By: Victoria Kline
December 20, 2025
Anomalies, Debunking, and the Drive that Broke the Audit:
The audit’s final report landed like a dud firecracker in September 2021, Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm at the helm, tallied up the ballots and handed Joe Biden a net gain of 360 votes in Maricopa County, bumping his total from 45,109 to 45,469. (1)
Anomalies were flagged: 282 potential dead voters (later probed by Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who confirmed just one, a case where a sister cast her deceased sibling’s ballot), 100 double votes, over 57,000 “non-residents” (tied to faulty address data), and claims of 5,000 duplicate ballots.
Brnovich’s office found no coordinated fraud, forwarding the rest to local prosecutors who saw nothing actionable. (2)
The people who did the audit Cyber-Ninjas fired back:
The Cyber Ninjas were tasked in the Audit to do the following:
- Examining ballot-scanning machines (tabulators), routers, and related equipment and software for signs of “cyber-attacks” or vulnerabilities. They used nine ballot-scanning machines, routers, and special software to hunt for “cyber-attacks.” Subcontractors CyFIR analyzed systems that raised concerns about deleted files, but these were debunked. No evidence was found of internet connections, tampering or connectivity.
- They randomly checked the signatures on 5% of the mail-in ballots by comparing them to voter records.
- They searched public records and databases for potential deceased individuals, out-of-state residents, or non-residents. Thousands were flagged yet most could be explained from temporary moving to curing ballots and small inaccuracies. (3)
But the audit itself got slammed for huge security problems:
- In some areas, there were no Democratic or bipartisan observers watching (only Republicans).
- Ballots were taken out of the secure county facility and stored unlocked in hotel rooms.
- They opened up the official voting machines with uncertified people and tools. So, Maricopa County had to throw out all those expensive machines and buy new ones for $2.2 million.
Experts called the whole audit a mess:
The respected Brennan Center for Justice said it was “deeply flawed from day one,” with no real scientific rules, bad data handling, and it ignored every federal election-security guideline. The AP and others labeled it a partisan circus.
How about the Funding?
Arizona ponied up $150,000, the rest a patchwork of private cash: $1.2 million from The America Project (Patrick Byrne’s outfit), $150,000 via OANN’s Voices & Votes, chunks from MyPillow’s Mike Lindell and lawyer L. Lin Wood. (4) Senator Wendy Rogers and Defending the Republic chipped in, too—all told, millions to chase shadows.
But Jovan? He doesn’t buy the clean narrative on the boxes.
“When you look at those 52 boxes,” he says, “they were done perfectly—no bleeds, perfect paper, no wrong folds.” Pristine, audit-ready, predictive of an outcome. The other 1,623? Chaos. Ballots fed into machines, copied, adjudicated, spat out as “corrected” post-images in the EMS files. Cast Vote Records (CVRs) from physical scans turn digital—yet suddenly, 130,000 ballots vanish from view. “Between the physical state and the final product,” Jovan explains, “it changes.”
Arizona calls this the “largest myth still discussed”
17,000 duplicates morphing into 74,000 extra EV33 records, ballooning to 130,000 “missing.” Here’s the official play-by-play for Maricopa 2020:
- Physical ballots roll in (early or Election Day and drop off)
- High-speed central tabulator scans, births a digital image Cast Vote Record (CVR).
- Damaged? Folded? Sharpie bleed? Overvote? Kicked out for duplication—bipartisan teams craft exact replicas of voter intent, per Arizona law and EAC feds.
- Duplicate scans in, new image, new CVR.
- Original damaged ballot is preserved (with a unique serial number linking it to the duplicate for audit trails), but it’s no longer tabulatable—the clean duplicate is what gets counted in the final tally.
- All images (original + duplicate where applicable) and CVRs are retained in the system for transparency and post-election audits.
Maricopa process was to ensure no valid votes are lost due to physical damage, while maintaining chain-of-custody and verifiability. It is why you sometimes see “extra” duplicate records or images in the database. They are not vanishing or missing ballots, but intentional replicas to replace unreadable originals. Maricopa said Jovan and Cyber Ninjas misunderstood this duplication process. (5)
Jovan’s not having it.
The pressure mounted, subpoena ticking down to an hour. County hands over a drive. “We tried to open it,” he recalls. “Corrupt. Called a JSON file, huge.” He looped in the format’s creators; execs pored over specs: “We don’t know what happened, they look intentionally corrupted.” Back to the hammer: Another drive demanded. What did they find? Thousands of machines in standard topology, how data flows, batch by batch. Every drive uniform. Except one. “Entire format different,” Jovan says. “Not for elections, not outputs, and jumbled. No batches, wrong format.”
We put them side-by-side with the norms:
Headers sliced off. No vote origins. “Manually cut off the header. We can’t tell what day it went into the machines. No pre-images. We get it months later. “Months later, in a 2022 deep dive, Jovan doubled down: Roughly 140,000 Election Day ballots—an “island in a sea”—digitally inserted, no physical twins. (6)
Bigger fonts, no left margins, scrubbed date-time stamps. “Someone went in and altered the images to cut off the stamp,” he claims, voiding mechanical proof they scanned legit.
