DOJ lawyer convicted of hacking election sites monitored voting in Maricopa County, Arizona

A Florida lawyer who previously pleaded guilty to illegally accessing election websites monitored the primary election in Maricopa County, Arizona for the Department of Justice (DOJ), according to records viewed by Democracy Docket.

Also part of the monitoring team was a DOJ lawyer who, Democracy Docket has reported, worked to help the Trump campaign’s bid to overturn the 2020 election. 

The involvement of the two lawyers in a state where President Donald Trump challenged the 2020 election results adds to concerns that the administration’s monitoring program for the fall — which it has said will include an unprecedented 1,000 monitors — is aimed not at protecting voting access, but at creating new barriers.

The government records, which were obtained by Democracy Forward*, provide the clearest confirmation yet that the Florida lawyer, David Michael Levin, worked as part of the DOJ’s 2026 election-monitoring operation.

Levin’s involvement in the Maricopa County monitoring was previously reported by CNN, citing the Democracy Forward documents. 

In August, Democracy Docket identified Levin in a video that showed him standing alongside senior Civil Rights Division attorney William F. Mohrman outside a Minneapolis polling place during the DOJ’s monitoring of Minnesota’s primary. In the footage, an election judge checked their credentials after a dispute over where the federal personnel could stand. 

At the time, the DOJ did not respond to questions about Levin’s role or title.

However, in a July 15 email to Maricopa County officials, Civil Rights Division trial attorney Anelise Powers provided a list of 12 people who would need authorization letters for the department’s monitoring operation.

Levin was listed by name among the “Department of Justice observers” and explicitly identified as one of the people “helping with our election monitoring effort in Maricopa County” ahead of the county’s July primary.

Maricopa County election officials subsequently issued Levin a credential identifying him as one of the department’s election “observers.”

Levin’s presence in the operation is notable because of his history of hacking an election system.

Florida authorities arrested him in 2016 on three felony counts of unauthorized computer access. Investigators said he used a SQL injection attack to obtain usernames and passwords from the Lee County Supervisor of Elections website, then used an election official’s credentials to enter restricted portions of the site as an administrator. Investigators also found evidence of attacks against the Florida Division of Elections website. 

The charges were ultimately reduced to two misdemeanors under a plea agreement. Levin served 20 days in jail and received two years of probation. The hacking did not involve voting machines or vote-tabulation systems, and officials said those systems remained secure. 

Levin later described what he did as political. At a plea hearing, he called it a “silly political stunt,” and in 2021 said he had been “curious about the integrity of elections” when he accessed the systems.

The new records also show that Christopher J. Gardner was part of the Maricopa County monitoring team. Democracy Docket previously exposed that Gardner, now a DOJ attorney, worked alongside Trump-aligned lawyers after the 2020 election and helped advise the Republican slate of alternate electors in Georgia. 

He now represents the DOJ in voting-related litigation. 

Levin’s involvement is particularly significant as the DOJ prepares a dramatically larger election-monitoring operation for the November midterms.

The Civil Rights Division has historically deployed attorneys and other personnel to polling places to protect voting access and enforce federal voting rights laws. This year, however, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has said the department plans to deploy roughly 1,000 personnel around the country — a force far larger than the Civil Rights Division itself.

Questions about who will make up that operation have become increasingly important as the DOJ recruits personnel from across the department. The Maricopa County records offer an unusually concrete glimpse at who has already been selected to participate.

And in Levin’s case, they resolve a central question left unanswered after Democracy Docket’s initial investigation: He was not simply standing alongside DOJ election personnel in Minnesota. Weeks earlier, a Civil Rights Division attorney had placed him on the department’s Maricopa County monitoring team, and local election officials had credentialed him as a Department of Justice observer.

*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias is the chair of Democracy Forward’s board.