Bennett Cautions Public To Reserve Judgement Of Audit Until Cyber Ninjas Release Final Report

ken bennett

A claim that nearly 23,000 ballots were counted twice during the recent Arizona State Senate audit while 167,000 ballots were never counted is misleading, according to a key member of the team which looked into how Maricopa County handled the 2020 General Election.

Senate Audit Liaison Ken Bennett says is it “totally illogical” for those not involved in the audit to attempt to formulate any findings by extrapolating data from the Senate’s machine count of ballots and comparing it with the Cyber Ninjas’ hand count focused on the votes for President on those ballots.

“There is no way they can come to any reasonable conclusions with the numbers they looked at,” Bennett told Arizona Daily Independent. “There is still some pretty important back-up information forthcoming from Cyber Ninjas.”

The conclusions Bennett is referring to were released earlier this week by “the Audit Guys,” made up of Larry Moore of Clear Ballot Group; Tim Halvorsen, formerly of Clear Ballot; and Benny White, a data analyst.

Officials with Clear Ballot, which offers ballot-tabulation services, had made it known to Senate President Karen Fann that the company was interested in assisting with the audit. Fann declined the offer, but the men undertook various reviews of Maricopa County’s election data on their own.

Bennett even reached out to Moore during the audit for an independent “spot check” of batch reports on 24 of the 1,681 boxes turned over by Maricopa County in response to a Senate audit. However, Bennett soon discovered that someone involved in the spot check leaked information to the media.

Bennett believes it is a “disservice” for outsiders like the Audit Guys to insist they know what happened within the audit, because not all of audit activities are finished. He says the audit team is awaiting Cyber Ninjas’ final reports as well as the forthcoming review of Maricopa County’s routers. And of course, the Arizona Attorney General’s election integrity unit has initiated an investigation based on Fann’s request.

“There is much more happening and it is important to allow the process to be done properly,” he said.

In the meantime, Bennett has agreed to take part in several townhalls across the state to talk about his experience with the audit. Information on dates and locations can be found at https://lookaheadamerica.org/aztownhall/