The "Cyber Ninjas" Wanted To Keep Their Recount Process A Secret

The extended farce that is the Arizona's election “audit” is starting to get to even the clowns doing the bidding of the clowns in the Arizona Senate. Apparently, the secret Ninja skillz of the Cyber Ninjas are beginning to fade. https://t.co/dVLBB1heI6

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) April 28, 2021

It's certainly mysterious.

After the ballots were counted, they went to an inspection table with three people. There are many questions about what the workers there were doing and what they were looking for, but here is what we know about what each one was doing:

The first person lines up the ballot under a Canon camera hooked onto brackets.

The second person lines up the ballot under a device that displays a portion of the ballot onto a computer screen. One of the images displayed on the screen is a filled-in bubble, and it is magnified and examined.

The third person holds the ballot inside a box set up on the table. The person takes a UV flashlight and shines it on particular areas of the ballot. As The Republic observed, the ballot was being examined on one side in particular, and the middle.

Rumors have spread about the workers checking the ballots for watermarks, but the paper that Maricopa County uses for ballots does not have a watermark. Shortly after the November election, QAnon conspiracy theorists claimed that former President Donald Trump and others secretly watermarked mail-in ballots to prove fraud.

A USA TODAY fact check and others found the claims false because mail-in ballots are designed by local governments and ordered from private printers. 

Another rumor was that workers were checking the ballots for fingerprints, but that has not been confirmed, nor has the idea of why fingerprints would be significant.

Asked about the purpose of workers examining ballots with lights, Bennett said, “I personally don’t know.”

Here's the fun part about all this:

The Arizona Democratic Party sued last week to stop the audit. The party contends the hired auditors are violating state elections law in their handling of ballots and other voter information. 

Lawyers for the Senate argued their client's audit wasn't bound by state election laws or regulations. 

If the audit is not bound by laws and regulations, of what force and effect is it?  Sure, the Arizona GOP can use the results to scream about "voter fraud" and other non-existent problems.  But beyond that?

Besides, it looks to be an incomplte count; what then?

Ken Bennett, the Senate's liaison for the audit, spoke to the media in a news conference outside the state Capitol for the first time since Friday, but he said he did not know how many ballots had been counted.

“I have an estimate of what the number is,” he told reporters, offering that just shy of 100,000 ballots had been tallied. 

....

While Bennett was unable to provide an exact number of the ballots counted, it was clear looking at the pallets that auditors had hardly made a dent. Of about 46 pallets of boxes, five had been opened, and the boxes on two of the pallets were nearly emptied.

The counting began in earnest about noon Friday. It got off to a slow start as procedures were finalized on the fly and training happened on the spot. Counters had looked at about 150 ballots by 1:30 p.m. that first day.

If the auditors have counted almost 100,000 of nearly 2.1 million ballots as of Tuesday afternoon, that's nearly 5% in more than three days of counting. The auditors have about 19 total days in the coliseum that they plan to work, since they are not scheduling shifts on Sundays.

Bennett said the companies are looking to expand counting hours if possible, potentially moving to three five-hour shifts instead of the original two shifts.

Let's see what Channel 12 has to add to that report:

We learned that just days into a planned three-week audit, there is already a "monumental race against the clock" to complete the hand recount of all 2.1 million ballots.

The stress was so acute that an executive with the company overseeing the hand count collapse, according to Cyber Ninjas' attorney.

"In order to complete this audit in the limited time remaining," attorney Alexander Kolodin told the court, "Mr. Kern has been working back-to-back 20-hour days … even passing out on the floor." 

Roopali Desai, representing the Arizona Democratic Party, later responded:

"Mr. Kolodin is admitting that the workers are sleep deprived and rushing to meet an artificial deadline. That ... does not instill confidence in the voters of Maricopa County." 

The source of the stress became clearer later in the day, at Bennett's news conference.

The audit has hand-counted almost 100,000 ballots, he told reporters. 

Putting the current rate at 50,000 ballots a day, the audit volunteers would have to count more than 140,000 ballots a day every day through May 14 to finish the hand count.

The Senate's rental of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum audit site ends May 14. The venue is booked for high school graduations the following week.  

Working 20 hour days, they can manage to count (and do what else?  That part is still weird) 50,000 ballots a day.  They need to triple that rate to finish by May 14.  So, will they work 60 hour days?  Or will they end up counting just 900,000 ballots, or only 43%?  And what will that tell them about the Maricopa County vote?