The Cyber Ninjas are a grim residue of Donald Trump’s time in office. The company is owned by a Trump acolyte and runs with all of its expertise in ballot auditing, which is exactly none. We saw the “auditors” running lights over the individual ballots seeking bamboo in the paper, because after all, we all know that anything coming out of China is made of bamboo. Fortunately, common sense is on the horizon.
The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that even though Cyber Ninjas is a private company it cannot “subvert the public records law.” Then, the court ordered the partisan Cyber Ninjas company to turn over its records from the audit of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million votes in the 2020 election. They are “public” and “must be disclosed, American Oversight wrote.
The appeals court ruled in its opinion that the Senate:
‘[a]s officers and a public body under the (records law), have a duty to maintain and produce public records related to their official duties.’
‘[That] governmental agency, authorized by the legislative branch of state government and performed by the Senate’s agents. The requested records are no less public records simply because they are in the possession of a third party, Cyber Ninjas.’
Executive Director of the nonprofit American Oversight Austin Evers sued for the audit records and released a statement that read:
‘The Senate has taken radical positions to obstruct basic public access to information about its so-called audit. It has tried to get away with outsourcing the audit to a third party, and argued that the public has no right to enforce transparency laws against them. Their arguments reflect a disdain for accountability. Fortunately the law is not on their side.’
The owner of the company has been involved in QAnon and announced even before the audit started that “hundreds of thousands of votes” would inevitably be found for Trump, The AZ Mirror reported. The audit has dragged on past its mid-May deadline. Still, no report has been presented.
There are strict laws governing the handling of voter ballots. In spite of that, truckloads of them found their way to an isolated Montana cabin. It is located 1,300 miles from Maricopa County, according to The Huffpost.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey could not find any irregularities even after several recounts. President Joe Biden won the state by 10,457, NBC News reported. He won the county by approximately 45,000 votes.
State Senate President Republican Karen Fann commented on Thursday that the Senate will take the case to the Arizona Supreme Court, according to The Arizona Republic:”
‘If this were to win, anybody that does business with a municipality, they would be subject to open records requests. I have never asked (Cyber Ninjas) for (the records). They are private between a private company and their clients.’
Her reasoning was that she thought “it sets a bad precedent to have emails between a state contractor like Cyber Ninjas and its subcontractors subject to the Public Records Law. And she said that she cannot hand over communications between Cyber Ninjas and its subcontractors because the Senate never had them:
‘We have nothing to hide.’
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