The Trump administration has issued a subpoena for records tied to the Republican-led review of Arizona's Maricopa County ballots from the 2020 election won by President Joe Biden.
Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen said Monday that he had complied with the subpoena, which sought documents connected to the controversial 2021 audit commissioned by Senate Republicans. It comes after months of broader legal pressure from the Justice Department, which has been pushing Arizona and other states to hand over expansive voter and election data.
In January, the department sued Arizona, arguing that the state had failed to provide detailed voter roll information sought by federal officials. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has fought that effort, saying compliance would force his office to violate state and federal privacy protections.
The administration is pursuing two parallel tracks in Arizona. One is focused on current voter registration databases, and another is aimed at records from the state's discredited 2021 review of the 2020 results. That review, conducted by Cyber Ninjas under Republican Senate oversight, became a national symbol of post-election conspiracy politics. Yet when the final report was released, it failed to produce proof that Trump had actually won Maricopa County. In fact, the tally confirmed former President Joe Biden's victory there.
Arizona has remained central to Trump's efforts to revisit the 2020 election because it was one of the key battleground states he lost narrowly. The renewed federal interest is landing in a state where officials have already spent years fending off false fraud narratives. A later review by the Arizona attorney general's office also found no significant evidence of widespread fraud capable of changing the outcome, undercutting claims that the election had been stolen.
The Justice Department has defended its recent data demands nationally as part of an "election integrity" effort. In a January statement announcing lawsuits against Arizona and Connecticut, Attorney General Pamela Bondi said: "Accurate voter rolls are the foundation of election integrity, and any state that fails to meet this basic obligation of transparency can expect to see us in court." Fontes recently asked a federal judge to block the administration's demands for voter registration and election records, calling them unlawful.
Overall, the second Trump Justice Department has sued 29 states "for failure to produce their full voter registration lists upon request." In the January statement, Bondi added that the administration will "continue filing lawsuits to protect American elections."
Originally published on IBTimes
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