The nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., last fall are currently packaged in 40 cardboard shrink-wrapped boxes and stacked on 45 pallets in a county facility in Phoenix known as “the vault,” due to its sophisticated security and special fire-suppression system.
But on order of the Republican-led state Senate, the ballots and the county’s voting equipment are scheduled to be trucked away next week — handed over for a new recount and audit spurred by unsubstantiated claims that fraud or errors tainted President Biden’s win in Arizona’s largest county.
The ballots will be scrutinized not by election officials, but by a group of private companies led by a private Florida-based firm, whose owner has promoted claims that the 2020election was fraudulent and who has been cited as an expert by allies of former president Donald Trump seeking to cast doubt on the election in other parts of the country.
Trump supporters, including a lawyer who volunteered with his post-election legal team, have been raising private dollars to supplement $150,000 in taxpayer money that has been earmarked to fund the Arizona recount.
Nearly three months after Biden took office and despite dozens of courtroom losses and previous recounts, many Republicans around the countrycontinue to echoTrump’s falsehoods that the election was rigged as justification to pass new voting restrictions….
Logan was listed in December as a potential expert witness in a lawsuit brought by a voter challenging the election results in Antrim County, Mich.,according to court filings. The county has emerged as a fixation of Trump supporters after an error not long after polls closed led the county briefly to report that Biden won the heavily Republican area.
Allies of Trump claimed it showedthe election could be stolen by manipulating voting machines. In fact, the mistake was the result of human error and swiftly corrected, according to the county clerk and other Michigan officials.
When asked how Logan got involved in the lawsuit, Matthew DePerno, a Michigan lawyer handling the Antrim County case, did not answer directly, responding instead by email: “Can you answer my question, how much election fraud is acceptable to you and the Washington Post?”
Logan also confirmed to the Arizona Mirror that he wrote a document titled “Election Fraud Facts & Details” that is posted on the website of conservative attorneySidney Powell, a Trump ally who filed a number of unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the election results in various states.
In an email, Logan told the Arizona publication that he prepared the document for use by U.S. senators who sought to challenge the election results when Congress formally countednthe electoral college ballots on Jan. 6. The Mirror reported that he did not indicate who asked him to compile the document or for which senators it was intended. It is also not clear how it came to be posted on Powell’s website.