Voter files in Maricopa County, Arizona, were obtained illegally before the 2020 presidential election, according to records released on Aug. 6 by the White House.
Authorities discovered that 633,000 voter files had been exfiltrated from the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office just before the election, according to logs from the U.S. intelligence community and other documents. The voter files contained information such as people’s names, birth dates, and addresses. About 930 of them included information on people such as domestic violence victims, judges, and law enforcement officers.
The man, who has not been publicly named, used to work for a city whose name was redacted in the FBI file. He went on to work for himself, fixing computers and removing viruses from machines. In 2020, he discovered a vulnerability on the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office website while registering to vote.
The man developed a program to obtain voter files from the website and ended up extracting between 1 million and 2 million files to his personal hard drives and an online account, he told investigators.
The man said he did not intend to sell the information. After he “realized the gravity of the situation,” he “became scared” and knew he would be visited by law enforcement, according to the interview summary.
The man told officials that he destroyed the files shortly before the FBI raided his house in Fountain Hills in November 2020.
The man said he regretted what he did and knew he had to deal with consequences for his actions.
There’s no evidence that any votes were changed in association with the incident, John Solomon, chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force, told reporters on a call.
The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
