'Our numbers are screwy': Cyber Ninjas CEO admits he couldn't tally hand count of Arizona ballots

The most pivotal moment in Arizona's high-profile election "audit" played out in near secrecy.

Cyber Ninjas, the technology firm hired by Senate Republicans to probe 2020 election results, had just completed a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County. But company CEO Doug Logan was starting to panic ― because he had no way to tally up the results.

With a deadline looming to produce a report for the Senate, he desperately sought to find a system to read the tens of thousands of tally sheets volunteers had used to record actual votes for then-President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden.

Logan privately admitted in a series of text messages during the summer of 2021 that he could not make sense of the data, The Arizona Republic, part of the Paste BN Network, found.

"How plausible is this solution looking? I looped back to look through all of the aggregation data again. It (is) pretty broken. A lot of it doesn't make any sense," Logan wrote in a July 5, 2021, text.

Logan enlisted help from a technology expert. He told him figuring out a way to quantify tally sheets was a priority. But two months and more than 300 messages later, they didn't have a solution.

At one point, Logan wrote he would be satisfied so long as the count was right "most of the time." He repeatedly said he was frustrated and summed up his feelings in a couple of one-word messages: "Ugh."

Even after he turned over his numbers to Arizona Senate Republicans ― 11 days before he would release his findings in a public hearing ― Logan was trying to reconcile the data.

"Reading through that summary doc on President vs. Senate. Looks like basically our numbers are screwy," he said in a Sept. 13 text message.

The text messages are among 39,000 obtained by The Republic through an ongoing public records lawsuit against Cyber Ninjas. Logan has fought for two years to keep documents secret, defying court orders to turn over all communications and racking up millions of dollars in contempt fines.

Read the document: Text messages between Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and technology expert Mike Piehota

Logan's texts offer the first direct evidence that the Senate's hand-picked auditor could not aggregate the results of his own "audit." And they appear to bolster critics who long have maintained Logan "made up" numbers and lacked the ability or methodology to make any credible findings.

"We said all along that his numbers were fiction," election analyst Larry Moore said. "These text messages completely corroborate that ... he even admits in one text his numbers are screwy."

Moore is part of a trio of nationally recognized election experts known in the industry as The Audit Guys, who in 2021 published multiple reports saying Cyber Ninjas' numbers could not be validated or replicated.

"He was going through the motions, recording the vote on handwritten sheets without a plan to add them up," Moore said.

Logan primarily exchanged messages about data problems with Mike Piehota, a technology expert who was dubbed "Super Mike" in texts.

Logan also engaged Trump allies Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania chain-of-custody investigator, and Erich Speckin, a Michigan forensic image specialist, texts show.

Honey and Speckin have circulated dubious claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania and both served as witnesses for former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who filed multiple legal challenges blaming fraud for her 2022 election loss. Courts dismissed Lake's claims for lack of evidence.

Logan's texts show how his team shifted away from trying to quantify the hand count and sought other means to deliver plausible numbers to the Senate.

They first tried counting votes by scanning tally sheets. They couldn't get a software program to read the tick marks. Then they focused on counting the total number of ballots, scouring county electronic tabulation records, creating worksheets and databases and weighing ballot boxes on scales.

Piehota summed it up bluntly in a July 6 text to Logan. The work of hundreds of volunteers, who spent two months sitting at Lazy Susan-type tables inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum reviewing ballots and recording individual votes with tick marks onto more than 70,000 tally sheets, could not be processed.

"To cut to the chase, it's my opinion we're not going to be able to accurately process tally sheets using current text recognition technology," Piehota wrote. "Ultimately, we need to consider a different approach if you want to revisit tally sheets in the short term. Other than a massive manual effort, I don't have a good answer."

Logan replied minutes later: "I don't care if we have to hand-write in the batch number, etc. As long as the tally is correct most of the time."

Neither Logan nor Piehota responded to interview requests. They did not answer questions about specific text messages.

Why were machines brought in? 'The ballot counts were not matching up'

Logan's struggle with numbers might explain why Senate Republicans launched a machine count of ballots immediately after Cyber Ninjas' hand count, which was supposed to determine empirically if Maricopa County's election results were accurate.

Former Senate President Karen Fann, who hired Logan and authorized the ballot review, said in July 2021 that Logan's hand count of ballots did not match Maricopa County's official results and she wanted to "triple check" the numbers.

Neither Logan nor the Senate appears to have issued any public statements at the time about Cyber Ninjas' inability to aggregate the tally sheets. They also didn't offer a specific vote count during a July 15 public hearing.

