Arizona’s Election Review Inspires Copycat Efforts in Other States

And this week, The Arizona Republic reported that Doug Logan, the head of Cyber Ninjas, the firm the State Senate hired to oversee the investigation, had worked with allies and lawyers for Mr. Trump last winter as they sought to overturn Mr. Biden’s election victory.

Citing emails, texts and videos, The Republic wrote that Mr. Logan was supposed to attend a meeting in mid-November with a group that included Sidney Powell, then a lawyer for Mr. Trump. It also indicated that Mr. Logan, identified in documents as “Doug Patriot,” worked with Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and the election conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne on efforts to gain access to voting machines nationwide.

A spokesman for Mr. Logan, Rod Thomson, did not immediately reply to an email requesting comment.

In December, long before he was hired, Mr. Logan repeated on his Twitter account a baseless theory that Dominion Voting Systems, a favorite target of the right, had robbed Mr. Trump of 200,000 votes in Arizona. Dominion, which has sued other prominent advocates of similar theories for defamation, says Cyber Ninjas is “led by conspiracy theorists and QAnon supporters.”

Arizona already has proved instructive to Republicans in other states that are seeking to autopsy their own 2020 results. Michael Gableman, a retired Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who is leading a Republican inquiry there, traveled to Arizona to review its investigation, and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this month that he had frequently consulted with Mr. Ayyadurai.

Mr. Gableman, a former Republican county chairman who is known as a hard-line conservative, has drawn criticism for telling a postelection rally of Trump loyalists that “your elected leaders have allowed unelected bureaucrats at the Wisconsin Elections Commission to steal our vote.”

In Pennsylvania, which Mr. Biden carried by 81,660 votes, the head of the State Senate committee overseeing the election investigation also traveled to Arizona to review its inquiry.

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