One Year Since Filing Lawsuit, American Oversight Releases Updated Report on Arizona Election ‘Audit’ Records
On Thursday, American Oversight released a new report that highlights major findings from our investigation of the Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County.
On Thursday, American Oversight released a new report that highlights major findings from our investigation of the Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County.
The report comes one year after American Oversight filed its lawsuit against the Senate for the release of records related to the discredited review. Thousands of pages of documents that have been released in response to our litigation have revealed the politically biased and conspiracy-rooted origins of the “audit,” as we detailed in our first report last September. Since then, American Oversight has continued to uncover yet more evidence that this sham “audit” was an anti-democratic tactic to undermine faith in the 2020 election results.
As we’ve previously reported, leaders of the election review had from the start set out to find evidence of fraud so as to cast doubt on the results. Senate President Karen Fann later hired Cyber Ninjas to conduct the “audit,” a firm with no election experience and whose founder and CEO, Doug Logan, had previously touted election-denying conspiracies. American Oversight has also obtained records that further demonstrate the following:
- Roots in the plot to overturn the election: After the election, multiple Arizona lawmakers attempted to subvert the results of the election by proposing the appointment of alternate presidential electors. Records reveal that they anticipated that results from the “audit” would help them in this scheme.
- Involvement of Trump allies and conspiracy theorists: Our records point to the influence of Trump surrogates like Rudy Giuliani, conspiracy theorists like Jovan Pulitzer, and prominent election deniers like Phil Waldron, whose firm Allied Security Operations Group was almost hired to conduct the “audit.”
- Connections to efforts in other states: Records we’ve obtained reveal communications of Arizona “audit” leaders with lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — two states that have since launched their own partisan election reviews — and show how many of the same activists and Big Lie proponents are working across state lines.
On May 19, 2021, American Oversight filed suit against the Senate for failing to release “audit”-related documents in response to our open records requests. Since then, multiple court rulings have found that both the Senate and Cyber Ninjas must turn over public documents related to the election review. The Senate is still seeking to withhold certain records under a broad claim of legislative privilege, which this month brought part of the lawsuit before the Arizona Supreme Court.
More information on the investigation and records uncovered to date can be found here. Legal filings related to the case against the Senate and Cyber Ninjas can be found here.