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Tag: Cyber Ninjas

Arizona CEOs warn election disputes could hurt economy

Key Points:
  • Two local CEOs are gathering support for election legitimacy ahead of November
  • Gov. Katie Hobbs is trying to tie election skepticism to economic instability
  • Business leaders say contested elections create market volatility, investment decline and distrust in all institutions

Two Arizona business leaders want to galvanize their fellow CEOs to combat election result denial in November after the local business community failed to do so during conspiracy theory-fueled election challenges in 2020 and 2022. 

John Fees and Adam Goodman are working with the national Leadership Now Project to encourage their fellow Arizona entrepreneurs to make election legitimacy a cornerstone of their political advocacy. So far, they’ve recruited 60 signatories to their “Election Legitimacy is an Economic Imperative” pledge. 

“This volatility that we’ve had around politics is not good,” Fees said. “It’s not good for investment. It’s not good for our employees. It’s not good for our communities.”

Gov. Katie Hobbs is also trying to connect affordability issues to election denial, telling attendees at the recent “Arizona Over Party” launch that Andy Biggs’ history of promoting election conspiracy theories could hurt investment in the state.

Fees is the CEO of GradGuard, an insurance company, while Goodman is the CEO of Goodmans, a local furniture and design company. Both are independents who endorsed Hobbs’ reelection bid and joined her “Arizona Over Party” coalition. 

“Stable democratic institutions are important for our economy, and things like election denial that undermine them are bad,” Hobbs said on Aug. 4. 

A recent survey conducted by the Center for the Future of Arizona found that 65% of likely voters are confident in the security of the state’s elections. But 54% of likely Republican voters are not.

For his part, Biggs pledged to accept the results of the 2026 election in Arizona when prodded by the Yellow Sheet Report, the Capitol Times’ sister publication. But he hasn’t provided direct answers when asked to name the winners of the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election. 

For leaders like Fees, that is a dealbreaker. 

“This is not an unreasonable ask of candidates that are asking us for money [and] putting themselves in the arena,” Fees said. 

That’s where the Leadership Now Project comes in. It boasts members in 25 states and chapters in eight, which its CEO and founder, Daniela Ballou-Aares, attributes to the unique perspective local business leaders bring to the conversation around election skepticism.

“There is a distinction between those who are taking advantage of the current system and those who are playing by the rules and looking to make it work for everyone,” Ballou-Aares said. “We think it’s an opportunity for business leaders who want to demonstrate that they think that business can and should be part of the solution.”

Fees said he was disappointed by the Arizona business community’s response, or lack thereof, to the 2021 Cyber Ninjas audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results. Leadership Now gave him an opportunity to change that response heading into 2026.

The GOP-led Arizona Senate awarded Cyber Ninjas a $150,000 contract to review the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County following the 2020 election and examine voting equipment. Auditors were fueled by a number of unsubstantiated claims, including that China had somehow manipulated the outcome. Auditors even searched in vain for evidence of bamboo fibers in ballots to back up the claim.

“Nobody in the business community condemned [the audit].” Fees said. “I think it’s important to say this organization is now standing by if that’s to happen again. We’re now prepared for trying to provide clarity and visibility in some of the nonsense.”

Leadership Now developed a political risk framework for business leaders to highlight potential threats, including voter confidence in results, restrictions on mail-in ballots, threats against poll workers and deployments of federal officers to polling locations. 

Fees is not exactly hopeful that those risks won’t come to fruition in November, in part because Arizona has been a proving ground for many of the conspiracies that now dominate the national narrative around elections. 

“I believe the risk is pretty high, and we need to wake up a bit in the business community,” Fees said. “I think that there’s a real chance for these elections to be contested for an extended period of time, and I think that that is going to create uncertainty that is bad for the economy and bad for Arizona.”

Anytime a CEO or local entrepreneur comes to Fees with similar concerns, he encourages them to tour the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, sign up to work the polls, or sit down with an election administrator to learn the process. He and Goodman encourage their employees to do the same, even giving them paid time off to serve as poll workers. 

“The more business leaders can do to support the existing [election] infrastructure and be familiar with it will help demystify the challenges that are certain to come,” Fees said.

Fontes wants Arizona voters prepared for election misinformation

PHOENIX — Adrian Fontes wants to get as many Arizonans as he can inoculated.

But in this case, it isn’t against the latest virus. It’s against the misinformation that the Democratic secretary of state says spreads every time there’s an election.

