Maricopa County, Arizona · Deployment case · August 2026
Maricopa County's cost per election cycle rose 86% since 2020. The ballots did not.
The 2020 cycle cost $21,568,933. The 2026 cycle is budgeted at $40,122,226. Across the same period November ballots cast moved from 2,089,563 to 2,078,460 — down half a percent. The county is buying the same output at nearly double the price, and the fastest-growing obligations are the ones that are procedural: per-envelope signature review, statutory cure workflows, daily party reporting, and chain-of-custody evidence.
What Operation Encrypt does
Two products, one platform, one boundary rule: the system proves what happened to a ballot package and never touches what is on the ballot.
Operation Encrypt builds custody and eligibility infrastructure for mail-ballot elections. The core product, MBLTS (Mail-Ballot Lifecycle Token Service), issues a one-time, opaque, election-scoped token to every outbound mail-ballot package and records every authoritative state transition — issuance, transport, receipt, validation, cure, acceptance or rejection, and privacy separation — as a signed, append-only event with a per-token hash chain and periodic signed Merkle-root anchors. An auditor can prove that no event was deleted, altered, or silently reordered. A voter can check administrative status without ever receiving anything that could function as a receipt for how they voted.
The second product, Blindfold, is a privacy-preserving eligibility layer that answers “is this person entitled to this ballot” while minimizing the identifying data that has to move between systems. Its classification under Arizona certification law is unresolved and we say so plainly on the product page.
Custody you can prove
Signed append-only events, per-token hash chains, Merkle-root anchoring, and an independent verifier. Chain-of-custody questions get answered continuously instead of by a retrospective audit.
The statutory workflow, as built
Cure states, deadline clocks, and the daily missing/mismatched-signature list owed to each qualified political party are first-class features, not reports someone assembles by hand. A.R.S. §16-550
Secrecy as an invariant
Four enforced trust boundaries. After privacy separation, no supported data path can join a voter or a token to an anonymised ballot record. No public ledger, no digital dependency for voters.
The curve
Cost per cycle against ballots cast
Cycle appropriation, both offices, versus November ballots cast. Bars are dollars; the sodium line is ballot volume on its own axis.
Cost per November ballot cast
Cycle appropriation divided by November ballots cast. 2026 uses the FY2027 adopted appropriation against 2024 turnout as the volume proxy — a modeled projection.
Derivations: 2020 cycle = $9,909,048 (Aug primary) + $11,659,885 (Nov general). 2026 cycle = $19,771,325 (Elections) + $20,350,901 (Recorder) in the FY2027 adopted budget. $13.95 = $28,996,887 ÷ 2,078,460. $5.58 = $11,659,885 ÷ 2,089,563. The 2026 per-ballot value assumes 2024-level November turnout and is therefore modeled, not sourced.
Why now
Three things happened in the county's own record that a custody-and-cure vendor should not ignore. In February 2025 the Board funded an independent outside review of election administration and technology covering physical security, chain of custody, and tabulation Maricopa County civic alert. In November 2025 the signature rejection rate nearly tripled year over year, to 5,903 of 704,548 ballots KJZZ. And in February 2026 the Board added $550,000 specifically for expanded bipartisan signature review Maricopa County, Feb 2026, on top of $581,332 of FY2025 funding for a Curing Technician and Signature Verification Specialist FY2025 Budget Book.
The county is currently paying for chain-of-custody assurance and signature adjudication in headcount and consulting engagements. Both are recurring. Neither produces a verifiable record after the fact.
Where a software contract lands
The Services object in the two offices' FY2024 actuals was $8,977,421 (Elections) and $14,220,296 (Recorder) FY2026 Budget Book. That is deep enough to absorb a seven-figure line without a new appropriation — but it clears both the $100,000 formal-solicitation threshold and the $500,000 Board-approval threshold Procurement FAQProcurement Code.
What we are proposing
We are proposing November 2026. The gating items are procurement, security review, integration and logic-and-accuracy testing, and we are prepared to run them in parallel rather than in sequence. The reason to start now is that every cycle this waits is another cycle decided on records that cannot be verified afterward. Scope, sequencing and the certification-classification question get settled with the county, not asserted here.
How to read the numbers on this site. Every Maricopa County figure — budgets, ballot volumes, statutory deadlines, vendor unit prices, procurement thresholds — carries an inline link to the primary document it came from and is marked Sourced. Figures describing Operation Encrypt's cost to deliver, pricing, deal sizing and margin are marked Modeled: they are internal planning estimates built on top of sourced compliance, insurance and unit-price anchors, and they are not quotes, offers, or proposals.
Derived values (a sourced numerator divided by a sourced denominator, or two sourced figures summed) are labelled derived and both inputs are linked. Nothing on this site is legal, accounting or procurement advice. The Arizona certification-classification question — whether a given component falls inside the statutory definition of a “voting system” under A.R.S. §16-442 — is unresolved and requires an Arizona election-law opinion before any bid.