FBI secretly seizes election records from Arizona’s largest county as voting probe expands

The FBI is expanding its criminal probe into suspected election irregularities, secretly obtaining a large tranche of voting records from Arizona’s largest county with a recent grand jury subpoena, multiple people familiar with the probe told Just the News.

The sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury probe, said FBI agents are receiving gigabytes of electronic election data from Maricopa County, about a month after the bureau first disclosed an investigation into election irregularities by raiding a warehouse near Atlanta and seizing ballots from the 2020 election conducted in Fulton County, Georgia’s largest metropolis.

Election irregularities in Arizona and elsewhere

The subpoena comes five years after the GOP-led Arizona state Senate conducted a lengthy investigation into the 2020 election and concluded there were significant irregularities.

More recently, the bureau was alerted to a report filed by Republican and Democrat election observers who believed they observed irregularities in November 2024 at a warehouse in Arizona where blank and filled-out absentee ballots were observed in the same location, according to the sources.

Congress has never released the report from the staffers who were sent to observe the 2024 election in Maricopa County, which includes Arizona’s largest city of Phoenix.

But House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil recently hinted at the significance of the report in an interview with the Just the News, No Noise television show.

“We’re digging back through those reports that were submitted by our election observers that were deployed across the country,” Steil said. “This is where working hand in glove with other federal government agencies is so important.”

“We have reports documenting instances that occurred in Arizona and across the country, and we are reviewing those in real time and working hand in glove with federal partners to make sure that the law was followed in every jurisdiction in the country,” he added.

FBI likely to expand ballot-related searches elsewhere

The sources said the joint report filed by one GOP and one Democratic observer who were in Maricopa County on election night 2024 included photos of the ballots and storage facility, which they described as heavily guarded and having ballots from multiple states’ elections.

Officials said that report was one of several foundations for the subpoena executed by the FBI in recent days.

Sources said the FBI is likely to execute searches and subpoenas in other states beyond Georgia and Arizona in coming weeks.

The bureau has been coy about the full extent of its probe, but the unsealed affidavit from its raid of Fulton County’s election center made clear the bureau is looking at possible violation of federal laws that require election administrators to follow state laws when sending out and counting ballots.

FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans told the court the bureau has "substantiated" some major irregularities in how votes were counted in Georgia's largest urban area in the aftermath of the 2020 election and is probing whether those failures were intentional efforts to violate federal election law.

"Some of those allegations have been disproven while some of those allegations have been substantiated, including through admissions by Fulton County," Evans wrote. "This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws."

Many of the substantiated allegations in Fulton County were previously reported by Just the News over the last five years based on its review of ballot records.

Audit suggested more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures

Concerns about election counting in Arizona, and specifically Maricopa County, stretch back more than a decade as the state moved to mostly mail-in ballots. In the old days, Democrats were the early complainants.

More recently, Republicans like President Donald Trump, former gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake and now U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh have raised concerns about the state’s ballot distribution and counting systems.

The Arizona Senate conducted a massive audit after the 2020 election affected by COVID-19 and concluded there were irregularities. One of the Senate’s most stunning findings was an estimate that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures may have been counted without being reviewed, or "cured" in Maricopa County, more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches requiring curing that had been acknowledged by the county.

You can read the full report on signature verification here.

The audit did little to resolve disputes, as Democrats and Maricopa County officials argue the concerns are overblown while Republicans say they fear there are still vulnerabilities. Those clashes continue into planning for the 2026 election.

Recently, Maricopa County’s new Election Recorder Justin Heap and the county Board of Supervisors have feuded over planning for the next election, including via litigation.

The Phoenix-based board passed a new draft of a Shared Services Agreement (SSA) last April, a formal contract detailing how the Recorder’s Office and the board will perform election administrative duties under Arizona law. After receiving the SSA agreement, Heap made 170 different changes to it and sent it back to the board, calling it his “final offer,” according to a Maricopa County news release.

However, Heap and the board could not come to an agreement on the SSA, so he filed a lawsuit against the board two months later. Heap said the lawsuit sought to “reclaim the legal authority afforded to the County Recorder under Arizona law and ensure that [his] office is not further deprived of the resources necessary to perform those duties to the fullest extent possible.”

On Feb. 17, the board passed a new SSA.

The new SSA permitted Heap to have full control over early-voting plans, while the board kept control over funding, staffing, contracts and Election Day operations.

“Since Mr. Heap has not provided a serious response to our latest SSA offer, we felt it was important to state publicly and transparently how we will go about navigating some of the most contentious issues between our respective offices so that we can ensure elections run smoothly and securely for Maricopa County voters,” Board Chair Kate Brophy McGee said.

The following week, board members sent a letter to Heap with their proposed early-voting plan despite giving him full control over it. “The Board of Supervisors strongly supports maintaining a comprehensive early in-person program consistent with prior practices,” the letter said.

Heap responded to the letter, saying that he had “serious concerns” about the board’s early voting plan. He said the proposal “makes voting inconvenient and inaccessible for a large number of Maricopa County voters.”

He told board members that he rejected their proposal because Arizona law “expressly authorizes the Recorder to establish early voting locations.”

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