Controversial Arizona Recounters Won’t Pound On Voters’ Doors After DOJ Complaint

Arizona’s Republican-run state Senate is pulling the plug — for now — on part of its controversial ballot recount plan that would have involved canvassers knocking on residents’ doors to ask them about their votes.

The president of the state Senate also promised that if canvassers are sent out at some point in the future, they would not be armed.

The move came after a Department of Justice official expressed fears about the recount operation, particularly the face-to-face voter interrogations. She warned in a letter that the move risked violating civil rights and intimidating voters.

“Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Pamela Karlan, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote in a letter Wednesday to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann.

“Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future,” she added.

Several other attorneys also sent a letter to auditors last month warning they would consider suing if canvassers were dispatched to knock on doors, arguing it would violate laws, including the anti-Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which prohibits voter intimidation, the Arizona Republic reported.

In a reply on Friday, Fann told Karlan in a letter that the Senate would “indefinitely defer” that part of the audit.

Fann left open the possibility that the Senate could undertake such canvassing in the future, but said voters and precincts would not be chosen based on race, ethnicity, gender, party affiliation or any other legally protected status. The audit crew would “not carry a firearm or other weapon when conducting canvassing,” Fann stated in her letter. 

Yet Karlan had also expressed further concerns that the ballots aren’t secure as they are handled unsupervised by a private company with free access to voter information.

“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” Karlan wrote.

Fann was comfortable with ballot security protocols, she wrote Karlan.

The recount of 2.1 million votes of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, involves a highly partisan private company, Cyber Ninjas, with no experience in elections or ballots, hired by the state’s Republican Senate. Company owner Doug Logan, a conspiracy theorist and disciple of the “Stop the Steal” lie that the presidential election was rigged, retweeted messages months ago that any vote audit in Arizona would inevitably unearth hundreds of thousands of extra votes for Donald Trump.

One of the ballot auditors is a former state lawmaker who attended the Capitol riot. Former Arizona Rep. Anthony Kern’s own name appears on the ballots he’s recounting as both a candidate for reelection (he lost) and as an elector for Trump.

Like something out of a racist sci-fi fantasy, Logan’s company is examining ballots using ultraviolet light in a hunt for any “bamboo” from China in the ballots. Some experts fear use of the light could damage ballots.

A reporter has witnessed boxes of ballots shuffled around with no discernible audit organization. Auditors were also seen with black and blue pens in their hands, which can be used to mark and change ballots.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is now under guard following multiple death threats after she criticized the partisan “recount.” 

It’s been almost six months since Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey certified his state’s election results, which put Democrat Joe Biden ahead of then-President Trump by 10,457 votes. Biden edged out Trump by more than 2 percentage points ― or about 45,000 votes ― in Maricopa County. 

Since then, multiple election audits have been conducted in Maricopa County, which is home to most of Arizona’s voters ― but none of the audits has revealed any fraud or other irregularities.

The current audit is only examining races Democrats won in the county.

Trump has asked about the Arizona recount “multiple times a day,” The Washington Post has reported. He hinted to guests at Mar-A-Lago that votes that suddenly appear for him in the state could be the road back to reinstatement at the White House.