International- Arizona's attorney general has refuted the Cyber Ninjas' claim that dead voters cast 282 ballots.
- Mark Brnovich said investigators looked into all the people the Cyber Ninjas claimed were dead.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich on Monday debunked a claim that hundreds of dead people voted in his state during the 2020 election.
Brnovich concluded his criminal investigation on Monday with a letter to Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate's GOP leader.
He outlined how the state's Department of Justice investigated "numerous complaints regarding allegations of dead voters during the 2020 elections," particularly those cited by Doug Logan, the founder of the Cyber Ninjas, the firm behind the Arizona vote audit.
Brnovich said his investigators looked into the Cyber Ninjas' claim that "282 individuals who were deceased prior to October 5, 2020," voted in the 2020 election.
He said his investigators spent "hundreds of hours reviewing these allegations" and found only one case of a voter who was dead by the time the election came around. All other people listed by the Cyber Ninjas as deceased "were found to be current voters," he wrote.
"Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead, and many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased," Brnovich wrote.
Brnovich said his office looked into thousands of dead-voter claims, all of which were "thoroughly investigated."
Investigators found, though, these claims were sometimes "so absurd" that the names and birthdays reported to them did not match those of dead people or were people who died after the election.
"While our office has successfully prosecuted other instances of dead voters, these cases were ultimately determined to be isolated instances," Brnovich wrote.
He then said the allegations of widespread voter fraud via dead voters were "insufficient" and "not corroborated."
The GOP-led audit of the vote count in Maricopa County carried out by the Cyber Ninjas not only confirmed in September that Joe Biden won the election but also resulted in former President Donald Trump losing 261 votes.
Logan, the Cyber Ninjas' founder, claimed at the time that 282 "potentially deceased" people voted in 2020 — which Brnovich's investigators have now thoroughly debunked.
The firm was criticized during its audit by the voting-machine maker Dominion and the US Justice Department after questions arose about ballots' chain of custody and integrity in the audit. In May 2021, the Cyber Ninjas also pursued a baseless, far-fetched theory that votes had been flown in from Asia and smuggled into the stack.
Arizona GOP officials testified to Congress in October that Biden won a "free, fair, and accurate" election, calling lawmakers unwilling to accept the result a "threat to our democracy."
Even after the Maricopa audit found Biden won, Trump has continued to falsely claim the GOP audit uncovered "undeniable evidence" of fraud. In October, he called for another vote audit in Pima County, Arizona's second-largest county.
Trump has also made a baseless claim that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, in a bid to prove widespread voter fraud. An investigation found just four such instances.
As for the Cyber Ninjas, a lawyer for Logan said in January that the firm was closing and letting all its employees go.