Jovan Pulitzer, an icon among election fraud believers, will play a role in the Arizona election audit

Jovan Pulitzer, a favorite of election fraud conspiracy theorists who claims to have invented technology that can detect fraudulent ballots and whom Georgia’s Republican secretary of state recently derided as a “failed inventor and a failed treasure hunter,” will have a role in the Senate’s audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.

The audit will seek to “identify any ballots that are suspicious and potentially counterfeit,” according to the statement of work for the lead contractor, Cyber Ninjas. Pulitzer’s name does not appear in the document. But Ken Bennett, Arizona’s former secretary of state who’s serving as a spokesman for the audit, confirmed his involvement, though he said he’s unsure whether Pulitzer himself will be involved or whether the audit team will only be using his technology that Pulitzer claims can detect fraudulent ballots.

Pulitzer’s involvement comes despite any evidence whatsoever that fraudulent ballots were cast in the general election, despite a lack of confirmation that his technology works as he claims, and despite questions about his credibility.

Bennett said Doug Logan, the owner and CEO of Cyber Ninjas, told him that he consulted with Pulitzer while designing the process used to test the ballots, a process that Bennett said will include other people’s technology as well. He said his understanding is that all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County will be examined.

Arizona Senate hires a ‘Stop the Steal’ advocate to lead 2020 election audit

Pulitzer, an inventor and author of dozens of books on treasure hunting, claims he invented technology that will determine whether the ink on the Maricopa County ballots he’ll examine was marked by human beings or by machines. He claims that examinations of the folds in the ballots will determine whether they were actually mailed to voters because fraudulently manufactured ballots that weren’t mailed will be devoid of certain physical markers. 

Pulitzer does not appear to have any background in elections-related work. It’s unclear whether Pulitzer’s alleged technology has ever been used on ballots, or whether anyone has confirmed that it works. It’s also unclear why Senate President Karen Fann wants to test for fake or counterfeit ballots, given the lack of any evidence or credible allegations that there were any such problems in the election.

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Bennett said the Senate has not independently verified that Pulitzer’s technology actually does what he claims, but that other election officials he’s spoken with over the years have described similar technologies. 

“So, it doesn’t strike me as odd at all that he may have some technology to do the same thing,” Bennett said. 

Fann’s own research that she used to select her audit team, which the Arizona Mirror obtained through a public records request, suggests that Pulitzer’s credibility was a concern. One undated document from her research includes three recommendations for potential auditors, one of whom was Pulitzer. It states that he “claims to know how to tell if ballots are valid by the way they are folded and marked,” and says he was recommended by “several people.” But it also includes the warning, “Credibility questionable.” 

Election officials in other states have been far more critical of Pulitzer. After Pulitzer claimed to have hacked into Georgia’s voting system during a legislative hearing, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said his allegation was false and dismissed him as a “failed inventor and failed treasure hunter.” 

Nonetheless, Stop the Steal advocates who falsely believe that the election was rigged against former President Donald Trump have long called for Pulitzer to have a role in the audit, and he has become a revered figure within the movement. 

In a March 8 email to Fann, We the People AZ Alliance, a group that has promoted conspiracy theories about the election and is attempting to recall the Board of Supervisors for certifying the election, told Fann that its members “politely demand and insist” that she include Pulizter on her audit team, noting that he testified with Trump attorney Rudy Giuiani.

“Since he will do that for free, not choosing him in addition to anyone else you want to include, would be a cover up, pure and simple. The whole world is watching, and if opposed to this, you will never be re-elected as a Republican in the State of Arizona,” the email read.

Emails provided to the Arizona Mirror as part of a public records request show that Fann and Pulitzer were in contact at least as early as Jan. 25, when he emailed her to thank her for that time earlier that day and to provide information on his background and his technology. Undated handwritten notes cite the need to combat “media misinformation” about Pulitzer.

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The audit description doesn’t elaborate on exactly how “potentially counterfeit” ballots will be identified. But an affidavit that Pulitzer wrote in December as part of the litigation between Fann and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors over the proposed audit describes technology that would do exactly that.

Pulitzer explains in the affidavit that his technology identifies “kinematic markers” that would indicate whether a piece of paper has been handled, folded or processed in the mail, and determine whether “pristine ballots” without those markers “were fraudulently, or incorrectly, counted in the total vote tally for an election.” Examinations of the ink on ballots will show if they’ve been marked by a human with a pen or by a machine, he claimed. He said he could conduct his examination on electronic copies of the ballots, and that he could examine the paper ballots as well, though that would take longer.

Speaking with the Mirror via text message, largely using voice-to-text, Pulitzer said he’s “received and onboarded” more than 2 million ballot images from elsewhere in the country and indicated that he’s tested paper ballots, as well, but non-disclosure agreements prohibit him from identifying the states, counties or other jurisdictions where he’s done this work.

“Everything is highly documented, highly transparent, and duplicatable upon official report publication,” Pulitzer said, adding that he’s not able to discuss details until the reports are published.

Election integrity and administration experts were wary of the audit’s call for an investigation into potentially counterfeit ballots.

Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor to the elections program at the Democracy Fund, a voting advocacy organization, found Pulitzer’s involvement and the allegations he’s supposed to investigate disconcerting. First, she said the search for counterfeit ballots supports the baseless narrative that fake ballots are a problem, which has never actually been documented. 

Second, Patrick described the methodology behind Pulitzer’s technology as “somewhat questionable,” and said the audit needs to provide specific data about how it reaches conclusions regarding allegedly fraudulent ballots. Ballots that come from the same facility can still have differences in the paper, the ink and other things, depending on which batch of ballots they came from. And after more than a decade of working with the U.S. Postal Service, Patrick said she’s unaware of any technology that would be able to detect how many times a piece of paper has gone through the mailstream.

Patrick also noted that all early ballots in Maricopa County are folded, but not all of them are mailed. When a voter casts an early ballot at an in-person early voting location, the ballot is printed on the spot. The voted ballot is folded by hand and then placed in the same kind of envelope that are used for mailed early ballots.

Early ballots that are cast in person are folded by hand while early ballots that are mailed to voters are folded by machines. But they’re folded into the same patterns, making it difficult to differentiate. 

“If he believes that it is fraudulent, he is going to mischaracterize thousands of voters who voted legitimately in person prior to Election Day,” said Patrick, who spent 11 years working as a federal compliance officer at the Maricopa County Elections Department.

And once election officials finish counting, they don’t separate early ballots based on whether they were mailed in, dropped off in person or cast in-person at an early voting location.

Former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, noted that any given folded ballot could have been cast by mail or it could have been printed on demand and cast at an early voting location, meaning it never would have gone into the mail. Even if Pulitzer’s technology can determine whether a ballot was never mailed — which Fontes doubted — that wouldn’t indicate that it was fraudulent or otherwise problematic.

“The guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Let’s be clear: He is an adventurer who is operating on grift, and there’s nothing legitimate about what he does or claims to do,” Fontes said of Pulitzer.

According to the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, 158,000 people voted in-person at early voting centers in the county, while 993,000 returned their early ballots by mail and 714,000 received ballots in the mail but dropped them off in person. The 51,000 ballots cast at emergency voting centers are also folded and placed into the same affidavit envelopes as other early ballots. Ballots cast in-person on Election Day, of which there were 186,000 in November, aren’t folded.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Arizona Mirror can be found here ***