This week, when information about the 2020 vote from Maricopa County, Arizona, was transmitted to the FBI, it might have seemed like an agency replay. raid at the end of January in Fulton County, Georgia.
Both are large counties in swing states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and both have long been targets of President Donald Trump’s claims that that year’s presidential election was stolen from him.
But the evidence collected in Maricopa County is fundamentally different, in a way that election experts say threatens the accuracy and integrity of the federal government’s investigation.
In Fulton, the FBI collected ballots cast in the 2020 county election, which had been kept in secure court storage facilities. In Maricopa, a federal grand jury subpoenaed digital data related to a partisan audit of county voting, according to Warren Petersen, President of the Arizona Senatethe recipient of the summons.
This material – which could include scans and photos of ballots – was kept by the Senate and not the county. Maricopa County destroyed the original ballots after two years, as required by state law.
The company hired by Senate Republican leaders to conduct the audit, Cyber Ninjas, was funded and run by Trump allies. Its leader, Doug Logan, privately admitted in text messages obtained by reporters through public records requests that the ballot recount was “messed up.” County leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, and nonpartisan outside observers documented several ways in which Logan’s team failed to follow procedures intended to prevent tampering. (Logan did not respond to a request for comment.)
Multiple election experts, including some who attended Arizona’s 2021 audit in person, said any investigation based on Cyber Ninja data would be fatally flawed.
“Access to invalid data will only lead to inaccurate conclusions and risks further harming public trust,” said Ryan Macias, a national elections technology consultant who observed the audit on behalf of the Arizona secretary of state’s office.
The Justice Department and White House did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about experts’ concerns about the quality of the data and records produced in the subpoena. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Arizona declined to answer questions about its involvement in the case, saying it was against policy to comment on subpoenas or grand jury proceedings.
Petersen, a Republican who helped launch the audit in 2021 and turned over the files to the FBI, did not specify under what court authority the grand jury subpoena was issued or answer a question on that basis. Neither Petersen nor an Arizona Senate spokesperson provided details on what exactly the FBI had collected. The Senate has not released the subpoena.
The subpoena is the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s unprecedented attempt to reinvestigate alleged problems in the 2020 election.
The White House charged Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who tried to help Trump reverses his defeathelping to lead the criminal investigation. Olsen helped launch the Fulton County case, which is ongoing supervised by Thomas Albusthe U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, according to the supporting affidavit. It is not yet known whether Olsen or Albus is involved in the Maricopa County investigation.
Arizona’s audit began in April 2021, after Senate Republican leadership subpoenaed in Maricopa County for analyzes of all 2.1 million ballots, county voter rolls and other election system data, such as logs showing who accessed the system. The Senate also had documents shared by the Cyber Ninjas during the audit, such as sheets used to count votes and track anomalies, as well as data from the county’s election management system and ballot tabulators.
The Cyber Ninjas pulled data from the Dominion Voting Systems machines the county used in 2020, so the FBI likely has this material. Trump falsely claimed after the election that Dominion voting machines had been hacked, changing votes so that he recorded them as votes for Biden. The Trump administration attempted to access Dominion machines other places since he took office. Fox News And Newsmax settled defamation lawsuits with Dominion after making similar claims, agreeing to pay millions to the company.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who was secretary of state during the 2021 audit, said in an interview with ProPublica that it was unclear what happened to the records in the five years they were out of county hands.
“I don’t think anyone should have confidence in what will come out of what’s been given to the FBI,” Hobbs said.
Maricopa County’s 2020 election results have been repeatedly confirmed, both by the county’s post-election hand count and by multiple audits conducted by independent firms commissioned by the county. Courts have rejected several complaints filed by Trump’s lawyers alleging fraud.
The Cyber Ninjas study, which also concluded that Biden won, attracted strong criticism from the start, both for its methodology and its partisan nature.
One of the audit leaders was Heather Honey, who now occupies a key position in the Trump administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security. The contractor conducted its review without the presence of county or Senate staff and only allowed observers from Hobbs’ office to be present after a court demanded more transparency.
Company employees makes mistakes tallying votes cast in the presidential race, keeping three separate tally sheets for each batch of ballots that often reflected different totals, according to a report from the secretary of state’s office. They also took out black and blue pens when taking photos of the ballots, causing concern of observers on the potential for falsification. The entrepreneur sent the data collected from the vote tabulators in a cabin in Montana for analysis and would not say how – or if – it had protected the data from hacking.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in an interview that the contractor’s botched procedures would make it unlikely that a court would accept records turned over to the FBI as evidence proving irregularities in the 2020 vote.
“You can easily drill holes in anything,” Fontes said.
Cyber ninjas sometimes mistake routine aspects of the electoral process for signs of wrongdoing. He announced that In Maricopa County, 74,000 more absentee ballots were cast than were sent.. There was, however, a simple explanation for this discrepancy: the ballots had not been sent; they were hand-delivered to voters at early voting locations.
Ken Bennett, a Republican who was the Arizona Senate liaison for the audit and is a former Arizona secretary of state, said in an interview that he believed the county’s initial election results were correct.
“The only evidence I could find of errors made by the county were minor errors that had nothing to do with whether or not the results were accurate,” Bennett said.
