“Cyber Ninjas, the controversial Florida company that conducted a bungle-plagued audit of Arizona votes in the 2020 presidential election, a recount pushed by Donald Trump and state senators over baseless claims of fraud, has folded,” Huffington Post reported on Thursday, January 6, 2022 (story here).
Arizona state senate Republicans hired the company to “audit” Maricopa County’s 2020 votes for president after Biden won the state. That county, which includes Phoenix, has about two-thirds of the state’s voters.
Hiring Cyber Ninjas was controversial because it was owned and run by a diehard Trumper who pushed false election conspiracies, the company was small and unknown, had never done election work before, and qualified companies with election experience were passed over.
As the “audit” proceeded, Cyber Ninjas became even more controversial for repeatedly missing deadlines and going off on ridiculous tangents such as holding ballots up to black lights to see if they were made of “bamboo paper” from China (pursuing a conspiracy theory that China flew in ballots marked for Biden).
What it boils down to is that Arizona GOP leaders couldn’t believe Trump lost their state. However, the ballots had already been officially recounted, and Cyber Ninjas’ unofficial recount merely confirmed those results.
The company did issue a report criticizing the election. But yesterday, “County election officials released a scathing report … rebutting almost every claim in the ballot review. It concluded that nearly 80 claims made by Cyber Ninjas were misleading or false.”
Closing down the company followed a judge finding it in contempt for failing to hand over records related to the “audit” and threatening it with $50,000 a day fines.
But there might be another reason for going out of business: Who’s going to hire a Republican “auditor” who, after being paid several million dollars of mostly donated money, concluded that Biden won?