Fontes has set up a website — “arizona.vote” — he hopes will counter that misinformation by giving voters reliable, easily accessible information about how Arizona’s elections work before the next controversy, rumor or false claim takes hold.

“You never know what’s the next little monster that’s going to rear its ugly head,” he said.

“But the reality is, the efforts we are engaged in now are confidence builders against the potential of those little monsters,” Fontes said. “And we prepare folks to understand how the systems work so that they, themselves, are better equipped to deal with the potential questions.”

That question of confidence is not just a local issue.

President Trump himself has repeatedly questioned the security of the election system, most recently with his ongoing efforts to say mail voting is inherently unreliable.

Some Arizonans still contend that Trump won the 2020 race despite the final official tally showing that Biden defeated him by 10,457 votes.

That election led Republican state senators to hire an organization known as Cyber Ninjas, a company with no significant election-auditing experience, to review all the ballots cast in Maricopa County in hopes of finding evidence that could overturn the result. That review did not change the election outcome.

In fact, the hand-count audits conducted as part of Arizona’s regular post-election procedures found no discrepancies in Maricopa County in the 2020 election. They concluded that Biden actually won by a larger margin than tabulators initially reported. 

But “arizona.vote” isn’t aimed specifically at conspiracy theories.

The website provides basic information, like registration deadlines. This year, that is Oct. 5 for those who want to vote in the Nov. 3 general election. The site also includes instructions for getting an early ballot for those not on the Active Early Voting List and what identification is required for those casting ballots in person.

Voters can also track their ballots to confirm they were received and counted, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

But Fontes said the website is also being designed to inoculate against situations “when some knucklehead gets out there and starts saying dumb crap about our elections.”

Debunking misinformation

Consider, he said, the demand for paper ballots.

“Well, in Arizona, all of our votes are cast on paper ballots,” Fontes said, with those ballots fed into tabulators that do the counting.

That still doesn’t satisfy some who insist that the totals are unreliable. But Fontes said that, rumors notwithstanding, the tabulators are not linked to the internet. They also undergo mandatory “logic and accuracy testing,” where a batch of sample ballots with known results is fed through tabulators to ensure they count accurately.

Arizona law already requires a random hand-count audit after every election, where a certain number of races from a certain number of precincts — all chosen by party officials — are tabulated by hand to see whether the totals match what the machines counted.

Still, that hasn’t always proven enough for everyone.

Two Cochise County supervisors, both Republicans, were indicted after the 2022 election for attempting to conduct a full hand count. Peggy Judd took a plea deal; charges against Tom Crosby are still pending.

Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould, also a Republican, went to the Arizona Supreme Court in his unsuccessful bid to get immunity from possible prosecution by Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes for his own efforts to demand a full hand count.

As recently as Sunday, Republican Abe Hamadeh still claimed he won the 2022 race for attorney general, despite the final tally showing Mayes beat him by 280 votes. He blamed Democrat Katie Hobbs, who at the time was the secretary of state.

Political implications of misinformation

Claims about election irregularities have political implications.

Stephen Richer, the incumbent Maricopa County recorder, was ousted in the Republican primary in 2024 by Justin Heap, who complained of “historically low voter confidence.” Heap went on to win the general election.

And just this past month, Republican state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, hoping to defeat Fontes in November, raised similar claims.

“There’s no doubt that confidence in our elections here in Arizona is at an all-time low,” he said during a televised debate. “And the responsibility of that sits squarely on the shoulders of Secretary Fontes.”

That assertion, however, may not be accurate.

In an opt-in online survey of 948 registered voters last year, weighted to reflect political and other demographics, pollster Mike Noble asked about their confidence in elections. He found 70% said they were “totally confident.”

That included 77% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats, while political independents — about a third of all registered voters — dragged down the average, with just 58% expressing confidence.

Noble said that differs sharply from when he conducted the same survey in 2021, at the height of the Cyber Ninjas audit, when confidence was just 58%. He also noted that it was a highly partisan response, with just 40% of Republicans expressing confidence versus 80% of Democrats.

“The bipartisan alignment suggests that successful election administration and the passage of time have helped heal some wounds from previous electoral controversies,” Noble said.

While Fontes is the state’s chief election official, county recorders and supervisors in each of the 15 counties run the elections, with a mix of Republicans and Democrats.

“The problem is there are people out there who are motivated to sow distrust even if the little issue that might pop up is minor and easily explained,” Fontes said. “Their goal is to capitalize on mistrust. And our goal is to make sure the public is inoculated against the potential mistrust.”

