Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently subpoenaed records from the Arizona Senate related to the exhaustively reviewed 2020 election in Maricopa County, marking another move by President Donald Trump’s administration to relitigate an election that he lost.State Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, announced Monday on social media that he had received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to the chamber’s controversial review of the county’s election results, which was conducted in 2021. That review ultimately concluded that former President Joe Biden had indeed won in the county. The news comes several weeks after the FBI searched an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, for records tied to the 2020 election, which Trump has long insisted was stolen from him. Such allegations from Trump and his allies have consistently been rejected by courts, officials in the first Trump administration, election officials, and experts after multiple audits and reviews found Trump lost the election to Biden.Jason Berry, a spokesperson for Maricopa County, said county supervisors had not received any subpoena related to election records from the FBI, but that they “will cooperate if that were to occur.” Spokesperson Judy Keane of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said her agency hadn’t received a subpoena, either.That suggests that the FBI obtained records that were largely already public, and did not receive documents from more recent elections. Most documents pertaining to the legislative audit of the 2020 election were turned over to news outlets and advocacy groups that sued for public access to them in the wake of the review, which found no evidence of substantial voter fraud during the election and slightly increased Biden’s margin of victory.Two former county elected officials — Republicans Bill Gates and Stephen Richer — confirmed to Votebeat that the county, which is the most populous in the state and a key election battleground, didn’t hand over any election records from the 2022 or 2024 elections to the Arizona Legislature, beyond what lawmakers may have individually obtained via public records requests.Gates, who now works as the executive director of Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, said the only non-public materials that could have been turned over to federal officials by the state Senate are those covered by legislative or attorney-client privilege. He added that such privileges likely encompass only a small number of records.But the records that the county turned over to lawmakers and auditors included data downloaded from hard drives used during the 2020 election. That included ballot images, which the FBI also obtained from Fulton County.Under state law, the county treasurer must securely store physical ballots, and then destroy them two years after an election, which means Maricopa County no longer possesses the physical ballots from 2020. It’s unclear, though, how that statute applies to ballot images, which are digital records, or how it applies if the holder of such records isn’t the county treasurer.Kim Quintero, a spokesperson for Petersen, did not respond to a request for comment on whether the Arizona Senate retained the ballot images and if so, whether it had handed them over to the FBI.She declined to comment in response to an earlier request on exactly what records were sought by the FBI’s subpoena, whether all of those documents still existed and were handed over, and when the subpoena was received and fulfilled.Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.
