On Sunday night, Just The News reported that “the FBI is expanding its criminal probe into suspected election irregularities … agents are receiving gigabytes of electronic election data from Maricopa County.” Early the next morning, President Donald Trump shared the article on Truth Social and wrote: “Great!!!”
And that whacked the hornet’s nest. The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, NPR, NBC, The Hill, MS NOW, and many local Arizona news outlets all had news stories up within a few hours.
The dust hasn’t fully settled, but it’s settled enough to make a few things clear: Yes, federal law enforcement did issue a subpoena for 2020 election data. But that subpoena wasn’t directed at Maricopa County election officials; it was issued to Arizona state Senate President Warren Petersen, who reported that he turned over the subpoenaed records. Petersen, a Republican, and the state Senate had possession of electronic data from Maricopa County’s November 2020 presidential election as a result of the monthslong review Petersen and then-Senate President Karen Fann commissioned in 2021.
We don’t yet know why federal law enforcement sought the election materials. There’s been no word on who the investigation targets or what statute may have been violated. Nor has any judge or grand jury made a determination as to the possibility or probability of such a criminal action; such a determination is not needed to issue a subpoena.
This makes the Maricopa County situation quite different from that of Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI seized more than 600 boxes of 2020 election materials in January. In that instance, federal law enforcement identified two statutes (Title 52 of the U.S. Code Sections 20701 and 20511) that had possibly been violated, and a federal magistrate judge found that law enforcement had established probable cause to obtain a warrant to seize documents (I believe the underlying affidavit in that warrant application was highly problematic).
Unlike Fulton County, Maricopa County no longer has the physical ballots from 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 45,000 votes in the county and won Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes. The county destroyed the ballots in 2024, well clear of the retention requirement. The county also doesn’t have the tabulators from the 2020 election.
Previous investigations.
Any new investigation by the FBI would have to brush aside the results of several investigations concluding that there was no material fraud or error in the county’s 2020 election. Most people will have long since memory-holed those previous investigations. But because I lived through each and every one of them, both as a Republican candidate on the ballot and as Maricopa County’s elected recorder, I’m here to offer you a refresher:
First, following the original tabulation of the 2.1 million ballots in November 2020, volunteers from the county Republican Party and county Democratic Party worked in bipartisan teams to do a hand-count audit of the results. Those teams counted approximately 47,000 ovals on ballots; they matched the machine count exactly.
Undeterred, Trump and his supporters continued to allege that Dominion Voting Systems-manufactured tabulators had flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden or awarded only fractional votes to Trump. That prompted Maricopa County to conduct another test of the tabulation equipment on November 18, 2020. Kelli Ward, then chairwoman of the Republican Party, signed off on that test, as did representatives from the Libertarian Party and the Democratic Party.
At the same time, Trump and his allies took their multitudinous allegations of voting irregularities to state and federal court. Seven times. They lost each case.
Those pushing the election fraud claims have maintained that all of these cases were dismissed on the basis of standing, or something else that they would deem a mere technicality. But that’s simply not true. For example, in Ward v. Jackson, the trial court permitted evidentiary examination of the county’s signature verification process and the county’s ballot duplication process. The court ruled on both issues that “[b]ased on the facts found above, the evidence did not prove illegal votes, much less enough to affect the outcome of the election.”
The Arizona Supreme Court later affirmed the ruling, writing:
Because the challenge fails to present any evidence of “misconduct,” “illegal votes” or that the Biden Electors “did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office,” let alone establish any degree of fraud or a sufficient error rate that would undermine the certainty of the election results, the Court need not decide if the challenge was in fact authorized under A.R.S. § 16-672 or if the federal “safe harbor” deadline applies to this contest.
But allegations of a stolen election didn’t die, and Dominion Voting Systems was still at the heart of many of those claims. Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar repeated conspiracy theories about the company’s tabulators; so too did Ward, who made a highly stylized video titled, “AZGOP Chairwoman EXPOSES Dominion Voting Software.”
That prompted those of us at Maricopa County, where I had just taken office as the official responsible for voter registration, early voting, and other election-related duties, to commission yet another assessment of the county’s tabulation equipment. This time, in early February 2021, we asked two federally certified election technology companies to independently assess whether the tabulation equipment had: 1) been connected to the internet at any point during the election, 2) if the software source code had been altered, 3) if any malware had been installed, and 4) if the tabulators could “flip” votes. Both companies, SLI Compliance and Pro V&V, said no, no, no, and no.
Enter the Ninjas.
The above testing, the court cases, the bipartisan hand-count audit, and the November 2020 test of the tabulation equipment satisfied state Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers, a Republican who was ready to move on from the election. But the state Senate was a different story. In March 2021, Fann and Petersen commissioned a “forensic audit” to be performed by the Cyber Ninjas, a private company run by Sarasota, Florida, resident Doug Logan, who had never worked in election administration or auditing and had already posted to social media several popular conspiracy theories about the 2020 election (including one involving the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez).
The Cyber Ninjas endeavor went about how you’d expect. The process, such as it was, cost millions of both private and public dollars; it took months longer than expected; the Cyber Ninjas got into legal trouble over withholding records; the company also declared bankruptcy; and he conceded in private messages about the ballot recount that it “looks like basically our numbers are screwy.”
The Cyber Ninjas also investigated and made a whole bunch of wacky, amateurish allegations–including, famously, that the county used fraudulent bamboo-laced ballots flown in from China. Maricopa County issued a 93-page response, writing that of the 75 claims, only one had any validity (the county had indeed double-counted one stack of 50 ballots out of 2.1 million ballots recorded).
The Cyber Ninjas did accomplish two things: One, the company embarrassed the state on The Daily Show, and two, it pleaded with Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate its allegations. It wasn’t a straight-line process, but Brnovich’s team ultimately spent (emphasis added):
more than 10,000 hours investigating allegations of voting irregularities and reviewing alleged instances of illegal voting submitted to our office by private parties. Some of the more high-profile matters involved Cyber Ninjas Incorporated, True the Vote, Verity Vote, and elected officials. In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations. The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.
Regarding the Cyber Ninjas’ allegation that dead people had voted, Brnovich stated that the people his office contacted “were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased.” Later, in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Brnovich said of the stolen election claims: “most of it’s horsesh-t, and I’ve been trying to scrape it off my shoes for the past year.”
At this point, I’m a bit embarrassed to continue the tale, as it only shows how maniacally obsessed my wonderful state of Arizona and my political party (Republican) became with theories of a stolen election.
But we did, in fact, do more to investigate the 2020 election. The state Senate and county together commissioned an investigation by former Republican Rep. John Shadegg to assess the county’s router system in response to continued allegations of digital manipulation of the vote via the internet. Shadegg, in turn, hired three different technology companies that ultimately produced a report giving the election a clean bill of health. The county also enlisted the company PacketWatch to examine the “event logs” on the Dominion server. And, we did our own internal audits of everything from signature verification to chain-of-custody forms.
I recount all of this now not because I set out to write the next great American horror story, but because over the next few days plenty of otherwise sensible people will say, “What’s the harm in having somebody take a look at election records?” People have looked—professionals and amateurs, over thousands of hours, costing millions of dollars.
The years of investigations, tests, reviews, and audits are also worth revisiting because any future allegations would have to account for why all the previous probes didn’t uncover any material fraud or error. I would politely suggest that the reason is because no such fraud or error exists. The voters of Arizona chose Joe Biden more than five and a half years ago. It’s time to move on.
