Ross D. Franklin/AP
- According to the Arizona Secretary of State, voters can have mail-in ballots sent to a temporary address.
- That vote, when cast, will be linked to their previous residence.
- Cyber Ninjas falsely implies such votes are illegal.
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Republican-led Maricopa County on Friday rebutted claims from the company behind Arizona's controversial, partisan election review that more than 23,000 mail-in ballots should not have been cast during the 2020 election.
In its long-anticipated report, Cyber Ninjas did not find any evidence that votes were changed or that ballots were made out of Chinese bamboo. But the company – whose founder, Doug Logan, had previously claimed the election was "rigged" – appears to have tried to save face among its right-wing supporters by intimating that there was still wrongdoing.
One of Cyber Ninjas "critical findings" was that 23,344 mail-in ballots were cast by people who no longer resided at their address on file. These voters, the company asserted, "should not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved," suggesting that they had been wrongly forwarded to the voters' new address, a claim amplified by the spokesperson for former President Donald Trump.
But that is not true.
According to the office of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican elected in November 2020, "As required by law, all election materials, such as ballots, are marked 'Do Not Forward – Return Service Requested.'" Returned ballots initiate a process of removing the person from the voter roll.
But sometimes people move in the weeks before an election; they are allowed to request that their ballot be sent to a temporary address. According to Maricopa County, 20,933 voters did so in 2020.
As for the rest? Former Maricopa County residents who are in the military and deployed overseas - and other Americans who live abroad but previously called the Phoenix metropolitan region home - have to list their "address in the state in which [they] were last domiciled" in order to participate in a federal election, according to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, "Your voting residence is your address in the state in which you were last domiciled, immediately prior to leaving the United States."
"Cyber Ninjas still don't understand this is legal under federal election law," the county posted on its official Twitter account. "To label it a 'critical' concern is either intentionally misleading or staggeringly ignorant."