by: Victoria Kline
December 18, 2025
“I’ve spent $3 million proving this.” Jovan Hutton Pulitzer insists, his voice carrying both exhaustion and defiance. “This will be studied for decades. It’s about our kids and grandkids.”
Five Christmases later, the Arizona audit remains – like a ghost at the holiday table – undismissed, unburied, and impossible to ignore. It is no longer just numbers or ballots. It is a symbol, a wound, a warning.
Jovan doesn’t let go. He says the Senate dodged the crimes, hiding behind machines while the paper told the real story. He talks about lawsuits tossed aside, rules that were “voluntary,” and evidence stacked higher than anyone wanted to admit. Four terabytes. Millions of files. Enough to overwhelm any office that dared to take possession. He says it’s been kept intact, untouched, chained in custody for 1,800 days. (1) (2)
Latches:
“The law has a clock,” Jovan explains. “It’s called laches. If you wait too long, you lose your rights.” Equity helps the vigilant, not the ones who sleep. That’s why Jovan never shut it down. The data has never been moved to keep a chain of custody.
And that’s exactly what happened in Johnson County, Kansas. The option was there, shut the audit down, or hold the evidence during an investigation. But the moment you do that; the statute clock starts ticking. Latches kick in. The delay becomes the defense. The evidence risks being buried, not because it isn’t real, but because time itself is used against you. JoCo showed how fragile the fight is: once the clock starts, the system can run out the time and call it justice. (3)
Federalization Debate
The easy answer people throw out is, “Just federalize the elections.” Jovan spits back: “Pray to God we don’t. It will only get worse.”
President Trump sees fifty different elections, fifty different fights, each state holding its ground. Federal rules might sound clean, but to him they mean control, bureaucracy, and distance from the people who actually vote.
Jovan tried to give all the evidence to the Arizona Attorney General
The A.G.’s office asked Jovan how big the evidence was. “Four terabytes,” he says again. “Millions of files. Bigger than anyone wants to touch. Too big for the Attorney General.” Too big for the politicians. “They wouldn’t even take possession.”
And now, five years later, he’s asking for help. A shortfall of $396,000 looms. For the first time, he turns to the people, not the Senate, not the courts, but the families who will sit around Christmas tables and wonder what kind of country their kids will inherit? And the first time the American people have been asked to help by Jovan. The information needs to be preserved till the Midterms.
Echoes of 2020: Phony Votes and the Shadow Over 2024
In a twist that echoes the ghosts of 2016 – when Hillary Clinton claimed 48.2% of the popular vote to Donald Trump’s 46.1% yet watched the Electoral College crown him president – the 2024 election flipped the script. Early projections on the night of November 5-6 painted a picture of Kamala Harris hovering at 66-68 million votes with 90-95% of ballots tallied, a number that evoked memories of narrow Democratic hopes. But by mid-December 2024, as states certified their results, the final tally told a different story: Harris at 75 million.
Persistent Questions: Patterns in the Popular Vote:
In a recent interview, Jovan pauses when the conversation turns to the sheer numbers that have fueled skepticism for years. “The oddity of elections that people question,” his examples pull from past election numbers. For example, President Obama came in at 68 million votes the first time and 65 million the second time. Hillary Clinton against President Trump had 65 million votes. President Biden received 81 million votes. Kamala Harris, on the closing night of the election in 2024, had 68 million votes. (4) (5)
He lets that hang, the implication clear: How has a party consistently draw around 65–69 million votes… then spike to 81 million… only to fall back near the same range again? To Jovan and many others, it’s not just a statistic, it’s the heart of why the Arizona audit’s evidence still matters. The paper ballots, the four terabytes of data, could hold the key to explaining these leaps.
For context, here’s how the official popular vote totals have stacked up in recent cycles:
(And in 2024, as Jovan notes, early counts put Harris around that familiar 68 million mark, far below Biden’s record haul, yet echoing the pre-2020 Democratic totals.) These numbers aren’t going away, Jovan insists. They’re why the audit lives on, why the data remains chained in custody. “This will be studied for decades,” It’s not about relitigating the past, it’s about securing the future.
The “Phony Votes” and the Fight for Ironclad Proof
Jovan’s voice hardens as he dives deeper into the interview, his words cutting through the static of five years’ worth of denials. “The system is taking phony votes,” he says flatly. “They’re making these phony votes look like regular ones for the midterms or smaller races. They age them, make it seem like these ghosts are still voting. That’s how they say, ‘This is an active voter.’ It gives the impression Biden eclipsed Obama twice and Hillary, that’s where the con lies.” He pauses, then zeros in on Arizona, where the margin was razor thin. “Joe Biden won Arizona by approximately 10,457 votes. Everything I’m about to report is from their records and reports. America has been let down because we’re not bringing ironclad proof into court. We’re not checking if what they reported was real or factual. This involves all data that comes to the machines. And please keep in mind: Maricopa County is the fourth largest county in America, with 4.4 million residents, larger in population than 22 other states. The election wrapped on November 4–5, 2020, with certification set for January 6, when electors would be locked in.”