Logan instead encouraged the Senate to subpoena more voting equipment from the Maricopa County Elections Department and to move forward with a door-to-door canvass of voters that he said was necessary to complete his analysis.

“Based on the data we’re seeing, I highly recommend we do the canvassing because it’s the one way to know for sure whether the data we’re seeing are real problems,” Logan said at the meeting.

Fann, in a May 30 interview, said she had no knowledge of Logan's internal concerns over the hand count. She said she was unaware of the texts and denied undertaking the machine count to provide cover for Cyber Ninjas.

Some of the texts could reflect computer glitches Logan's team faced rather than fundamental problems getting the tallies, she said. Fann suggested Maricopa County's refusal to provide voting equipment and information might have inhibited Cyber Ninjas' efforts.

But she confirmed that Logan's numbers were far apart from the county's.

"When they got down very close to the report ... They came up with a number which was very different than the county's," Fann said. "The ballot counts were not matching up. That's when we (got) the machines."

Maricopa County voters cast 2,089,563 ballots in the 2020 election, according to official results. Fann did not share Logan's number.

A ballot count (how many ballots were cast in an election) is not the same as a vote count (who voted for what candidate). But any significant disparity in the number of ballots posed a problem for Logan. If he couldn't get the number of ballots right, how could he come up with an accurate vote count?

Logan might have provided a partial answer in a Sept. 6, 2021, text to Piehota.

"This is definitely a high priority, when can we talk? I already gave these numbers to the Senate and it's going to take a lot of explaining if they change."

The next text from Logan is redacted.

Piehota responded 5 minutes later: "These records seemed to have 'slipped' through the cracks. I was getting different answers depending on how I derived the data − using raw aggregation data vs. results from the consolidated worksheet."

Senate liaison Ken Bennett: Workers alerted him to 'audit' trouble

State Sen. Ken Bennett, R-Prescott, who served as a Senate liaison during the "audit," said the text messages don't surprise him.

Staffers approached him with multiple concerns about the accuracy of the hand count long before it ended, Bennett said in a May 30 interview.

"People on staff came to me and alerted me that the aggregation process was problematic," he said. "The numbers were way off, according to the people who came to me."

Bennett said when he shared concerns, Logan told him he wasn't "authorized to be around aggregation data."

The information was suddenly off-limits, Bennett said. More issues arose as the ballots were moved from the coliseum to another building at the state fairgrounds for the machine count. Bennett said he asked Logan directly if he knew how many ballot boxes they had accounted for.

"I was stunned when he said, 'Yeah, but you're not authorized to have that information,' " Bennett said. "I asked if the Senate had that information ... and I told him the Senate should absolutely know."

Bennett said he wanted to make sure Logan was not trying to "force balance" the ballot count, or manipulate the results of his own count through the machine count. Bennett took his concerns to former GOP Chair Randy Pullen, who was leading the machine count and serving as "audit" spokesperson.

"Pullen said he didn't have authorization to share that with me," Bennett said.

Pullen did not respond to an interview request. Seventy messages from Pullen remain redacted.

After Bennett shared data from the machine count with The Audit Guys, Pullen and Logan on July 23 banned him from the building. Bennett threatened to resign unless his access was restored. It was, but Bennett said he never got a satisfactory explanation about the data.

Six days later, the election review ended and the 2.1 million ballots were loaded onto trucks and returned to the county. Two months later, on Sept. 24, Logan announced the results of the hand count. Joe Biden won the presidential election in Arizona. Logan's tally differed from the county's official results by 994 votes.

Bennett said he would "like to believe" the count was accurate and honest.

"I take that at face value," Bennett said. "I have not seen the backup material showing how they got to those numbers."

Cyber Ninjas CEO coordinated with other Trump allies on election challenges

The election review was billed as nonpartisan, but it was a MAGA production from start to finish.

The world watched ballot counters on livestream feeds broadcast by a far-right network, whose hosts not only did standups from the coliseum but helped bankroll the effort. Republican politicians and legislators joined tours and took notes on how to stage similar election reviews at home in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Alaska and elsewhere.

Trump loyalists poured their own and other people's money into the "audit." They set up nonprofits to solicit donations. Conservative activists got key roles overseeing operations, such as vetting who got to count ballots.

And Logan, whose company had no prior election experience, emerged in Arizona fresh from his own post-election immersion in Trumpworld.