Federal probe examines debunked 2020 Arizona election audit

Key Points:
  • Federal grand jury subpoenas records from 2020 Arizona election audit
  • Senate President Warren Petersen complies with federal subpoena for audit records
  • Attorney General Kris Mayes calls the grand jury inquiry “weaponization”

A federal grand jury apparently is looking at the results of a long-ago-debunked “audit” of the 2020 Arizona election.

Senate President Warren Petersen said in a social media post on Monday that he “received and complied with” a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to the Senate audit of Maricopa County results following the 2020 election. That is a race where Joe Biden outpolled Donald Trump.

“The FBI has the records,” Petersen said.

He declined to comment further.

This comes just weeks after the FBI raided Fulton County, Ga. — another state where Trump lost in 2020 — seizing their election records from that year.

Both events come amid ongoing claims by Trump, who lost the 2020 election, that there was extensive fraud. And he has publicly urged his Department of Justice to investigate.

“Great!!!” the president posted on social media in response to the reports of the subpoena in Arizona.

There was no immediate response from the FBI.

But what Trump — or his agency — hopes to get out of it remains unclear.

In fact, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, who reviewed what he got in 2022 from then-Senate President Karen Fann, found the report prepared by Cyber Ninjas as deeply flawed.

Brnovich for example, noted that the report claimed that 282 people who had allegedly died in early October 2020 cast ballots in the November general election.

“Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead,” he said. “Many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.”

In fact, the attorney general said, only one of 282 listed voters on that report actually was deceased. The others were not only quite alive but also current voters.

But it wasn’t just what Cyber Ninjas had provided that Brnovich concluded was largely unfounded.

He said his agency’s Election Integrity Unit looked at the names of another 409 allegedly dead voters that came from other sources. And then investigators went through yet another report of 5,943 names, which made no distinction between dead voters and dead registrants.

“Once again, these claims were thoroughly investigated and resulted in only a handful of potential cases,” Brnovich told Fann.

“Some were so absurd the names and birth dates didn’t even match the deceased,” he reported. “And others included dates of death after the election.”

And Brnovich said while his agency has previously prosecuted other instances of dead people voting, even those cases “were ultimately determined to be isolated incidents.”

Of note is that the audit also included a hand count of the 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots. And it found that Biden actually outpolled Trump by an even larger margin than the official tally.

Responding to the reports of a grand jury subpoena, Kris Mayes, the current attorney general, cited the Brnovich investigation into the Cyber Ninjas report. And she said that complaints and allegations submitted to the AG’s office “were also unsupported by factual evidence.”

“Warren Petersen knows all this,” she said. “He has known it for years.”

Mayes also said that Petersen, who is running to be the GOP nominee for attorney general to take her on in November, has been “an unrepentant election denier.” She pointed to a rally he had after the election in 2020 claiming “we certified the vote prematurely.”

Petersen then co-chaired the oversight of the Cyber Ninjas inquiry with Fann.

Mayes also took a shot at the president, saying that what his administration appears to be pursuing is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry.

“It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies,” she said.

The 2022 report by Brnovich was only one of several that concluded that Cyber Ninjas’ findings, which had never conducted an election audit before being hired by Fann, were misleading or outright wrong.

Other claims had since been debunked, including people voting duplicate ballots, machine-filled-in ballots, missing signatures on absentee ballots, and tallying machines linked to the internet.

For example, Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, claimed that the county logged 74,232 more early ballots than the number of requests sent out.

County spokesman Fields Moseley, whose staff worked with the county recorder to research the claims, said in response at the time, there were two problems with that.

First, he said the records show there were 2,364,426 requests for early ballots, with 1,918,024 returned.

“So the claim is not just wrong but completely wrong,” he said.

Aside from that, Moseley pointed out that there are two ways to vote early: with a mail-in ballot or going directly to one of the early voting locations. And in the latter case, people are handed ballots that are prepared there but lumped into the early ballot category.

“So it’s not unusual that we would have more early votes than mail-in ballots sent,” Moseley said.

There even was a lawsuit over a related issue of whether the tabulation machines were properly recording votes when ballots, which had been damaged or had extra marks, had to be redone by hand so they could be fed through counting machines.

In that case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said that a random check of 1,626 of these ballots, ordered by a trial court, found an error rate of as low as 0.37% or as high as 0.55%.

