Clay Parikh

Early Life and Education

Clay Uday Parikh was born on December 10, 1962. He graduated from J.O. Johnson High School in 1981.

Military Service

Parikh joined the United States Marine Corps in June 1980. By September 1987, he had attained the rank of sergeant and was serving with the 2nd Marine Division at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, where he was awarded the Good Conduct Medal. In 1994, he served a tour of duty at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, at the rank of staff sergeant. He completed his military service in 2003.

Cybersecurity Career

Following his military service, Parikh worked in cybersecurity. In testimony related to election litigation, he stated that he had audited classified systems for Northrop Grumman and had worked with NASA, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and voting machine companies. The full scope and timeline of his cybersecurity work is based primarily on his own courtroom statements.

Election Litigation

Parikh became publicly prominent through his involvement as an expert witness in election-related legal proceedings. In 2022, he testified in a lawsuit filed by former television presenter Kari Lake challenging Arizona's use of electronic voting machines in the gubernatorial election. During that testimony, Parikh claimed that Arizona's 19-inch ballots had been printed on 20-inch paper, though he offered no supporting evidence for the claim.

Parikh also testified in a separate lawsuit filed by the DeKalb County chapter of the Republican Party against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In that proceeding, he claimed to have obtained encryption keys for snapshots of Dominion Voting Systems's databases.

Special Government Employee

In February 2026, ProPublica identified Parikh as a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. According to reporting, he assisted lawyer Kurt Olsen in the FBI investigation into the 2020 presidential election. An affidavit related to a raid on the election office for Fulton County, Georgia, indicated that conservative researcher Kevin Moncla had asked Parikh to review the county's tabulator tapes from the 2020 election, and that Parikh's analysis was used to justify the raid.