The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:
One of the companies involved in the unprecedented review of 2.1 million ballots in Arizona has ended its involvement in the effort, the Arizona Republic reported Tuesday.
The company, Pennsylvania-based Wake TSI, was only contracted to work on the review through 14 May, and chose not to extend its contract, a spokesman for the review told the Republic. Their decision to stop comes as the effort, executed at the behest of Republicans in the state senate, has come under national scrutiny for shoddy practices and bias.
Sam Levine
(@srl)This is hugely significant. Cyber Ninjas has gotten a lot of attention around the audit, but Wake TSI was the company on the floor running the counting. https://t.co/8at3mzTESX
Wake TSI was involved in overseeing the portion of the audit that dealt with a hand recount of the presidential vote and US senate race in Maricopa county (Republicans are also examining voting technology and the paper ballots were cast on). The firm overseeing the entire audit, called Cyber Ninjas, had previously pointed to Wake TSI’s involvement in a prior audit in Pennsylvania to assuage concern about Cyber Ninjas’ own lack of experience in election audits.
New details have come to light in recent days about Wake TSI’s involvement in Pennsylvania. On Monday, the Arizona Mirror reported that the firm had been hired by a non-profit linked to Sidney Powell, a Trump ally and one of the most prominent figures to spread lies about the results of the 2020 election last year.
StratTech solutions, an Arizona-based IT firm, will take over for Wake TSI and continue to count ballots in accordance with the procedures the company had already set up, according to the Republic. It’s unclear what experience StratTech has in elections, if any.
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