The FBI has secretly obtained a massive tranche of voting records from Maricopa County, Arizona — home to Phoenix and the state's largest population center — using a grand jury subpoena, multiple sources familiar with the probe told Just the News. The move signals a significant expansion of the bureau's criminal investigation into suspected election irregularities, which began last month with the dramatic raid on a Fulton County, Georgia election warehouse and the seizure of 700 boxes of 2020 ballots.
The bureau has now received terabytes of electronic election data from Maricopa County, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. Critically, the subpoena covers records from multiple elections — including both 2020 and 2024 — suggesting the FBI's inquiry is not narrowly focused on a single cycle but is instead examining a broader pattern of potential irregularities over time.
Arizona State Senate President Warren Petersen confirmed on Monday that his chamber had received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to the Arizona Senate's 2020 audit of Maricopa County.
"Late last week I received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records relating to the Arizona State Senate's 2020 audit of Maricopa County. The FBI has the records," Petersen wrote on X.
A 2024 Election Report That Congress Never Released
One of the key catalysts for the Arizona subpoena, according to sources familiar with the investigation, was an observer report filed jointly by Republican and Democratic election monitors who were present at a Maricopa County warehouse on election night in November 2024. The observers reported seeing blank and filled-out absentee ballots stored together in the same location — a significant irregularity — and documented their findings with photographs. Sources described the facility as heavily guarded and said ballots from multiple states' elections were present at the location.
Despite the potentially explosive nature of the report, Congress has never publicly released it. However, House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil recently hinted at its significance in an interview, making clear that congressional investigators are actively working through observer reports submitted from across the country.
"We're digging back through those reports that were submitted by our election observers that were deployed across the country," Steil said. "We have reports documenting instances that occurred in Arizona and across the country, and we are reviewing them 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."
Sources told Just the News that the joint observer report — along with several other findings — served as one of the primary foundations for the FBI's grand jury subpoena in Arizona. The bureau is expected to execute searches and issue subpoenas in additional states beyond Georgia and Arizona in the coming weeks.
Arizona's Long History of Election Concerns
The FBI's interest in Maricopa County did not emerge from a vacuum. Concerns about ballot distribution and counting in Arizona — and Maricopa County specifically — stretch back more than a decade, predating the current political climate. Notably, Democrats were among the early complainants as the state shifted to a predominantly mail-in ballot system.
More recently, those concerns have been raised loudly by Republicans, including President Trump, former gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake, and now-U.S. Representative Abe Hamadeh. Following the 2020 election, the Arizona State Senate launched a comprehensive audit of Maricopa County's election processes — one of the most extensive post-election reviews ever conducted at the state level.
The audit's findings were striking. Among its most alarming conclusions was an estimate that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures may have been counted in Maricopa County without being properly reviewed or "cured" — more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches that the county itself had acknowledged required curing. If accurate, that figure alone would dwarf the margin of victory in many statewide races.
Democrats and Maricopa County officials have disputed those findings, arguing the concerns are overblown. Republicans counter that significant vulnerabilities in the system remain unaddressed — a debate that continues to shape planning for the 2026 election cycle.
The Georgia Connection
The Arizona subpoena follows the FBI's January 28 raid on the Fulton County Election Hub in Georgia, where agents seized 700 boxes of election records including physical ballots from the 2020 presidential election. In the affidavit supporting that raid, FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans told the court that the bureau has "substantiated" significant irregularities in how votes were counted in Georgia's largest county and is investigating whether those failures were intentional violations of 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."
The legal standard the FBI is applying is straightforward and significant: it does not matter whether the irregularities were outcome-determinative. If they were intentional, they constitute violations of federal law — full stop.
Maricopa County in Turmoil
The FBI's subpoena arrives at a moment of considerable internal conflict within Maricopa County's election administration. The county's newly elected Election Recorder Justin Heap and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors have been locked in a bitter legal dispute over control of election operations, including litigation over a Shared Services Agreement governing how the Recorder's Office and the board divide election administrative responsibilities.
Heap made 170 proposed changes to the board's draft agreement, calling it his "final offer." The board declined to accept his terms, and Heap filed a lawsuit to, in his words, "reclaim the legal authority afforded to the County Recorder under Arizona law." The two sides eventually reached a new agreement in February granting Heap full control over early voting plans while the board retained authority over funding, staffing, contracts, and Election Day operations. But tensions remain high as both sides continue to feud over early voting planning ahead of 2026.
The internal dysfunction within Maricopa County's election administration only adds urgency to the FBI's investigation. An election system riven by institutional conflict, with a documented history of irregularities and a fresh federal grand jury subpoena now in play, is exactly the kind of situation that demands independent federal scrutiny.
For years, questions about the integrity of elections in Maricopa County were dismissed as partisan noise. The FBI's quiet but sweeping expansion of its election probe into Arizona suggests federal investigators are taking those questions very seriously indeed.
The FBI's election integrity investigation is ongoing. Sources indicate the bureau is expected to expand its subpoenas and searches to additional states in the coming weeks.
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03.09.2026