AZ Political Podcast: Could the FBI seize 2020 election documents here like they did in Georgia?

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes tells me on the AZ Political Podcast that what happened in Fulton County, Georgia can’t happen in Arizona — at least not in the same way.

In case you didn’t hear about, over in Georgia, FBI agents seized ballots and documents from the 2020 election.

Fontes said there’s a reason why this can’t happen in Arizona in the same way. This is partly because of state law and partly because of earlier efforts to prove that there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election, like the “Arizona audit.”

Arizona law requires ballots to be destroyed after a certain length of time (so they don’t exist to be seized) and the voting machines the audit looked at were decertified the moment they were taken out of county offices and essentially scrapped.

What Arizona election documents could Trump admin actually take?

However, Fontes says that the Trump administration may get its hands on some election-related documentation in the form of voter rolls.

But he doesn’t think there’s a court in the land that will side with the Department of Justice in its effort to secure full, unredacted voter files,  something the DOJ has sued Arizona over.

We also talk about a piece of legislation he’s hoping to get passed in the Legislature: the Voters First Act, which his office says is designed to “modernize, standardize, and prioritize the voting process for every eligible voter in Arizona.”

And he’s looking for something else from the state capitol: almost $3 million in election readiness funding.

Finally, Fontes tells me whether he thinks turnout will be high (or low) in this year’s midterm election in Arizona — and how he’s not very satisfied with his Democratic Party’s efforts to help boost voter registration here.

The AZ Political Podcast is available at KTAR.com, the KTAR News app and everywhere you get your podcasts.

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