Text messages, emails and court records show Logan had spent the last weeks of 2020 at pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood's South Carolina properties, strategizing how to challenge election results with notable figures from the "Stop the Steal" movement. Former national security adviser Mike Flynn, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Trump loyalist and retired Army colonel Phil Waldron all participated and later would play different roles in the Arizona ballot review.

Fresh from those meetings, Logan took part in efforts to access voting machines in Georgia and Michigan. Authorities in both states are investigating.

Michigan authorities accused Logan in August of being part of a criminal conspiracy. He has not been named in the Georgia investigation. The Fulton County district attorney appears to be expanding an election interference probe of Trump and his allies to multiple states and is considering racketeering charges.

Moore, who is the founder of Boston-based election technology company Clear Ballot Group, said the texts show Arizona's "audit" was part of the larger "Stop the Steal" effort; Logan set out to overturn the election and, failing that, to sow doubt in the electoral process.

Logan's Sept. 24 report to the Senate skimmed over Biden's win and raised a host of "anomalies" and concerns that continued to raise doubts about the election process. It left lawmakers, partisan contractors and Trump allies calling for more audits, the rejection of voting machines and new voter integrity laws to prevent fraud at the polls.

Moore said the texts show Logan started the hand count with no clear way to finish it.

"Once the hand count ended, texts show they were flailing around trying to add up the number of votes and the number of ballots, which they should have had on June 25," he said of the Cyber Ninjas and their contractors.

"Logan went into this with no plan to produce a vote tabulation. He was going through the motions of recording the vote on handwritten sheets and had no way to add them up."

The Audit Guys include Benny White, a prominent Pima County Republican data analyst, and Tim Halvorsen, Clear Ballot's retired chief technology officer. Their stated mission is to "debunk election disinformation and confront those who use their power to spread it."

The trio built databases and software to untangle Logan's messages, which were released in nonsequential order with broken threads and in formats that couldn't be searched.

But Logan's record of communications remains incomplete. He has redacted about 3,000 messages, including ones with Piehota. There are inexplicable gaps in text conversations. Some messages are blank. Others reference alternative messaging systems, which have yet to be turned over.

Moore said the message threads reveal a pattern of deceit.

"Once we were able to make tens of thousands of highly disorganized and obscured conversations easily accessible, the truth emerged," Moore said. "The Maricopa so-called 'forensic audit' was a fraud. Furthermore ... we believe Doug Logan knew it."

Doug Logan couldn't make numbers work: 'I am so frustrated right now'

The issues raised in Logan's text exchanges about the counts are often technical. But they aren't hard to understand.

Beginning July 5, Logan's team initiated two separate counting efforts: one to quantify the votes recorded on tally sheets for president and U.S. senator, the other to count ballots. Texts indicate neither worked.

"They tried optical character recognition software and machine-learning software; both failed," Moore said. "They tried to count ballots by weighing the boxes ― that didn't work ... Next, they employed two high-speed paper counters capable of counting 500 ballots per minute. Still, they could not come close to the official ballot count."

Without an accurate ballot count, election officials know an accurate vote count is impossible, Moore said. They also know the "mathematical identity" between ballots and votes.

There is a formula, Moore said: The number of ballots = votes + overvotes + undervotes. The identity requires the number of ballots to be equal to the number of votes, plus overvotes (when a person votes for more candidates than permitted) plus undervotes (when a person votes for fewer candidates than allowed).

Logan's Sept. 24 report allayed suspicion by reporting a total that preserved that mathematical identity and confirmed the county's official result, said Moore, who called it "a sham."

Six weeks after Logan delivered his report to the Senate, he appears to acknowledge the tally sheets still were incomplete.

"This is a long shot; but going to throw something out to you to see if you have any ideas," Logan wrote to Piehota in a lengthy Oct. 29 text.

"Right before the hearing we ran the aggrigator and Tamera worked with a team to build out the master spreadsheets with links to all of the tally sheets. They didn't finish it, but got it down to about 3K missing links and not working."

Logan told Piehota he finished the work on his own but was still having problems and another Senate deadline was looming.

"But after removing duplicates its a solid 8K off the numbers we officially reported with our report. I deleted maybe another 20 duplicates that I found when working with the data, but nowhere near enough for that," Logan said in the text.

"I keep looking over the data though and it seems right. Meanwhile a version of this tally sheet goes live at the Senate tomorrow for the public to view it ...

"If you have any ideas on a quick way to spot check this and see what I'm missing it would be great. I am so frustrated right now."

Robert Anglen is an investigative reporter for The Republic. Reach him at robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8694. Follow him on Twitter @robertanglen.