Contractors working for the firm Cyber Ninjas, which was hired by the Republican-led Arizona state Senate, count Maricopa County ballots from the 2020 general election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Saturday in Phoenix./NPR
By Andrew Oxfor | Arizona Republic
The Arizona Senate is dropping, for now, a controversial plan to go door-to-door to ask local residents about their voting history as part of its audit of Maricopa County’s election.
The decision, which Senate President Karen Fann included in a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice on Friday, comes after federal officials raised concerns that the canvassing could violate civil rights laws aimed to prevent voter intimidation.
The Senate’s contract with Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm it hired to manage the audit, said a “registration and votes cast team” has already worked with several people “in order to statistically identify voter registrations that did not make sense, and then knock on doors to confirm if valid voters actually lived at the stated address.”
But the company’s CEO, Doug Logan, would not say during a press conference on April 22 how his company identified the voters it would investigate. Instead, he said the work was based on a statistical analysis performed by someone else he would not identify and maintained that canvassers would not ask anyone how they voted.
