By Mary Jo Pitzl| Arizona Republic
For nearly two decades, working for both Republicans and Democrats, Ken Matta’s job was to ensure Arizona’s elections were secure. He checked the accuracy of election machines, boosted cybersecurity and built firewalls to protect other data in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
He is leaving his post as the state’s information security director just months before voting begins for the next major election, and Matta is both assured and worried.
“We have our layers of security,” Matta said. “They’re set up specifically so that if there is a bad actor or two, we can still trust the count of the vote.”
But, he added, “There’s going to be some hoopla, there’s going to be some chicanery. I feel it.”
Matta exudes the confidence of a professional deeply familiar with the intricacies of his work, knowing Arizona’s 2022 election will again attract the national spotlight. But the wave of distrust and disinformation since the 2020 election resulted in a loss for then-President Donald Trump is eroding faith in a process built on centuries of collaborative, bipartisan work, he said.
Trust the pros; ignore the politicians
Matta has worked in information security for a succession of five Arizona secretaries of state. His last day on the job was Friday and he is taking an election-related position in the private sector, lured by an offer that far eclipsed his state salary.
He wouldn’t say yet where he will be working. But he was quick to qualify it’s not with Dominion Voting Systems Corporation, the company that provided tabulation machines for Maricopa County’s 2020 election and became a target of unfounded conspiracy theories in Arizona and elsewhere.
His parting advice for voters still wary about the election process: Trust the professionals and tune out the politicians.
Arizona’s electoral history is solid, he said, despite ongoing suspicions and outright disbelief in the 2020 results, particularly in Maricopa County, where numerous audits, reviews and an ongoing investigation have not provided any evidence of widespread fraud.
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Before reworking the election system, proof of wide-scale problems must exist, Matta said.
“I’ve never seen an election without some sort of fraud — piecemeal fraud like the attorney general is prosecuting now,” he said, such as a woman who votes for her dead husband or a couple that votes in Arizona and in the state where they have a summer home.
“But I’ve never seen an election that I don’t trust the results of, in all of the elections I’ve worked in.”
As for those who continue to doubt the elections professionals who maintain there was no widespread fraud, he said this in a long Twitter thread as he announced his departure from the Secretary of State’s Office:
“So go ahead and hire a pet groomer to wire your house and get your butcher working on your car and keep thinking politicians are telling you the truth,” he wrote. “See where that all gets you.”
What he saw at the Senate review:
