The Republican-ordered recount of presidential election votes in Arizona’s largest county stumbled toward a close on Thursday, its already tattered reputation dogged by fresh accusations of partisanship and a thinly veiled warning of legal problems from the Justice Department.
Three months and one week after a truck caravan hauled 2.1 million ballots cast by Maricopa County voters to a fairgrounds auditorium, another caravan hauled them back to the county’s election offices on Thursday for storage. Senator Karen Fann, the president of the Republican-controlled State Senate that ordered the review, said earlier this week that a report on its results would be issued next month.
But the ferocious criticism that has trailed the review since the Senate announced it in December is unlikely to end, regardless of the report’s conclusions. Its critics were handed fresh ammunition late Wednesday, when the private company overseeing it disclosed that it had been almost entirely financed by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, many of them promoting the lie that voter fraud cost Mr. Trump’s presumed victory in Arizona.
The firm, Cyber Ninjas, said that it had collected more than $5.6 million from five pro-Trump organizations for the review, in addition to $150,000 that the State Senate had allotted.
In a statement hailing the review as “the most comprehensive audit in American history,” the chief executive of the firm, Doug Logan, said the identity of its funders was being made public “as we continue our commitment to transparency.”
In fact, an Arizona county court ordered two weeks ago that the sources of the review’s funding be released after Republicans in the Senate resisted making them and other records of the process public. Election administrators and experts have harshly condemned the operation as so sloppily run that its results would be untrustworthy regardless of what they showed.
The funding disclosure capped an arduous week for the recount of ballots in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and roughly 80 percent of the state’s population. The public face of the effort, the former Republican secretary of state Ken Bennett, briefly resigned on Wednesday in frustration over the lack of transparency surrounding the ballot recount.
A prominent Republican state senator and a candidate for secretary of state in the 2022 elections, Michelle Ugenti-Rita, withdrew her backing of the review last weekend, calling it “botched.” She also sharply criticized Ms. Fann, the Senate president, accusing her of “a total lack of competence” in managing the effort.
Also on Wednesday, the federal Justice Department issued legal guidance warning that so-called audits of federal elections must follow laws that can result in criminal penalties if they are ignored. Parts of the guidance appeared directed specifically at the Arizona recount, including a passage citing the risks of giving federally protected ballots and other election material to “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling such records.”
Neither Cyber Ninjas nor other subcontractors involved in the Maricopa County review have any experience of note in auditing elections.
The Maricopa review involves only votes cast last November for president and for the state’s two seats in the United States Senate, all of which were won by Democrats.
Ms. Fann and other senators have said that the recount, whose findings have no authority to change the winners of any race, was needed to reassure supporters of Mr. Trump that the vote was fairly conducted. But the credibility of the effort was seriously undermined this spring after disclosures that Mr. Logan, the Cyber Ninjas executive, and other purported experts involved in the review had ties to the “Stop the Steal” movement spawned by Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.
It had been apparent since the review began in April that supporters of Mr. Trump were both donating money to the effort and recruiting volunteers to work on it. But the sources and size of the donations had not been disclosed until Wednesday.
According to the Cyber Ninjas statement, the largest donation, $3.25 million, was made by a newly created group, The America Project, led by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of the Overstock.com website and a prominent proponent of false claims that the November election was rigged.
Mr. Byrne resigned his post at Overstock in 2019 after it was disclosed that he had an intimate relationship with Maria Butina, a gun-rights activist who was jailed in 2018 as an unregistered foreign agent for Russia and later deported. He later said he had contributed $500,000 to the Arizona review, and produced a film featuring Mr. Logan that claimed the November election was fraudulent.
The statement said that another pro-Trump group, America’s Future, contributed $976,514 to the review. The group this year named Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, the retired Army officer Michael T. Flynn, as its chairman. Mr. Flynn is a vocal conspiracy theorist who once called for the military to “rerun” the 2020 election.
An additional $605,000 came from Voices and Votes, a group organized by Christina Bobb, an anchor for the pro-Trump cable channel One America News, who solicited donations for the review while covering it. A fourth group that was reported to have donated $550,000, Defending the Republic, is tied to Sidney Powell, the former attorney to Mr. Trump who led a failed legal campaign to overturn the election results.
The last reported donor, the Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic, was reported to have donated $280,000. The fund was established by a Michigan lawyer, Robert Matheson, to help finance Ms. Powell’s lawsuits, but since has launched other fund-raising efforts.
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Arizona Vote Review Being Financed by Trump Supporters - The New York Times
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