The shady cybersecurity firm should be barred from federal contracts.

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As Congress’s investigation shows, the attempt to subvert American democracy did not start on January 6. It didn’t end then, either.

Arizona voted for Joe Biden in 2020. But last year, in an effort to stir doubt about the result and about the electoral system as a whole, pro-Trump Republicans in the Arizona Senate announced an “audit” of the election in Maricopa County, which Biden carried by more than 45,000 votes. The legislature hired a Florida-based security consultancy called Cyber Ninjas — amazingly, not a pseudonym — to conduct it.

Cyber Ninjas had no experience auditing elections. But the company’s CEO, Doug Logan, was spreading election misinformation on social media and had links to prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists.

The Cyber Ninjas “audit” — quotation marks cannot express how little this thing resembled a legitimate audit — was farcical from the outset. People pored over ballots looking for evidence of bamboo fibers. Aha! That would mean the ballots had really been sent from China, which must have been secretly rigging the election, no doubt with Italian intelligence and Hugo Chavez. (Alas, no bamboo was found.)

The company worked to keep its procedures secret. Cyber Ninjas tried to stop election security experts from witnessing the process. Election documents weren’t properly protected. Doors remained unlocked, and outsiders had easy access. The auditors didn’t even have the right color pens — blue and black ink, which are legible by machine tabulators and can thus spoil a ballot, are supposed to be kept out of an auditing site. This is just a small sample of the many ways in which Cyber Ninjas demonstrated its incompetence

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. The audit cost millions of dollars.

In September 2021, after dragging the circus-like review on for months, Cyber Ninjas issued its conclusions. Guess what: Biden won, by more votes than first tallied.

But the result of the audit wasn’t the point. The goal was to kick up dust, spread innuendo, and discredit elections. The report was laced with nonsense

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. For example, Cyber Ninjas recommended that Arizona review more than 10,000 voters simply because each of them shared a name and birth year — not even birthdate — with another voter in the system. In a state with 4 million registered voters, there’s nothing suspicious about that level of overlap.

When an Arizona state court ordered Cyber Ninjas to release public records, the company refused. It was assessed a $50,000-per-day fine, which eventually rose into the millions of dollars. The CEO shut Cyber Ninjas down.

This week, the Brennan Center and our partners All Voting Is Local Arizona, Arizona Democracy Resource Center, Living United for Change Arizona, and Mi Familia Vota sent a letter

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to federal officials requesting that both Cyber Ninjas and Doug Logan be barred from federal government contracts

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for up to three years.

Such bans are a powerful tool for government accountability and ethics. Federal law states that a contractor is subject to the measure if it receives a civil judgment for violating the law. The refusal of Cyber Ninjas to divulge public documents is in clear violation of the legal standards. Logan and his company also failed to meet the basic requirements of competence and responsibility.

Expect election deniers to follow the same script in coming years. Spew doubt. Spin conspiracy theories. Hope the voters shrug about the whole thing. It’s critically important that all of us — the Justice Department, Congress, and the public — do what we can. Bad faith actors who undermined our elections and smeared our election officials must be held to account. As America moves to hold the president and his closest advisers responsible, let’s not forget the wider sphere of malefactors who supported them.

Shedding Light on the SCOTUS ‘Shadow Docket’

In recent years, the Supreme Court has transformed its shadow docket from an obscure procedural tool to a way to quietly rule on high-profile issues, including gerrymandering, abortion, and pandemic restrictions. Unlike cases on the merits docket, in which the Court receives numerous briefs and hears oral argument before issuing a lengthy opinion, shadow docket cases are typically released without warning and with little explanation. A new Brennan Center explainer details what the shadow docket is, how its role has changed over time, and why its current use is problematic. Read more

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Texas Treats Immigrants as Combatants

This month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) made a brazen and expansive bid to take border security and immigration enforcement into his own hands. Using a constitutional provision allowing states to invoke war powers in case of “invasion,” he authorized the Texas National Guard and state police to detain and effectively deport migrants and asylum seekers. Treating migrants as enemy combatants is not only misguided — it illegally oversteps the bounds of state power. Abbott’s order “is a shameless attempt to contort the law in service of scoring political points and demonizing undocumented individuals,” Katherine Yon Ebright and Joseph Nunn write. “The Biden administration has ample legal and policy options at hand to end this abuse and should exercise them before Abbott escalates the situation even further.” JUST SECURITY

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Reining In Executive Emergency Powers

Trump’s attempt to thwart voters and stay in office was unsuccessful, but the January 6 hearings have raised alarming questions about the scope of presidential powers and how they can be abused in times of crisis. In particular, government and legal experts have pointed to the Insurrection Act and National Emergencies Act as the main sources of ill-defined executive authority that could be misused by an unscrupulous president. Elizabeth Goitein talked to the AP about how Trump could have tried to improperly use some of these extraordinary powers, which must be reformed. ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Coming Up

NYC Outdoor Event: The Fight to Vote

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Wednesday, July 20, 7–8:30 p.m. ET

Since the 2020 election, the United States has since seen ongoing efforts to restrict voting rights on the basis of election fraud lies. As part of this year’s Non-Fiction at the Bryant Park Reading Room series, join Brennan Center President Michael Waldman for a lecture on the history of the American struggle for the franchise, from the 18th century to modern day. RSVP today

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Want to keep up with Brennan Center Live events? Subscribe to the events newsletter.

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News

Lauren-Brooke Eisen on the financial incentives that drive mass incarceration // REUTERS

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John Kowal on constitutional amendments of the past and future // CNN

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Sean Morales-Doyle on the impact of conspiracy theories on voting rights // NEW YORK TIMES

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Eliza Sweren-Becker on the radical “independent state legislature theory” // NJ STAR-LEDGER

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