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This week, when 2020 voting information from Maricopa County, Arizona, was handed over to the FBI, it might have seemed like a replay of the agency\u2019s late January raid<\/a> in Fulton County, Georgia.<\/p>\n Both are large counties in swing states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and both have long been targets of President Donald Trump\u2019s claims that that year\u2019s presidential election was stolen from him.<\/p>\n But the evidence collected from Maricopa County is fundamentally different, in ways that election experts say threaten the accuracy and integrity of the federal government\u2019s investigation.<\/p>\n In Fulton, the FBI took the actual ballots cast in the county\u2019s 2020 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 the county\u2019s vote, according to Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen<\/a>, the subpoena\u2019s recipient.<\/p>\n This material \u2014 which may have included scans and photos of ballots \u2014 was stored by the Senate, not the county. Maricopa County destroyed the original ballots after two years, as state law requires.<\/p>\n The firm hired by Senate Republican leaders to run the audit, the Cyber Ninjas, was funded by and took direction from Trump allies<\/a>. Its leader, Doug Logan, privately admitted in text messages obtained by journalists via public records requests that its ballot recounts were \u201cscrewy.\u201d County leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, and nonpartisan outside observers documented several ways Logan\u2019s team had failed to follow procedures to prevent tampering. (Logan didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n Several election experts, including some who watched the Arizona audit in person in 2021, said any investigation based on the Cyber Ninja data would be fatally flawed.<\/p>\n \u201cAccessing invalid data will only draw inaccurate conclusions and risk further degradation of public confidence,\u201d said Ryan Macias, a national elections technology consultant who observed the audit on behalf of the Arizona secretary of state\u2019s office.<\/p>\n The Department of Justice and White House did not answer questions from ProPublica on experts\u2019 concerns about the quality of the data and records produced under the subpoena. A spokesperson for the Arizona U.S. attorney\u2019s office declined to respond to questions about whether it was involved in the case, saying it was against policy to comment on grand jury subpoenas or proceedings.<\/p>\n Petersen, a Republican who helped launch the audit in 2021 and handed over the records to the FBI, didn\u2019t say under which court\u2019s authority the grand jury subpoena was issued or respond to a question on its basis. Neither Petersen nor a spokesperson for the Arizona Senate gave details on what exactly the FBI collected. The Senate has not released the subpoena.<\/p>\n The subpoena is the latest salvo in the Trump administration\u2019s unprecedented attempt to reinvestigate purported problems in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n The White House has tasked Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who tried to assist Trump in overturning his loss<\/a>, with helping to lead the criminal inquiry. Olsen helped initiate the Fulton County case, which is being overseen by Thomas Albus<\/a>, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, according to the supporting affidavit. It\u2019s not yet clear whether Olsen or Albus is involved in the Maricopa County investigation.<\/p>\n The Arizona audit began in April 2021, after the Senate\u2019s Republican leadership subpoenaed Maricopa County<\/a> for scans of all 2.1 million ballots, the county\u2019s voter rolls and other voting system data, such as logs showing who accessed the system. The Senate also had material that the Cyber Ninjas shared from the audit, such as sheets used to tally votes and track anomalies as well as data from the county\u2019s election management system and ballot tabulators.<\/p>\n Cyber Ninjas pulled data from the Dominion Voting Systems machines the county used in 2020, so the FBI presumably has that material. Trump falsely claimed after the election that Dominion voting machines had been hacked, switching votes for him to register as votes for Biden. The Trump administration has been trying to access Dominion machines<\/a> from other locations since he took office. Fox News<\/a> and Newsmax<\/a> settled defamation lawsuits with Dominion after making similar claims, agreeing to pay the company millions.<\/p>\n Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who was secretary of state during the 2021 audit, said in an interview with ProPublica that it\u2019s unclear what has happened to the records in the five years they have been out of the county\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone should have confidence in whatever comes out of whatever was turned over to the FBI,\u201d Hobbs said.<\/p>\n Maricopa County\u2019s 2020 election results have been confirmed repeatedly, both by the county\u2019s postelection hand-count and by multiple audits conducted by independent firms commissioned by the county<\/a>. Courts tossed out several cases filed by lawyers for Trump alleging fraud.<\/p>\n The Cyber Ninjas\u2019 review, which also concluded that Biden won, drew intense criticism from the get-go, both for its methodology and its partisanship.<\/p>\n One of the audit managers was Heather Honey, who now holds a key post<\/a> in the Trump administration as the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. The contractor conducted its review without county or Senate employees present and only allowed in observers from Hobbs\u2019 office after a court demanded more transparency.<\/p>\n The firm\u2019s workers made errors<\/a> recounting votes cast in the presidential race, keeping three separate tally sheets for each batch of ballots that often reflected different totals, a secretary of state\u2019s office report found. They also had black and blue pens out as they took photos of ballots, causing concern among observers<\/a> about the potential for tampering. The contractor sent data collected from ballot tabulators to a Montana cabin for analysis<\/a> and wouldn\u2019t say how \u2014 or if \u2014 it had protected the data from hacking.<\/p>\n Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in an interview that the contractor\u2019s sloppy procedures would make it unlikely a court would accept the records handed over to the FBI as evidence proving irregularities in the 2020 vote.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can easily poke holes in any of this stuff,\u201d Fontes said.<\/p>\n Cyber Ninjas sometimes mistook routine aspects of the election process as signs of wrongdoing. It announced that 74,000 more mail-in ballots had been cast in Maricopa County than had been sent out<\/a>. There was a simple explanation for the discrepancy, however: The ballots hadn\u2019t been sent out; they\u2019d been given to the voters by hand at early voting locations.<\/p>\n Ken Bennett, a Republican who was the Arizona Senate\u2019s liaison to the audit and is a former Arizona secretary of state, said in an interview that he thinks the county\u2019s original election results were correct.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only evidence I could find of mistakes made by the county were minor errors that had nothing to do with whether or not they came up with the accurate results,\u201d Bennett said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n