Rhythm Shifts, Chain-of-Custody Issues, and the AP Exchange.
Jovan pointed to suspicious patterns in the ballot processing rhythm: a steady climb in counts before Election Day, followed by erratic “roller coaster” spikes and drops, then a suspiciously smooth finish that he argued pointed to a predetermined outcome. He highlighted the absence of pre-adjudication images, only post-adjudication versions remained in the Election Management System (EMS), which he called “ghosts” created after human intervention. Chain-of-custody, he insisted, had collapsed: missing delivery receipts for November 3 pickups, unlogged collections, unsigned forms—clear violations of state statutes.
These issues are tied directly to his kinematic artifact analysis:
Thousands of “pristine” ballots lacking the folds, creases, or wear expected from mail handling, suggesting to him they were inserted rather than legitimately mailed. For balance, the counterarguments must be acknowledged—and they fuel much of the ongoing distrust.
In 2021, Associated Press reporter Ali Swenson contacted Gateway Pundit.
To challenge a claim that 284,412 ballots (about 1 in 10) were unconfirmable because their images were missing. Maricopa County maintained the auditors had simply searched the wrong folders; the images were there, properly stored. Jovan fired back sharply and unfiltered, accusing the county of partial compliance at best and insisting the corrupted or incomplete files spoke for themselves.
“Ali, maybe because I am looking at the files right here in our system and see the files destroyed and unreadable.” Partial dumps? No compliance. “If you needed images and I sent you a drive labeled images, but the images were partially corrupted, did I actually comply? No of course not.” Subpoenas ignored, DC hearing admissions, teams decoding wreckage—10% MIA? “Not really a full audit now is it?” Media? “Gives them cover… takes the word of the very people who will and should get in trouble.” Shameful word games.
Mic Drop:
“Trust me I do understand how both the news and AP work since one of my mentors… was the AP’s long-running Chairman. We talked for many hours about how the game is really played.” (7)
Cyber Ninjas didn’t vanish quietly.
In late October 2021, just ahead of Maricopa County’s anticipated takedown, they sent an 11-page rebuttal directly to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann. The document doubled down hard: The county was misleading the public about the audit’s findings, obstructing access at every turn, and failing to refute the original claims of significant anomalies.
Cyber Ninjas stood firmly by their report and urged an immediate investigation by the Attorney General. When Maricopa finally released its 93-page “Correcting the Record” report in January 2022, dismantling the audit point by point, the response from Cyber Ninjas was silent. Days later, the firm began shutting down. Crippled by $50,000-per-day fines for withholding public records, a penalty that ballooned to nearly $2 million by March 2022, CEO Doug Logan was removed, and the company dissolved. There was no major follow-up, no encore audit, no further Senate action. The controversy faded into lawsuits and lingering questions.
Routers remained the enduring flashpoint.
Cyber Ninjas had subpoenaed them early on, insisting the network logs could reveal unauthorized access. The county balked, warning that the routers weren’t dedicated election equipment but shared infrastructure carrying sensitive law enforcement data, releasing them risked exposing criminal investigations, personal information, and public safety.
In May 2021, a compromise was reached:
A third-party special master would hire independent experts to review the routers and Splunk logs, answering Senate questions without handing over raw access. Cyber Ninjas never touched them. (9)
The review found no evidence of internet connectivity or vote manipulation.
Five years on, the ghosts refuse to rest. Jovan’s warnings about “time hacks” on paper ballots, the only evidence courts might respect, still echo. Four terabytes of data, chained in custody for 1,800 days, waiting.
But the clock ticks. Laches loom. And without fresh funding to bridge the $396,000 shortfall, even the hard evidence risks fading.
The questions linger like a shadow no one quite knows how to chase away—questions about trust, about truth, about the country we’re leaving behind to the next generation. We want to fix this because we want our children to feel their voice matters. Because some things are bigger than one election. They’re about the soul of a nation…and the promise we make to the generations watching us now.
(1) https://www.azsenaterepublicans.gov/cyber-ninjas-report
(2) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/02/investigation-finds-claim-300-dead-people-voted-arizona-2020-election-false
(3) https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/arizona-tries-again-ensure-manual-audits-election-results-get-done
(4) https://azmirror.com/2021/07/28/election-conspiracy-theorist-groups-paid-5-7-million-for-the-arizona-audit/
(5) https://azmirror.com/2021/10/07/maricopa-county-audit-response-slams-claims-as-false-and-misleading/
(6) https://uncoverdc.com/2022/09/27/jovan-hutton-pulitzer-election-day-ballots-may-have-been-inserted-in-maricopa-county#google_vignette
(7) https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/epic-jovan-pulitzer-eats-lunch-fact-checker-associated-press-siding-maricopa-county/
(9) https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2021/12/22/arizona-audit-cyber-ninjas-say-senate-owes-firm-100-k-and-wont-pay/8988418002/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=false&gca-epti=undefined&gca-ft=0&gca-ds=sophi