Maricopa County assures voters elections are secure following tabulator key theft

Maricopa County has been scrambling this week to assure voters that its election systems are secure after a temporary worker stole an electronic tabulator key from the county’s Tabulation and Election Center on June 20.

The temporary worker accused of taking the key, Walter Ringfield Jr., 27, was arrested the following day, after police found the key when searching his residence, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said.

County Supervisor Bill Gates and Sheriff Russ Skinner during a Tuesday morning press conference worked to reassure voters that the county’s protocols and the quick thinking of its elections workers ensured that election security was not compromised ahead of the upcoming July 30 primary election.

“Their swift response helped safeguard democracy,” Skinner said of the county’s election workers.

Skinner praised the workers for their vigilance in noticing the key was missing on June 20, immediately watching surveillance footage to determine what happened to the key and confronting Ringfield, who said he hadn’t taken it. Workers then contacted law enforcement with their suspicions, since video footage allegedly showed him putting the key in his pocket.

Ringfield reportedly allowed elections workers to search his vehicle on Thursday evening, where they found a lanyard and security fob that had been taken from MCTEC, but not the tabulator key.

Ringfield initially told the workers who confronted him that he might have accidentally taken the key, as well as another fob, so that he could come back to clean up at Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center to potentially turn the temporary job into a permanent one.

But Skinner didn’t buy that story, calling Ringfield’s comments “erroneous.”

Ringfield began as a temporary worker at the tabulation center on June 3, according to Votebeat. Gates assured listeners that the county performs background checks on all its temporary and permanent workers, but Ringfield’s July 2023 charge for theft did not register on his check because he had entered a diversion program.

The theft cost the county around $19,000, because it had to reprogram all of the other tabulator keys and perform additional logic and accuracy testing on its tabulators to ensure the security of the July 30 primary.

“As far as the cost is concerned, all of my colleagues on the board of supervisors agree with me, you can’t put a price on democracy and election security,” Gates said during the press conference.

He added that as soon as workers discovered that the key was missing, they deactivated it. The keys are just a part of what Gates called a “multilayer process” to turn on the tabulators on Election Day and that a person could not turn on the tabulators with just the key alone.

“I do not expect this to have any impact whatsoever on the upcoming primary,” Gates said.

Investigators don’t have any evidence that anyone besides Ringfield was involved in the theft, Skinner said, but they plan to comb through his phone and computer to determine if he spoke to anyone about plans for the theft or offloading the key.

Both Gates and Skinner said they hoped that existing protocols at MCTEC which resulted in elections workers quickly noticing the key was missing and swiftly identifying the suspected thief would make voters more confident in the security of the elections process.

But Maricopa County has been plagued by conspiracy theories that elections have been stolen from Republican candidates, along with allegations that its elections aren’t secure since former President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Although some of the theories were debunked during and after the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of the 2020 election and others were thrown out of court in multiple challenges to the results of the 2022 election, that doesn’t stop some people from believing them.

“I certainly hope that people don’t take this incident to spin up new conspiracy theories, but that’s exactly why the sheriff and I are here today, to answer these questions, to address this,” Gates said.

But new conspiracy theories have already surfaced. Bryan Blehm, who represented Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake in her unsuccessful challenges to the results of the 2022 race for governor that she lost, is one of the people sharing them on social media.

The Scottsdale divorce attorney’s law license is set to be suspended for 60 days for lying to the Arizona Supreme Court about “illegal ballots” being counted in Maricopa County in 2022.

“Maricopa County voters, your elections are unsecure and so long as your elected officials maintain their current policies, your vote will not matter,” Blehm posted on X, formerly Twitter, on June 24.

He went on to accuse Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, of wanting to “kill” the story about the stolen key, and accused Richer of creating this situation as a “deepfake.”

“Is this a setup to convince courts that our elections need more secrecy?” Blehm posted on X.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley issued a statement on Tuesday saying that the RNC and the Arizona Republican Party sent attorneys and observers to MCTEC to “gather information and promote transparency” in regards to the theft.

“The RNC and AZGOP have a long history of engaging in Maricopa County election issues both in the field and in the courtroom, and (Thursday’s) events are an example of our election integrity program’s capacity to provide real-time legal response when issues arise at tabulation centers,” Whatley said in the statement. “This incident raises serious questions about election security in Arizona that must be answered — we will be constructively engaged with Maricopa County officials to ensure that the remedies to this security breach sufficiently address our concerns.”

Ringfield was briefly registered to vote in Maricopa County as a Democrat for 11 days in 2016, but has otherwise been an independent since first registering to vote in the county in 2015 when he was 19 years old, according to the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office.

In early 2023, Ringfield submitted a statement of interest to run for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, but did not turn in any signatures to make it on the ballot.

In a writing assignment that Ringfield penned in 2017 during his time at Arizona State University, he expressed his admiration for former Democratic President Barack Obama. The letter is posted online alongside other essays that Ringfield wrote while attending the university.

Additionally, Ringfield requested Democratic ballots for the 2020 and 2022 primary elections and has worked as a signature gatherer for various Democratic ballot measures over the past few years, including the Arizona Abortion Access Act and the Arizona Fair Elections Act.

He has also gathered signatures for the Make Elections Fair Act, which was championed by independents.

However, in posts to Truth Social from an account that used Ringfield’s full legal name and features photos of him, Ringfield shared multiple posts from right-wing news organizations like the Gateway Pundit and Newsmax, along with posts by far-right social media personalities.

His posts on the site over the past two years are chaotic and often difficult to decipher.

“The falling Angel with his demons and 8 sins who are undoubtedly holy,” he posted on April 14, with no additional context.

In some of them, Ringfield seems to be speaking directly to the owner of Truth Social, Donald Trump.

“Hey Don remember when I graduated I was under your presidency,” Ringfield posted on Dec. 16.

On July 28, Ringfield posted, “I will die for my country and state.”

Skinner promised during the press conference that his office would continue to work to determine if any more people were involved in the theft and, if so, to bring them to justice.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and X.