Overview
- Security flaws in Maricopa County’s voter‑registration website were exploited from early October through about November 2, 2020, when a script scraped roughly 633,000 voter records from the public registration interface.
- FBI agents traced the activity to a Fountain Hills residence, interviewed the self‑described hobbyist who admitted writing the PowerShell script, and seized multiple hard drives and computers during a search warrant.
- The FBI presented its findings to federal and state prosecutors but the U.S. Attorney’s Office and several local prosecutor offices declined to bring charges in mid‑2021, and the FBI closed the case in 2023.
- Declassified memos say about 930 of the stolen files contained sensitive, non‑public data such as domestic‑violence victim flags, judges and law‑enforcement information, and there is no public evidence that ballots or registrations were changed.
- The documents were released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force and have been framed politically while prompting renewed scrutiny of county website security, data‑protection gaps, and decisions by prosecutors not to pursue the case.