Turns Out AZ Fraudit Even Scammier Than You Thought, Actual Auditors Reveal

Well knock us over with a feather!

TOLDJA.

When those charlatans from Cyber Ninjas presented that ridiculous report saying they'd fraudited Maricopa County's votes and hey, wouldn't ya know it   found a couple hundred votes for Biden, we told you not to trust a damn word they said. It was clear from the jump that those blundering idiots couldn't audit a box of doughnuts, and giving any credence to their math risked legitimizing their recommendations, all of which would solve non-existent election security problems by making it harder to vote and easier for officials to toss out ballots.

And we were right, as a coalition of guys with actual experience running ballot audits just conclusively proved . Golly, whodathunk that a partisan effort — performed by a guy with no election experience who announced his conclusion that the vote was riddled with fraud before being hired to prove it, funded by proponents of the Stop the Steal effort, and conducted in such patently unprofessional circumstances — would produce junk data? So shocking!

 AZ Republic reports that there was actually a 15 percent discrepancy between the frauditors' "hand recount" and the county's own tally (as confirmed by its own machine recount).

"This is proof that the Cyber Ninjas' vote count wasn't real," said Larry Moore, co-founder of the Boston-based Clear Ballot Group. "You can't even talk about their vote counts anymore."

Moore is part of a three-person team known as the Audit Guys. It also includes Benny White, a prominent Pima County Republican data analyst, and Tim Halvorsen, Clear Ballot's retired chief technology officer.

The Audit Guys, indignant that this shambolic display erodes civic integrity while bringing their own profession into disrepute, have been hot on the Cyber Ninjas' trail from the get-go. They knew that the Cyber Ninjas' Doug Logan was never going to be able to get an apples to apples comparison to Maricopa County's tally because he was counting undifferentiated boxes of ballots, while the county did its tabulation by precinct, differentiating between early, in-person, and mail-in ballots. But being actual data scientists, they were able to back-tabulate the ballots and figure out exactly which ones were in which box.

In July, they sent their spreadsheet to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, the ringmaster of this shitshow, along with an admonition not to share the data with either the machine re-auditors or the Ninjas, since it was functionally a cheat sheet as to what should be in each box.

"We believe strongly that the operators should not be told of the CVR counts. That way, they are not influenced to change their count," they wrote . "Likewise, the Cyber Ninjas should escrow their ballot and vote counts by box. Once all machine counts are completed, the three independently created results should be made public."

But it looks like the Ninjas got their hands on that info anyway, and, according to the Audit Guys, used it to dummy up their own results.

"A few days prior to Sept. 24, I was told by the Senate's attorney for the 'audit' that the list of boxes was 'extremely helpful' to the Ninjas. We now believe it helped them determine which boxes to say they did not count," the Audit Guys wrote on their website . This is an apparent reference to Chief Ninja Logan's insistence that his 695-page report released to the Senate was just preliminary and didn't include every box.

The account is pretty technical, but in short, the real auditors suspect that "by the end of June the Ninjas knew their ballot counts were substantially different from Maricopa's." Which caused Fann to get all hot and bothered and order another machine recount, which she hoped would substantiate the allegations that the election was rigged. Only it did the opposite, which put her and the Ninjas in a pickle, because it made them look like incompetent fools. Which ... well, yeah.

"An enormous discrepancy of 15,692 missing hand counted ballots from 40 boxes out of out of 1,634, supports our opinion that the Ninja's hand count of ballots was so far off the Senate's machine count of ballots that any statements about the vote counts (e.g., that Trump lost 261 votes) are meaningless," the Audit Guys wrote, after getting their hands on 40 boxes of ballots and matching them to the data they'd sent to Fann in their spreadsheet months earlier.

But instead of copping to wasting months and months and millions and millions of dollars, Fann and Logan announced that they'd confirmed the original count, hoping to salvage their credibility and export the exercise to other states. Also, they fought like hell and are currently defying a court order to turn over their records, all while hinting darkly at a Democratic conspiracy because Maricopa County refuses to expose its entire network to hackers by handing their routers to the dipshit Ninjas.

"We are not done," the Audit Guys concluded, promising to conduct a "real audit of the Ninja's sham process, publish our results and stand ready to defend them vigorously" once the court forces these assholes to show their work.

Which won't undo the damage done to public confidence in our elections, but at least it's something.

[ The Audit Guys / AZ Republic ]

Follow Liz Dye on Twitter!

Smash that donate button to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty. And if you're ordering from Amazon, use this link, because reasons .