A Palm Beach, Florida, elections volunteer was arrested for stealing computer equipment encrypted access key ahead of a special election where a Democrat won by 800 votes.
John Panicci was arrested on Friday for taking sensitive computer equipment and other supplies on March 19 ahead of the March 24 special election.
As previously reported, a Democrat flipped a Florida state house district that includes President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Emily Gregory won state house district 87 in last Tuesday night’s special election.
President Trump won this district by 11 points in 2024.
Last Monday, ahead of the election, President Trump endorsed Republican Jon Maples for state house district 87.
However, Emily Gregory defeated Republican Jon Maples last Tuesday night.
NBC Miami reported:
A man accused of stealing election computer equipment in Palm Beach County was arrested on Saturday, authorities said.
John Panicci was charged with taking damaged computer equipment, supplies/electronic devices.
According to detectives, on Friday, they arrived at the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office after receiving reports that sensitive computer equipment had been stolen.
During their investigation, detectives said that on March 19, the Elections Office was doing a training session for volunteers who were going to help with the election scheduled on March 24.
Detectives said that during the training session, Panicci stole an encrypted access key from a voter registration terminal.
The key that Panacci allegedly took was programmed only for the training databases, but there were concerns that if someone else could reverse engineer the encryption, they could then use it on a voter registration kiosk for malicious purposes.
