'Staggeringly ignorant': Maricopa County rebuts Cyber Ninjas' charge that mail-in ballots should not have been sent

The Arizona Secretary of State states that voters can request mail-in ballots to be sent to a temporary address.
When they cast their vote, it will be tied to their previous residence.

Cyber Ninjas falsely suggests that such votes are illegal.

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Republican-led Maricopa County refuted claims by Arizona's controversial, partisan electoral review that more than 23,000 ballots were not eligible for casting during the 2020 election.

Cyber Ninjas' long-awaited report did not contain any evidence of votes being altered or ballots made from Chinese bamboo. The company's founder Doug Logan had claimed that the election was "rigged". However, Cyber Ninjas found no evidence to support this claim and suggested that there were still wrongdoing.

Cyber Ninjas "critical finding" was that 233.344 postal ballots were cast by voters who did not reside at the address they had on file. The company claimed that these voters "shouldn't have received their ballots via mail because they had changed residences," suggesting that they were wrongly forwarded at the new address. This claim was amplified by a spokesperson for former President Donald Trump.

However, this is false.

The office of Maricopa County Registerer Stephen Richer stated that a Republican was elected to November 2020. All election materials (including ballots) must be marked "Do Not Forward Return Service Required" according to law. Returning ballots will initiate the process to remove the person from the voter rolls.

Sometimes people move within weeks of an election. They can request that their ballots be sent to a temporary address. Maricopa County reports that 20,933 voters did this in 2020.

What about the rest? For those who have been in the military or deployed overseas, and for other Americans who reside in another country but call the Phoenix metropolitan area home, they must list their "address" to be eligible to vote in a federal election. According to the Federal Voting Assistance Program "Your voting residence" is the address you had immediately before leaving the United States.

The county wrote on its official Twitter account that "Cyber Ninjas still do not understand this is legal according to federal election law." It is either deliberately misleading or shockingly ignorant to label it a critical concern.