But the justice said that extrapolating that out to the 27,869 ballots that had to be duplicated to be able to be counted would have gained Donald Trump just 103 votes or, at best, 153 votes, “neither of which is sufficient to call the election results into question.”

How Maricopa County, Arizona, prepared for the Election Day spotlight

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

It’s Sunday morning before the big event, and Jennifer Liewer is standing outside the elections center in downtown Phoenix, inspecting a metal tent frame that contractors are erecting in the parking lot.

“I told him to make it bigger,” she tells a colleague. “I’m not sure if this is the ‘bigger.’”

Liewer, Maricopa County’s deputy elections director for communications, knows hundreds of journalists from around the world will be here on Election Day, working in this tent. To be able to do her job then, she needs to be a logistics manager now, directing trucks and workers, while ensuring that voters can still drive up to the ballot drop box in the parking lot.

The last two federal elections, county officials were caught by surprise when worldwide media attention turned toward Maricopa. After 2020, journalists arrived to watch allies of Donald Trump recount all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county after Trump claimed, without evidence, that the election was rigged against him. Then, on the day of the midterm election, widespread technical failures at the polls spurred similar claims of fraud, this time from failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

This year, Trump and Lake were both back on the ballot. Arizona — and especially Maricopa, the country’s largest swing county — was predicted to help decide the presidential election. Nearly 700 journalists applied for credentials. Liewer and her colleagues knew this was an opportunity to help restore public trust in elections in the most scrutinized county in one of the most closely watched states.

The county brought on more staff to handle media requests, sent a packet to reporters in advance detailing how the county runs its elections, prepared a live fact-check page on its website, required journalists working from the elections center tent to obtain credentials, and spent $35,000 to set up the media tent and bathrooms in the parking lot.

Liewer allowed Votebeat to shadow her in the days leading up to her Election Day gantlet.

On Sunday, her phone buzzed repeatedly as she met with colleague Ali Flahive in a room serving as a communications command center. Soon, anyone responsible for election messaging would be sitting at the rows of tables, fitted with computer monitors. Two projector screens at the front of the room would soon show wait times at the polls, and a running list of pending media inquiries. On the wall were framed black-and-white signs with quotes from Scott Jarrett, one of the county’s two elections directors.

“THIS IS The Super Bowl of Elections,” one said.

“WE ARE The Belle of the Ball,” another declared.

County officials didn’t ask for this attention, but they’re getting used to it.

‘Cut through the noise’: Maricopa County officials fight back

In 2020 and 2022, Liewer watched from behind the scenes as a spokesperson for the county attorney’s office. When she stepped into her role last year, she knew what she was getting into.

It’s not her first high-pressure role, and she’s often found herself responding to crises. Just out of college, she began working for the American Red Cross in Phoenix and was called to New York after the 9/11 attacks. She was spokesperson for the city of Glendale when it hosted the 2008 Super Bowl and responded to high media interest about financial problems, and later for the Arizona Supreme Court as the elected county attorney faced disciplinary proceedings. She started in the county attorney’s office under Allister Adel in 2019, and represented the office as Adel publicly battled alcoholism.

And she was there in 2022, when the office commissioned an outside investigation of the Election Day problems. The next year, when the communications role opened, she knew she could handle it.

“Here, we are all doing it together, and the chaos is on the outside,” she said, sitting in her office on the Sunday before the election. It’s not lost on her that she is now coordinating media arrangements and messaging for what Jarrett calls the “Super Bowl of elections,” when she once did the same for the actual Super Bowl. Of course, the stakes for the presidential election are a little different.

She’s watched county election officials manage all the twists and turns of the past four years, and she uses that information to anticipate what’s coming her way.

For a while, the county took a “backseat approach” to communications, said Supervisor Bill Gates. That was true even as state Senate Republicans subpoenaed every ballot cast in the county’s 2020 election for what they called an audit.

But the strategy shifted quickly.

In May 2021, the Senate’s contractors, Cyber Ninjas, falsely accused the county’s workers of deleting election files. County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, had been reserved until then, but when Trump echoed that false claim on social media, Richer responded on Twitter, calling it “unhinged.” That’s around when the typically mild-mannered Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican, began to call the audit a “grift.”

From then on, the county’s tone changed.

“We thought, ‘That’s enough. We can’t remain silent,’” Gates recalled. “And that’s been the motivation ever since. It’s about defending the team, defending our workers.”

County Communications Director Fields Moseley began to transform the county’s sleepy social media account with live fact-checking, plus some snark, aimed at the auditors.

