(Sarah Roderick-Fitch, The Center Square) More than 600,000 voter files in Arizona’s largest county were hacked before the 2020 elections, with prosecutors refusing to pursue charges, according to declassified documents released Thursday.
The case stems from a 2020 Maricopa County voter registration site, where a suspected hacker exploited the county’s voter records by “illegally” extracting 633,000 records, including 930 with sensitive information.
Following the incident, the FBI thoroughly investigated, handing over the information to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County, Arizona, Attorney’s Office and the Pinal County, Arizona, Attorney’s Office, but all declined to prosecute the case, leading to it being closed in 2023.
The suspect, who authorities said confessed, claimed to have discovered the vulnerability on Maricopa County’s voter registration record servers, using a PowerShell script to extract the data and store it at his home; however, he destroyed the files before an FBI raid.
A White House official told The Center Square that the suspect expressed remorse for the hacking and investigators don’t believe the suspect was working with any foreign agents, nor were any ballots or voter registrations altered.
According to declassified documents, the suspect “first discovered a vulnerability” on the county’s recorder’s office website “after entering his own voter registration information.” The suspect “noticed his voter ID appeared in the URL.” He continued by testing the “vulnerability by entering several seven-digit numbers into the URL path resulting in access to different … registration information.”
The suspect ran the PowerShell script “up until around November 2, 2020,” when the county “fixed their firewall.” The suspect admitted that “he probably would have continued the activity” if the issue hadn’t been fixed.
“[The suspect] knew Maricopa County was aware of his activity because his script provided an error message and could no longer generate requests. Between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 voter registration records were extracted to text files stored on [the suspect’s] personal hard drives, which he estimated to be four gigabytes of data. Records were also saved to [the suspect’s] Google Cloud account,” according to declassified documents.
The latest revelation comes as the Trump administration moves to declassify a trove of documents and evidence highlighting election vulnerabilities, including hacking, exploration and foreign interference from adversaries such as China and Iran.
During a primetime address last month, President Donald Trump accused China of “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.”
“That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening,” the president said during his address.
“This data loss presents on unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence event shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project, compounding the travesty.”
Among the evidence, Trump claims China engaged in election meddling, accusing China of compromising “tens of millions of voters’ data in 18 states [which have] have been bought, stolen, or hacked by China.”
“Starting during the 2020 election cycle, China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history,” Trump added.
The president says the CIA obtained information pointing to China’s meddling in U.S. elections, claiming, “for many years Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including voting machines and ballot county systems.”
He also accused the “deep state” within the federal government of burying the evidence.
In addition, Trump cited that the Department of Homeland Security found that approximately 278,000 non-citizens “are registered to vote in federal elections,” adding, “since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that.”
Trump warned that “hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking, manipulation and corruption.”
The Trump administration is using the evidence in a push for passage of the Save America Act, calling on Americans to pressure their members of Congress to approve the landmark legislation that would require voter ID and curb mail-in ballots. The legislation’s fate now lies in the hands of the Senate, with many Republican senators pushing to delay or cancel the August recess to pass the legislation ahead of November’s midterm elections.
