Citing security concerns, officials in Maricopa County have refused to hand over a county router to the team conducting an audit of the 2020 election on behalf of the Arizona state legislature.
County officials sent a letter Monday to Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state in Arizona who is serving as the Republican-led state Senate’s audit liaison, explaining that they could not give the audit team access to county router information that was subpoenaed by the state Senate.
Doing so would pose a “significant security risk to law enforcement data utilized by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, as well as numerous federal agencies,” Deputy County Attorney Joseph La Rue claimed in the letter, obtained by Just The News.
“We had previously believed that the risk would be eliminated by redacting the law enforcement data on the routers and not producing it,” La Rue said.
“But we were informed that redaction did not eliminate the risk,” he continued. “We also learned that if criminal elements or others gained access to this data, it might compromise county and federal law enforcement efforts and put the lives of law enforcement personnel at risk.”
The Senate’s subpoena included requests for “access or control of all routers and tabulators used in connection with the administration of the 2020 election,” along with “the public IP of the [routers],” according to Bennett.
A state court upheld the state Senate’s subpoena earlier this year and ordered Maricopa County to comply with it.
“I don’t know why the routers in a tabulation and election center have anything to do with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office or numerous federal agencies,” Bennett said, adding that “the sheriff’s department and the Maricopa County tabulation and election center aren’t even in the same building.”
County officials claimed in a statement that information contained in the routers “can be used as blueprints to intercept sensitive county data” across more than 50 different departments.
“The routers the Senate subpoena commanded the county produce support all of these departments, not just elections operations,” county spokesperson Fields Moseley said. “This includes critical law enforcement data that, by law, cannot be disclosed, as well as Maricopa County residents’ protected health information and full social security numbers.”
