Armed and Masked Vigilantes Are Staking Out Arizona Ballot Boxes With the GOP’s Blessing

By Bess Levin

With exactly two weeks to go until the midterm elections, Democrats and Republicans are out here making their respective cases re: why voters should allow them to either hold on to their majority in Congress or retake power. One way the two parties have diverged on tactics? Well, the GOP appears to be the only one openly encouraging its base to stake out ballot boxes and intimidate would-be voters. With guns.

On Monday, Paul Penzone, the sheriff for Arizona's Maricopa County, said he had to increase security at ballot drop boxes following a number of incidents involving individuals "keeping watch on the boxes and taking video of voters," according to the Associated Press. On Friday, Penzone's deputies responded after two people carrying guns and wearing masks and bulletproof vests appeared at a drop box in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa. The following day, per HuffPost, four people, two of whom reportedly also had guns, "got into a confrontation at the same drop box" when another person showed up and attempted to take down their license plate information, which was obstructed. "Every day I’m dedicating a considerable amount of resources just to give people confidence that they can cast a vote safely, and that is absurd," Penzone said during a news conference. He added that his office had referred two voting-related incidents to prosecutors for possible criminal charges. Last week two Maricopa County officials issued a joint statement saying: "We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box. Uninformed vigilantes outside Maricopa County's drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead, they are leading to voter-intimidation complaints."

Critics, of course, will claim that we don't definitively know that the individuals wearing masks, carrying guns, and intimidating voters are Republicans or aligned with the Republican Party—but the evidence sure points in that direction. For one thing, Democrats have long been known to cast their ballots early (and Republicans have been specifically told to wait until Election Day to vote). For another, only one party has been obsessed with baseless allegations of voter fraud for the last two years, or endorsed ridiculous claims that a vast network of "mules" conspired to throw the 2020 election to Joe Biden by smuggling fraudulent votes into drop boxes. There's also the fact that the right-wing organization Clean Elections USA told Steve Bannon last week that it is "actually making a difference" and "seeing mules be intimidated from doing their thievery."

This kind of electoral vigilantism is not especially new. Back in May, Arizona Republican state senator Kelly Townsend told a conservative group that she was "pleased to hear about all you vigilantes out there that want to camp out at these drop boxes," as the AZ Mirror reported. "We’re going to have hidden trail cameras. We are going to have people parked out there watching you, and they are going to follow you to your car and get your license plate," Townsend added. In August, the outlet reported that Arizona Republicans Sonny Borrelli and Mark Finchem took part in a nearly four-hour "election security forum" over the summer, with Borrelli telling attendees: "We need to have people camped on unmanned drop boxes and camp on those and keep an eye on them and take down that data—license plates, pictures, and so on and so forth." And just last Thursday, Finchem wrote on Twitter, "WATCH ALL DROP BOXES," adding over the weekend: "[George] Soros does not want people to watch their shenanigans. We must watch all drop boxes because they do not have live cameras on them streaming to the public for people to ensure there is no fraud in the process."

On Monday, the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino filed a lawsuit against Clean Elections USA, alleging that the group's activities violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That same day, Democratic representative Jim Himes told MSNBC that the US will "need to collectively decide that not only are we going to oppose Russians and Chinese and North Koreans and Iranians messing around with our elections, we’re not going to allow the Republican Party to do it either."

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