When 2020 voting information from Maricopa County, Arizona, was turned over to the FBI this week, it may have looked like a repeat of a late January FBI investigation in Fulton County, Georgia.
Both are large counties in battleground states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and have long been targets of President Donald Trump’s claims that that year’s presidential election was stolen from Biden.
But the evidence collected from Maricopa County is fundamentally different, and election experts say it threatens the accuracy and integrity of the federal investigation.
In Fulton, the FBI harvested actual ballots cast in the 2020 county election that were stored in a secure courthouse storage facility. In Maricopa, a federal grand jury subpoenaed digital data related to a partisan audit of county votes, according to Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, the recipient of the subpoena.
This material, which may have included scans and photos of ballots, was held by the Senate, not the county. Maricopa County destroyed the original ballots after two years, as required by state law.
CyberNinja, the company hired by Senate Republican leaders to conduct the audit, was funded and directed by Trump’s allies. Its leader, Doug Logan, privately acknowledged in a text message obtained by journalists through a public records request that the recount of that vote “was fraudulent.” Republican and Democratic county leaders and nonpartisan outside observers have documented several situations in which Mr. Logan’s team failed to follow anti-tampering procedures. (Mr. Logan did not respond to a request for comment.)
Several election experts, including some who saw the 2021 Arizona audit firsthand, said any investigation based on CyberNinja data would be fatally flawed.
“Accessing invalid data will only lead to inaccurate conclusions and risk further erosion of public trust,” said Ryan Macias, a national election 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 data and records produced under the subpoenas. A spokeswoman for the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to answer questions about its involvement in the case, saying it is against policy to comment on grand jury subpoenas or legal proceedings.
Petersen, a Republican who helped launch the 2021 audit and turned over records to the FBI, did not say under what court’s authority the grand jury subpoenas were issued or answer questions on that basis. Neither Petersen nor an Arizona Senate spokeswoman provided details about what exactly the FBI collected. The Senate has not made the subpoena public.
The subpoenas are the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s unprecedented attempt to reexamine the issues at stake in the 2020 election.
The White House has tasked Kurt Olsen, the lawyer who tried to help President Trump overturn his loss, to help lead the criminal investigation. According to supporting affidavits, Mr. Olsen helped initiate the Fulton County case, which was overseen by Thomas Albus, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. It is not yet clear whether Mr. Olsen and Mr. Albus are involved in the Maricopa County investigation.
Arizona’s audit began in April 2021 after Senate Republican leadership issued a subpoena to Maricopa County asking for scans of all 2.1 million ballots, the county’s voter rolls and other voting system data, including logs showing who accessed the system. The Senate also had materials the cyber ninjas shared in the audit, including sheets used to tabulate votes and track anomalies, as well as data from county election management systems and vote tabulation machines.
CyberNinja pulled data from Dominion Voting Systems machines used by the county in 2020, so the FBI likely has that material. Trump falsely claimed after the election that Dominion voting machines were hacked and switched to register votes for him as votes for Biden. Since taking office, the Trump administration has sought to access Dominion machines from other locations. Fox News and Newsmax settled defamation lawsuits with Dominion after making similar claims, agreeing to pay the company millions of dollars.
Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, who served as secretary of state during the 2021 audit, said in an interview with ProPublica that it is unclear what happened to the records in the five years after they left the county’s hands.
“I don’t think anyone should have any confidence in what will emerge from what is turned over to the FBI,” Hobbs said.
Maricopa County’s 2020 election results have been repeatedly confirmed by both the county’s post-election manual tally and multiple audits conducted by independent firms contracted by the county. Courts have dismissed several lawsuits brought by Trump’s lawyers alleging fraud.
The CyberNinja review also concluded that Biden won, but it drew heavy criticism from the start for both its methodology and partisanship.
One of the auditors in charge is Heather Honey, who currently holds a key post in the Trump administration as the assistant secretary for election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security. The contractor conducted the review without county or Senate officials present, and only observers from Hobbs’ office were allowed as the court demanded more transparency.
A report from the Secretary of State’s Office found that company employees made errors in recounting votes cast in the presidential election, keeping three separate tabulation sheets for each batch of ballots, often reflecting different totals. They also produced black and blue pens when taking pictures of ballots, raising concerns among observers about possible tampering. The contractor sent data collected from vote tabulation machines to a shed in Montana for analysis, but did not say how or if it protected the data from hacking.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in an interview that the contractor’s sloppy procedures made it unlikely that a court would accept records turned over to the FBI as evidence proving fraud in the 2020 vote.
“It’s easy to poke holes in these things,” Fontes said.
Cyber ninjas can sometimes misinterpret mundane aspects of the election process as signs of fraud. Maricopa County announced that it received 74,000 more mail-in ballots than mailed them. However, there was a simple explanation for this discrepancy. This is because the ballots had not been sent out. It was handed out to voters at early voting locations.
Ken Bennett, a Republican who serves as the audit liaison for the Arizona Senate and is a former Arizona secretary of state, said in an interview that he believes the county’s original election results were correct.
“The only evidence I found of a mistake the county made was a small mistake that had nothing to do with whether the county produced accurate results,” Bennett said.