“#RealAuditorsDont: Assume guilt and post false information like it’s a Season 1 cliffhanger,” the account tweeted on May 14, 2021.

It was their way to “cut through the noise,” said Zach Schira, Gates’ chief of staff at the time and now an assistant county manager overseeing elections. “There was no other answer.”

The 2022 midterms: A setback on Election Day

As the 2022 midterm election approached, the county adopted a strategy from its COVID-19 response and set up a command center for the first time.

“Immediacy is top concern,” a draft county communications plan from the time said. “Rumors/misinformation should be addressed ASAP.”

Leading up to the election, county officials were holding weekly press conferences. Then, when polls opened on Election Day, they found themselves contending with a significant problem: Tabulators across the county weren’t accepting ballots, and county officials had to tell reporters they didn’t know why.

That night, reporters filled the lobby of the elections center to question officials. The officials explained that the problem was with the ballot printers, not the tabulators, but didn’t provide details that night — or for months. The lack of immediate answers allowed conspiracy theories to flourish.

Voter confidence took another hit.

Afterwards, to shore it up, the county started to more aggressively push public tours of the elections center. Officials hosted about 100 tours this year alone so far, in between running elections. The county also spent $1.8 million on paid TV, radio, digital, and social media ads and billboards this year, trying to get information about voter registration, mail ballots, and other issues straight to voters before the election.

Deciding what to say, and what not to say

Behind Liewer’s desk is a sign: “Do what is right not what is easy.”

When pressure hits, she said it’s important for her to be honest about what’s happening, while still respecting her team’s opinions on what information they aren’t prepared to share. If she can’t talk about something, she said, she is up front about that.

“I think it’s about being true to the people you work for directly, but also being true to the community,” she said.

Of course, not everyone agrees on “what is right” — or that the county has gotten its communications efforts right in the past.

At times, the county has withheld information. Officials chose not to respond to the Cyber Ninjas’ questions about the 2020 election, and, after 2022, chose to wait five months, until an independent investigation was complete, to provide detailed answers about what went wrong with the ballot printers. In both instances, misinformation spread without a quick official response.

Critics have also taken aim at the county’s past requests to social media platforms to remove posts officials believe are false or harassing. And, after the county started restricting events only to credentialed media, a court ruled that it had to provide access to outlets it had banned, such as The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website that frequently publishes misinformation. Liewer has to now take all of that into account.

‘We will not be playing whack-a-mole’: Officials lay out plan

On the Monday morning before the election, Liewer swivels in her chair at her desk as she talks to a local radio reporter from KTAR. She’s been getting media requests all morning, and she seems antsy to get off the phone. She still has to finish preparing for a press conference in a few hours, the final of three leading up to the election. Dozens of journalists are expected. She tells the reporter she has to go.

“I hope I was nice,” she says as she hangs up.

She reads through a script she’s printed out, highlighting certain comments, crossing out others.

Some reporters have gotten word that the county is experiencing delays while processing early ballots, and they’re asking her about it. A local reporter for Axios Phoenix texts her to ask exactly what results would come out at 8 p.m. election night. Would they be all early ballots received up to Friday, or Saturday?

“It’s actually neither,” Liewer says, dictating a text message into her phone. “The recorder is going to address it in the press conference this afternoon.”

Flahive stops by to let her know the staff started a new spreadsheet, this one to keep track of news broadcasters’ liveshot requests for Election Day. They are trying to get through the backlog in the media inbox, but requests are coming in faster than they can respond. Overall, from September through mid-November, a team of seven would field more than 1,000 media inquiries.

In the afternoon, more than 100 journalists sit at tables or stand behind cameras on tripods in a county conference room. The Gateway Pundit employee banned in 2022 is in the first row.

Gates, Richer, Schira, and Liewer walk to the front of the room. Moseley, the county communications director, is already there, in the back.

Schira speaks last, telling the crowd that if misinformation shows up on Election Day “we will not be playing whack-a-mole.”

“But what we will be taking very seriously is any misinformation that impacts a voter’s ability to vote a ballot,” Schira said. “That misinformation, we will be very aggressive in reporting.”

Liewer sets the stage for what the visiting reporters can expect. “Obviously, there are a lot of members of the press here,” she tells the crowd. Her staff can’t take questions from everyone, she says, but they will be there all week to help.

And with that, she opens it up to the floor.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

https://www.votebeat.org/arizona/2024/11/18/maricopa-county-election-media-preparations-communications-jennifer-liewer/

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