by WorldTribune Staff, August 6, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
A hacker extracted more than 600,000 voting records from Maricopa County, Arizona prior to the 2020 election, newly declassified documents show.
The suspect used a PowerShell script to exploit a vulnerability on Maricopa County’s voter registration record servers and stored the hacked data at his home. The suspect, who confessed to the hacking operation, destroyed the files before an FBI raid, the documents show.
According to the documents, the suspect “first discovered a vulnerability” on the Maricopa County recorder’s office website “after entering his own voter registration information.” The suspect “noticed his voter ID appeared in the URL.” He continued by testing the “vulnerability by entering several seven-digit numbers into the URL path resulting in access to different … registration information.”
The suspect ran the PowerShell script “up until around November 2, 2020,” when the county “fixed their firewall.” The suspect admitted that “he probably would have continued the activity” if the issue hadn’t been fixed.
“[The suspect] knew Maricopa County was aware of his activity because his script provided an error message and could no longer generate requests. Between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 voter registration records were extracted to text files stored on [the suspect’s] personal hard drives, which he estimated to be four gigabytes of data. Records were also saved to [the suspect’s] Google Cloud account,” according to the documents.
The FBI said it thoroughly investigated the incident and handed over the information to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, and the Pinal County Attorney’s Office. All declined to prosecute the case, leading to it being closed in 2023.
A White House official told The Center Square that the suspect expressed remorse for the hacking and investigators don’t believe the suspect was working with any foreign agents, nor were any ballots or voter registrations altered.
During a primetime address last month, President Donald Trump accused China of “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.”
“That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening,” the president said.
“This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence event shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project, compounding the travesty.”
Trump has also noted that the Department of Homeland Security found approximately 278,000 non-citizens “are registered to vote in federal elections,” adding, “since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that.”
Trump warned that “hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking, manipulation and corruption.”
Freedom Rocks! Until It Is Gone
Documents: 600,000 voter records hacked in Maricopa County, Arizona before 2020 election added by Editor Two on
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