About
Cyber Ninjas was a digital security company run by Doug Logan that was hired to conduct what it termed a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Arizona.
After initial audits found no irregularities in Arizona, the state’s Senate Republicans contracted with Cyber Ninjas to conduct a third audit of the 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County. That undertaking began in April 2021 and although it had been slated to be completed in 60 days, it only ended four months later when a judge ordered Cyber Ninjas to preserve all documentation related to the audit. In the end, the probe revealed more votes for Biden than had been originally counted.
In January 2022, an Arizona judge imposed a fine of $50,000 a day on Cyber Ninjas when Logan failed to turn over public records related to the audit requested by the Arizona Republic and by the watchdog group American Oversight, which had filed a separate lawsuit. (Once those records were eventually released in 2023, it became clear that Logan had been withholding information in part due to advice from Trump loyalist and audit fundraiser Christina Bobb.)
When the fine was imposed, Cyber Ninjas’ lawyers claimed that the company was already insolvent and no longer had any employees, an argument the judge found unpersuasive given the amount of private funds that had poured into the audit effort. “The court is not going to accept the assertion that Cyber Ninjas is an empty shell and that no one is responsible for seeing that it complies,” said Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah.
In June 2023, the public records finally released by the Arizona Senate revealed a series of text messages from 2021 between Logan and Bobb indicating, among other things, that he was originally slated to participate in Wisconsin’s partisan audit, too. And midway through the audit, Bobb texted Logan to say that she had “had a detailed discussion with 45 today,” apparently referring to Trump. “We’re losing people, Doug,” she wrote. “We need a good statement to encourage our base. I’ll spare you the details, but we’re losing people.”
Election Audits
- At a July 2021 hearing, the Cyber Ninjas CEO said the county had “74,243 mail-in ballots where there is no clear record of them being sent” to voters. Election officials explained that early voters who voted in person received a “mail-in” ballot when they visited the county offices for that purpose, which undermined Logan’s suspicions of fraud.
- Shiva Ayyadurai, head of EchoMail and a subcontractor for Cyber Ninjas, said that at least 70% of their digital files with images of ballots cast were corrupted. In a report, he slammed the company as “self-serving grifters” only interested in making money.
- One assessment of the ”audit” found that the auditors overlooked 16,000 votes in a particular sample, which led an expert to believe that Cyber Ninjas had “just made up the numbers.”
- More than $600,000 of the funding for the “audit” came from the Voices and Votes PAC run by One America News anchor Christina Bobb. She also sent affidavits to Arizona Sen. Karen Fann (R) on behalf of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and spoke with Trump about the audit. Just prior to the Cyber Ninjas probe, Greg Roeberg, a leader of Jewish Voices for Trump, incorporated Voices and Votes in Wyoming.
- America’s Future, an organization run by former Trump advisor Michael Flynn, donated $976,512 to the probe.
- Sidney Powell, a Trump attorney who filed several frivolous lawsuits challenging the election results, donated $550,000 through Defending the Republic, the organization she leads.
- Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne gave $3.25 million to Cyber Ninjas for the audit, according to company disclosures. In April 2021, his nonprofit, The America Project, launched a campaign to Fund the Audit with a goal of raising $2.8 million.
- Fight Back, a group backed by pro-Trump attorney L. Lin Wood (who filed a number of lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results), reportedly donated $50,000 to the audit fundraiser in April 2021.