But Jovan’s questions linger like smoke: Why were 120,000 ballots scanned a month after the election? He pulls this straight from Maricopa County reports, machine data – no speculation, just the logs. Invited to testify in the 2021 Arizona Senate-led audit of Maricopa’s 2020 results, Jovan pushed back hard against the official narrative. Contrary to the auditors’ conclusions, he claimed:120,000 ballots scanned a full month post-election.
240,000 ballots are still uncounted on certification day.
And yet, their own records showed ten machines capable of scanning 140,000 ballots per day in the pre-election crunch.
Arizona officials fired back: No discrepancies, all 2.1 million ballots out of 2.4 million registered voters processed, canvassed, and certified before December – no issues.
- Daily online updates for transparency.
- State law mandates county canvassing by November 20, submission to the Secretary of State by November 30. Maricopa hit November 23.
- Those 174,000 “not verified” as of November 10? Not missing, just pending signature checks.
Records confirm the ramp-up: Starting October 9, signature verification and scanning hit 100,000–150,000 per day by late October, powered by high-speed scanners at Runbeck Election Services gobbling 12–15 envelopes per second. (6)
But to Jovan, the timelines do not add up. “Over two days, 90,000 ballots were counted, then nothing for days. Other days averaged 7,000. What were they doing for ten days?” He cites 30,000 anonymous entries into election systems – routers, logs – hinting at unauthorized access. The routers? Hosted for the first time at the Sheriff’s office. “Why move them? If audited, the Sheriff doesn’t have to turn over info, it could expose investigations.” Cyber Ninjas backed off this, but Jovan hasn’t.
Jovan also backed Trump’s push for routers and Splunk logs to trace activity.
Arizona’s quickly pushed back against the claims –
“There was no tampering and no intentional slowdowns. The reason it took days to count ballots after Election Day? More than 181,000 people dropped off their ballots in person on Election Day. By state law, those ballots can’t be scanned early, they all have to be verified and processed after the polls close. That naturally creates a backlog. If we had been allowed to run at full speed our 50+ tabulation machines can easily process more than 200,000 ballots per day.”
So, the equipment was never the bottleneck, the law and the huge last-minute drop-offs were. Jovan Hutton Pulitzer (the auditor) called this explanation “misleading, exaggerated, and trying to confuse normal procedures with fraud.”
About the routers: The routers the auditors wanted aren’t special “election-only” machines. They’re the main county network routers that everything runs on, including the Sheriff’s Office systems. Turning them over would have exposed active criminal investigations, Social Security numbers, medical records, undercover officers, etc. Lives could literally be put in danger. That’s why, on May 7, 2021, the Sheriff’s Office said no, public safety comes first. (7)
Routers are a “No!”
“No dice on subpoenas; routers stayed put.” As for the logs, Jovan counters, “we never got them. So, we looked harder, sued to force the Senate and county to cough up records. Amid all the wrangling and nastiness, we got the audit.” But the real prize? Physical boxes from the election, hard evidence for court. Cyber Ninjas and Jovan zeroed in: Missing or altering batch header cards, mismatched counts, unsealed boxes screaming fraud or stuffing.
The official 2020 process: 1,675 boxes secured, each holding ~200-ballot batches with pink header cards logging into voter tallies. Eight batches per box, sealed tight. Arizona’s line: Cyber Ninjas verified all 1,675 sealed boxes, batches intact, pink cards as standard. Their count matched the counties, save a few dozen out of 2.1 million. Not fraud; proof of solid chain-of-custody. (8)
Jovan begs to differ: “Not accurate. Only 52 boxes were sealed perfectly. The rest? Disarray—batches jammed at the bottom, headers on top. A 200-ballot box with just 30 inside. Stuffed willy-nilly, no order.” The real red flags, he says: “Ballots are wrong size, wrong paper, not legit mail-ins. Too many duplicates, too many hand folds.” Just all this junk, I won’t belabor it. He circles back to his warning: Ditching machines is a sideshow. The evidence? Time hacks on paper ballots, the only thing courts respect. Four terabytes of it, untouched for 1,800 days. But without funding the clock may start for their destruction (8)
We will pick this up in Part 2.
(2) https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=2179
(8) https://azmirror.com/briefs/tamper-seals-and-deleted-databases-arizona-audit-myths-and-facts/