The floor of Veterans Memorial Coliseum during the Arizona Senate’s audit of the 2020 general election in Maricopa County. Photo by Courtney Pedroza | Washington Post/pool
One of the contractors for the Arizona Republican Senate’s “audit” of the 2020 presidential election claims to have photos of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County and is raising money to preserve them, despite state law saying ballots and images have to be destroyed 24 months after an election.
Jovan Pulitzer, a favorite of election fraud conspiracy theorists, who claims to have invented technology that can detect fraudulent ballots by examining the folds in the paper and the markings, was hired by the Senate to use that unproven technology in 2021. When he said that Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia was marred by fraud that only he could detect, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state derided him as a “failed inventor and a failed treasure hunter.”
His technology was deployed at the “audit” but was ultimately left out of the Senate’s final report and his claims were called “utter rubbish” by a fellow “audit” researcher who was hired by the Senate to double check his work.
The GiveSendGo fundraising campaign, which Pulitzer has been heavily promoting on his Substack and Rumble accounts, is seeking $396,000 and has raised over $129,000 so far.
“Once presented in court, the 2.1 million physical ballots, and the Full Forensic Audit investigation and documentation that provide evidence of thousands of nefarious actions, can beat the corruption that controls our election system,” the GiveSendGo says. No evidence of widespread voter fraud has been discovered in Maricopa County, even through the “audit” and multiple court cases challenging the 2022 elections results.
Arizona law dictates strict rules for how ballots and their images are kept. Ballots and their associated images have to be stored securely and must be destroyed 24 months after an election. The ballots and images of them are not considered public records.
In an email exchange with the Arizona Mirror, Pulitzer claimed that he was still doing audit work under contract but would not say for whom. He also refused to elaborate on what exactly the money he’s raising would be used for, or if he had been in contact with election officials in the state regarding the retention of the ballot images.
The Arizona State Senate did not respond to a request for comment asking if Pulitzer is still working under contract for the chamber. Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the “audit,” similarly did not respond to a request for comment.
“What they are proposing to do is not permitted as a legal use of ballot images. They can’t circumvent the process,” Calli Jones, spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office told the Mirror when asked about the GiveSendGo campaign. “Ballot images are currently only retained in the same manner and for the same length of time as paper ballots.”
Richie Taylor, spokesperson for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, told the Mirror that the office was unaware of the situation and would “review the matter internally,” declining to comment further.
Jason Berry, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors told the Mirror that “the county is aware of the claims but we don’t have a comment at this time.”
Former Secretary of State and former state lawmaker Ken Bennett, a Republican who served as the Senate’s liaison to the audit, told the Mirror that to his knowledge the contract Pulitzer entered into with the Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm the Senate hired to conduct the audit, is over.
“I was not aware of that,” Bennett told the Mirror when asked about Pulitzer’s fundraising efforts. He also questioned if Pulitzer was actually in possession of the images, adding that he was not always privy to all the conversations Cyber Ninjas had with its contractors.
Bennett is not the only one with questions.
“Why was he allowed to leave with those?” Alex Gulotta, Arizona director of All Voting is Local, told the Mirror. “They may have contracted to do this audit but those materials should never have left that space and no one should have copies of them.”
Gulotta said that while the Senate had legal subpoena power to request the materials from Maricopa County to conduct its review, those materials should still fall under the same state laws that govern ballots and their images.
Some of these questions were pondered by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Timothy Thomason in 2021 when the Arizona Senate issued those subpoenas to Maricopa County. In a February 2021 ruling, Thomason said that the subpoenas did not violate confidentiality laws regarding the right to a secret ballot granted by the Arizona Constitution since the Senate is a government agency.
However, the two state laws cited by the county and Thomason in the ruling “operate as restrictions on access by the general public,” the ruling says.
Pulitzer told the Mirror that the images will not be made public or shared publicly. However, the GiveSendGo campaign states that the images need to “be preserved for the courts, for our Supreme Court, for President Trump and for historical purposes!”
When asked how presenting ballot images in court would not make them a public record Pulitzer repeated that the images are “not public, are not being shared publicly, and are not intended to be included in, or made part of, any public record.”
Pulitzer also claimed it was “incorrect to conflate ballot images with the physical paper ballots,” adding that the images are “high-resolution forensic captures and are not the paper ballots themselves.”
His contract with Cyber Ninjas states that he would be given “images of voted ballots” that he had the rights to.
In the report he provided to the Senate in 2021, Pulitzer alleged that Maricopa County ballots were printed in foreign countries, that some ballots were counterfeit and that bleed-through on double-sided ballots caused large-scale problems. All of those accusations have been thoroughly debunked by Maricopa County and independent fact-checkers.
Pulitzer’s company, which contracted with Cyber Ninjas, was created on the day he signed the contract, according to records from the Utah Corporation Commission.
Pulitzer threatened possible legal action against the Senate, alleging that it had infringed on his intellectual copyrights by sharing ballot images with EchoMail CEO Shiva Ayyadurai, who was hired to review his work.
“It is our firm belief the transfer of these images to outside or other parties will compromise our Intellectual Property and would surely make up ‘willful infringement’ and the damages would easily be over $3,000,000 (since we severely discounted our services being used in the Arizona audit),” Pulitzer said in his email to the Senate.
Pulitzer originally planned to bill Cyber Ninjas $2.1 million for his work — a fee of $1 per ballot examined — before cutting the price by 90% and charging $210,000.
The Mirror asked Pulitzer what exactly the $396,000 would be used for but never got a clear answer. Pulitzer replied that he had answered the Mirror’s questions, and that his answers could be confirmed in “open record.”
“My cc (credit card) can’t handle to (sic) much at once, so this will have to do for the month! WE have a long way to go! Jovan needs us peeps!” one donor to the fundraiser who gave $2,500 commented on the fundraiser.
