The sham election audit taking place in Arizona’s Maricopa County threatens to undermine the democratic process, but one of the people responsible for the baseless recount thinks that now is a good time for him to run for office.
Bobby Piton, a managing partner at Illinois-based financial planning and investment advisory firm PreActive Investments, has announced that he will run for Senate in Illinois after spending six months discrediting and undermining democracy in the U.S.
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Piton, who has shared many QAnon posts and messages on social media, is one of at least 33 supporters of the conspiracy theory who are running for Congress in the 2022 midterms.
Piton, whose only previous brush with elections was a failed bid to become chair of the Kane County GOP in 2020, has been pushing election fraud conspiracies since last November, when he was called as an “expert witness” during one of the sham election fraud hearings held by Rudy Giuliani, then the personal attorney of former President Donald Trump.
At that hearing, Piton made the bold claim that he’d reviewed Arizona voter data and concluded that “between 120,000 and 306,000 ballots were cast by ‘fake people’.”
As with all of the claims made by Giuliani and the other members of Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team, there was never any real evidence to back up claims of voter fraud in Arizona, and a USA Today fact check found the allegations to be false.
Additionally, several bipartisan audits of the election process found there was no fraud in the state.
Nevertheless, Piton persisted, and continued to push the false claim that there was evidence of widespread voter fraud in Arizona.
In April he tweeted that he “had a dream… that Arizona changed the course of American history and that I assisted in this process.”
In a document sent to the Arizona legislature urging them to take action, Piton outlined his methodology and findings—though without the actual data to back it up. In the document, which was posted on his company’s website, Piton bombastically claims that if the lawmakers don’t act, “over 7 billion people could face very serious and dire circumstances over the next 100 years if Joe Biden is allowed to steal this election.”
Piton has no prior experience in election fraud investigations, but claims on his website that he has “read well in excess of a million pages over his career and has extensively studied physics, quantum mechanics, mathematics, economics, trading, portfolio construction, model development, asset valuation, and alpha generation to develop and refine his methodology.”
His persistence paid off and in late April, just as the audit was about to get underway, he held a Zoom meeting with Republican lawmakers from the Arizona Senate as well as sitting Republican Congressman Rep. Andy Biggs.
The meeting was private, but Piton accidentally livestreamed it to the entire internet.
Piton indicated in the meeting that he had been in contact with Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida company chosen by the Senate to run the audit despite the company having no election experience.
“One of the individuals that may be winning this bid to do the work has contacted me a few weeks back,” Piton said. “And they asked me if I would look at the data and I said that I would definitely be helping in one way, shape, or form.”
Piton has also said in the past that he has been in touch with Ron Watkins, the former administrator of the QAnon message board 8chan, who is now one of the biggest pushers of the election fraud conspiracy.
Piton continues to promote the audit in Maricopa county and his claims about “phantom voters,” though he says that he is playing no official role in the process.
The financial planner says he is currently deciding whether to run for the Senate as a Republican or an independent. In the meantime, he has taken part in a new “documentary” funded by former Overstock CEO and election fraud conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne.
“The Deep Rig,” which is due to be released next week, was filmed inside the Maricopa County audit center and features a number of the figures known for pushing the election fraud conspiracy. It was directed by a man whose past work includes a “documentary” claiming 9/11 was an alien conspiracy.
Piton’s role in bringing about the audit is clear, as is the fact that he has the ear of senior Republican lawmakers in the state, as well as those conducting the audit.
This will be concerning for many given Piton’s support for QAnon, a conspiracy movement the FBI this week said could lead to more real world violence.
In an interview with the Daily Beast in April, Piton said he didn’t know much about QAnon, but his social media activity, as documented by Media Matters for America, suggests otherwise.
As well as posting “Q drops” on his Facebook page and using a QAnon slogan on his Twitter account, Piton has shown he is aware of some of the more extreme QAnon conspiracies, including the baseless allegation that John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive and secretly working in collaboration with Trump.
The above post, like many others, remains live on Piton’s Facebook page.
Piton did not respond to any questions from VICE News.
