Members of the Conservative Political Action Conference recently announced the group intends to monitor ballot drop boxes in November in order to identify supposed illegal voters. State officials told TPM that the initiative, which was outlined to both the Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and the state Attorney General Kris Mayes in a letter last month, is merely another effort to cast doubt on the safety and integrity of the election system — and intimidate voters in the process.
In the letter, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp and Vice Chairman Bill Walton claimed they want to address “skepticism” following the “rapid implementation of drop boxes around the country during the COVID pandemic,” by placing monitors, who they say may have photographic or video equipment on hand, near drop boxes in certain Arizona counties.
Schlapp and Walton, who asserted that the purpose of monitoring drop boxes would actually be to “encourage—not discourage—voting,” asked to discuss the matter with Fontes and Mayes, according to the letter. The request, of course, sidesteps the fact that there are remarkably low numbers of fraudulent ballots cast via drop boxes in any given election, as multiple experts told TPM. And as we witnessed in 2020, ballot drop box monitoring does little besides create an environment of intimidation around voting, which can stop eligible voters from participating.
“It’s adding fuel to a fire and potentially creating dangerous situations where the problem that they’re trying to fix isn’t a problem,” Mark Kokanovich, former federal prosecutor and attorney at the Arizona-based Ballard Spahr, explained to TPM. “They’re trying to fix something that’s not broken, and by doing it, they’re creating a lot of serious problems.”
“I think this is part of a more coordinated effort to attempt to establish ground rules on their terms—on CPAC’s terms—about how this can be done in a way that perhaps can fulfill CPAC’s goals without leading to lawsuits or other behavior that could potentially limit the monitoring of drop boxes,” election integrity consultant David Levine told TPM in an interview.
The letter has been met with pushback from state officials. In an email to TPM, JP Martin, a spokesperson for Fontes, said that the secretary of state has “serious concerns” about CPAC’s plan to monitor drop boxes.
“Their claim is that this effort will bolster trust and accountability in our elections process,” Martin said. “However, … their true intentions, similar to an ‘arsonist calling the fire department’—a poignant metaphor for a group that has previously sown seeds of distrust now portraying themselves as guardians of election integrity.”
And similarly, Mayes, in a statement to TPM, said that she finds it “ironic that an organization like CPAC, which has spent the last four years sowing chaos and fueling misinformation about Arizona’s elections, now claims to be committed to instilling confidence in those very same elections.”
“I am more than happy to work with good faith actors to share the indisputable fact that Arizona’s elections have been conducted fairly and honestly without any evidence of widespread fraud,” the attorney general added.
This initiative also ignores the fact that there are safeguards in place to protect fraudulent votes from being cast. For example, as Kokanovich pointed out, voters in Arizona will be notified when their ballot has been received and counted, and that includes early ballots.
State officials’ disinterest in the CPAC initiative and the state’s safeguards against fraudulent voting likely won’t stop Schlapp and Walton from attempting to carry out the scheme, Levine told TPM.
“I doubt that CPAC, even though they didn’t get the initial response that they wanted, I doubt that this is the end of it,” he said.
Ballot drop box monitoring also serves as an outlet for the proliferation of right-wing conspiracy theories, like the 2020 version of ballot “mules” and the big area of fixation for Republicans this campaign cycle: the myth of non-citizens voting.
“It is just feeding the narrative that there are lots of people who aren’t citizens who are voting that’s demonstrably false,” Kokanovich added.
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