A left-leaning watchdog group on Wednesday sued the Arizona Senate for records pertaining to the “partisan” audit of the Maricopa County 2020 election.
The filing comes after American Oversight said in April it requested documents on Cyber Ninjas, the private firm conducting the inquiry, the audit’s funding and investigation techniques, and other matters. The organization said that by May 4, the Republican-led legislative body claimed there “are no more responsive documents to provide at this time because the Senate doesn’t have custody, control or possession of any of the records requested.”
The lawsuit seeks to convince a judge to “enforce Arizona Public Records Law by compelling the Senate to promptly produce records responsive to American Oversight’s requests.” The litigation specifically targets Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, who is spearheading the audit.
“If President Fann had kept her promise to run a transparent process, we wouldn’t be forced to go to court today,” Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement. “Instead, President Fann is playing a legal shell game — insisting that the audit is official state business when it needs to issue subpoenas, then keeping it at arm’s length to duck transparency laws.”
The audit, which has seen staunch resistance from Democrats and some Republicans, has earned praise from former President Donald Trump, who claimed the 2020 presidential election was ripe with fraud. Election officials have rejected claims of there being widespread fraud, and the courts have dismissed dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies.
Dominion Voting Systems, which has been the target of attacks from those who believed the Nov. 3 election was fraudulent, lambasted the audit and slammed Cyber Ninjas earlier in the week.
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“Dominion voluntarily provides access to voting machine equipment and information to auditors who have been accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. We happily did so with the independent EAC-accredited providers that Maricopa County hired for system auditing earlier this year,” the company wrote in a statement.
“Not only is Cyber Ninjas unaccredited, but they have also demonstrated bias and incompetence, including committing a serious breach of the secure chain of custody that protects voting equipment,” Dominion added.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors issued a letter this week that chastised Cyber Ninjas as “incompetent” and spoke of a waste of taxpayer dollars, prompting Fann to respond during a hearing on Tuesday.
“There was something that was said that was very hurtful about how the Senate is wasting taxpayer money on this. First of all, I don’t think that there is ever any waste of money if we are ensuring that our elections are good, our police forces are good, departments are being run efficiently. That’s part of government. This is what accountability is all about,” she said.
