimidation of voters.

The letter then goes into Doug Logan’s widely reported social media postings in December of 2020 lending credence to election conspiracy theories that have yet to be proven as well as his authoring of a document used by Sidney Powell making claims “regarding Dominion Voting Systems, including that the company has origins in Venezuela, was used to rig elections for deceased President Hugo Chavez, and is owned in part by a Chinese company.”

Chairwoman Maloney ends the letter by making requests for documentation from Logan to be provided by July 28 that includes information on funding for the audit, which despite several attempts by multiple media outlets, has remained opaque except for the initial $150,000 payment by the Arizona State Senate. She also asks for all communications between Logan and former President Donald Trump and many of those connected to the efforts that were made to overturn state certifications of the election prior to the events that culminated on January 6.

ABC15 reached out to the spokesperson for Doug Logan but have not yet received a response.

Read the letter in full here.