Slate: “Sitting in the press booth at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, several rows above where some two dozen tables of counters were retallying the 2020 presidential votes of the citizens of Maricopa County, Bennie Smith acknowledged something that has become readily apparent to most outside observers of the process that has come to be known as the ‘Arizona audit.’ ‘They’re not trying to capture an accurate count,’ said Smith, a Democratic Tennessee election official who had traveled to Phoenix to advise the auditors. In fact, Smith said he expects the end result to be ‘wildly different from the count.’ Smith said he was advising the audit – a process specially ordered by the Arizona Senate and which began last month outside the county’s ordinary recount system – because he hopes to see a standardization of independent machine ballot audits of most U.S. elections. What’s going on in the Vets Coliseum, former home to the Phoenix Suns and commonly used these days for gun shows and high school graduations, is not that. Nor is it a hand recount done in accordance with the Arizona election procedures.”

“The Republican-controlled county board went along with the audit plan initially because the Senate, Fontes said, ‘had given these guys guarantees it wasn’t going to be a shit show.’ Instead, the state Senate ended up handing nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots to a previously unknown company called ‘Cyber Ninjas,’ whose CEO has claimed the election may have been manipulated by a firm with ties to the former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez (who is dead). ‘We’ve changed course,’ Stephen Richer, the current county recorder who unseated [Former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian] Fontes in the last election, told me of the local Republican response. Up close in Arizona, it’s clear that the Cyber Ninjas are doing exactly what their CEO, Doug Logan, has accused election officials of doing: miscounting the 2020 election. If and when that new and inaccurate result is made public as part of an official audit report, local leaders believe the consequences will be grave. ‘I think a small mushroom cloud will go up over Maricopa County if the Cyber Ninjas report that Donald Trump really was the winner of the election,’ Richer says.”