Just a few weeks after President Donald Trump called for a special prosecutor to investigate election irregularities in the 2020 election, another agency is announcing its own investigation.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) new Directors Initiatives’ Group (DIG) plans to look into election vulnerabilities in the 2020 and 2022 elections, which may include Arizona’s elections.
According to Just the News, DIG, which is under the leadership of ODNI Director Tulsi Gabbard, also intends to investigate the Russia collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop, and the Biden administration’s labeling of political opponents as “domestic terrorists.”
DIG is likely interested in Arizona’s 2022 election since many believe Trump’s appointee, Kari Lake, and Representative Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ-08), who Trump endorsed, wrongly lost their statewide races for governor and attorney general. Both Lake and Hamadeh have remained quite vocal about the wrongdoing.
Hamadeh posted on X last month, “2020 was rigged & stolen. In Arizona the machines ‘failed’ on Election Day in 2022. Our elections are compromised – it’s why I’ve introduced legislation in Congress to codify President Trump’s Election Integrity Executive Order.”
Rasmussen Reports conducted an exit poll after the 2022 election and found that voters chose Lake over Democrat Katie Hobbs by a margin of 8 points. Polls leading up to the election also had her ahead. Similarly, the exit poll showed Hamadeh defeated Democrat Kris Mayes by 6 points, and Mark Finchem defeated Democrat Adrian Fontes for secretary of state by 3 points. In the 2020 presidential race, 538 ranked the pollster fifth in accuracy out of 26 polling companies.
Several election integrity groups have conducted extensive research into wrongdoing in those elections. The We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA) found that all 444 voting machine tabulators in Maricopa County in 2022 failed to meet the minimal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) standards, experiencing ballot reading errors that exceeded the allowable 0.2 percent error rate. Despite litigation from Lake, courts declined to order a new election.
Due to 19-inch ballot images that were erroneously printed on 20-inch ballots at the vote centers during the 2022 election, the tabulators could not read the ballots and rejected them, affecting mainly Republicans who vote on Election Day, unlike Democrats who tend to vote mostly by mail. Analyzing the voter turnout, it was estimated that over 300 percent more Republicans than Democrats were disenfranchised. The ballots were put in “Door 3” containers, where most believe they were never actually tabulated.
WPAA’s Shelby Busch told the Arizona Senate’s Election Committee that 64 percent of the 4,021 people waiting in long lines of 85 or more people due to the mishap at the time the polls closed at 7 p.m. last fall never got to vote.
WPAA stated it believes thousands of votes for Hamadeh were not counted in the 2022 election, including 9,000 provisional ballots that have since been destroyed, as it has been over 22 months. Many voters found when they went to vote that their voter registration had been mistakenly transferred to another county, so they were forced to vote a provisional ballot, which was not counted. Hamadeh lost by 280 votes to Mayes.
Zach Chira, the assistant county manager who previously served as chief of staff to former Supervisor Bill Gates, said the voters didn’t check the opt-out box for automatically updating their address when they conducted a transaction at the Department of Motor Vehicle Services, like re-registering a motor vehicle in another county. However, despite the massive voter disenfranchisement, no court would order a new election.
The Arizona Senate conducted an independent audit of the 2020 election, which was thwarted due to Maricopa County officials refusing to comply. Finchem, who was a state representative at the time, said he had heard from a credible source that Democrats had added 35,000 fraudulent votes.
Maricopa County mostly ignored four repeat requests for data and equipment from Jennifer Wright, the Election Integrity Unit civil attorney for the attorney general’s office. Much of the evidence appears to indicate violations of the state’s Election Procedures Manual, which are classified as Class 2 misdemeanors. While not all of the alleged violations can be described as fraud, many of them can be characterized as alleged criminal activity.
One of the biggest allegations in both Maricopa County’s 2020 and 2022 elections was that voters’ signatures on their mail-in ballot envelopes did not match the signatures on record, often due to different handwriting or a completely different name. In some cases, the signature was missing altogether. In other cases, the signatures were similar to those of other voters, suggesting that one person was likely signing multiple affidavits fraudulently.
Former State Senator Sonny Borrelli presented a report after the 2022 election regarding this issue. His team of researchers found 17,822 signature mismatches — more than the margin that Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in Arizona’s presidential election, 10,457 votes. A video went viral showing “User 134,” a Level 1 Maricopa County signature reviewer, caught on video approving signature matches in less than one second each.
Additionally, over 298,942 early ballots delivered to Runbeck Election Systems, Maricopa County’s third-party ballot processing vendor, did not have the required chain of custody records, a class 2 misdemeanor.
DIG’s investigation may also include Arizona’s 2024 election, where Lake lost the Senate race to Ruben Gallego. Two reputable polls conducted immediately prior to the election showed Lake in the lead.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said during a press conference after the 2024 election, “People with entire trash bags full of voter registration forms” dropped off 97,000 voter registration forms on the day of the deadline, October 7, and 40,000 of them were potentially “fraudulent,” “damaged,” “torn,” or “written illegibly.” He added that some “tried to register Mickey Mouse, Jerry Seinfeld, Donald Duck, among others…” He said it was the largest drop in registration forms ever in Maricopa County’s history.
In June, Hamadeh asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Maricopa County and Runbeck into claims that the vendor breached protocols during the 2024 election. Hamadeh said he’d received “credible reports indicating that boxes of printed blank ballots from several western states were improperly mixed in a warehouse with returned voted mail ballots that were in the process of being prepared for tabulation.”
Two state legislators demanded an investigation by Mayes into Pima County’s 2024 election, regarding “disturbing allegations” that the county encouraged convicted felons to vote, and how the office handled undeliverable ballots. Previous reports from the Pima Integrity Project found that numerous laws were violated in the county’s 2020 and 2022 elections, declaring that there was “malfeasance, incompetence, and possible criminal activity.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to .
The post Federal Government to Investigate Election Irregularities, Possibly in Arizona first appeared on The Arizona Sun Times.