Justice Department official says she personally observed ‘incompetence’ in Maricopa elections

The senior U.S. Justice Department official leading a campaign to force states to clean up their voter rolls said she personally witnessed either “incompetence” or “malfeasance” in Maricopa County during past elections where she served as an election lawyer. Maricopa County, Arizona, home to the state’s largest city, Phoenix, was recently forced to turn over election records to the FBI pursuant to a grand jury subpoena. 
The subpoena was justified, in part, by a memo authored by a congressional staffer dispatched to observe the 2024 elections there. In that report back to Congress, the staffer raised “alarming” concerns about how the county and its third-party contractor were handling ballots, Just the News exclusively reported earlier this week.   
“I can say, as a lawyer who – taking off my government hat and putting on my former political hat – I was on the ground in the last two election cycles, in 2022 and 2024 in Arizona, in Maricopa County, specifically,” Dhillon told the Just the News, No Noise TV show this week. 
Incompetence or deliberate malfeasance
“And you don’t know whether it’s incompetence or deliberate malfeasance, but either way, it is a shambolic, you know, bleep word show of an election process that leaves many citizens feeling like they shouldn’t vote because they see the wrong paper being loaded,” she said. “They see ballots being transported without proper security under state law, and then they see unclean voter rolls that are in violation of our federal election laws.”
In the memo, a Republican staffer described in detail his visit to a third-party contractor, Runbeck Election Services, which was hired by Maricopa County to sort mail-in ballots for signature verification in preparation for counting at the county’s main election site. 
It was at that third-party site, miles away from the main election facility, that the House staffers observed concerning storage practices and were informed that no state workers were present, despite the handling of completed mail-in ballots. 
The Republican staffer was joined by his Democratic counterpart during the visit, who shared similar concerns about what they observed at the facility, according to the memo delivered to the House Administration Committee–the legislative panel responsible for overseeing federal elections. 
“They should be treated like Fort Knox”: Dhillon
When the congressional monitors visited the Runbeck facility, they observed that mail-in ballot sorting was taking place in the same warehouse alongside shelves of unsecured blank ballots and other printing materials. 
Additionally, Runbeck staff informed the congressional staffers that no state election officials or bipartisan observers were present at the third-party site while ballot sorting was ongoing.
“Runbeck, of course, runs the elections in Maricopa County, and […] many other places. It’s a company that does that. And you know there’s state laws that say, for example, when ballots are transported from a voting place to the central count area, there have to be police escorts, so they should be treated like gold. They should be treated like Fort Knox, and they’re not,” Dhillon told Just the News.  
She added, “They’re treated like those coupons you get for…your grocery store, and that’s outrageous.”
Rep. Abe Hamadeh, a Republican from Arizona, asked the Justice Department last summer to investigate claims that the Runbeck facility in Maricopa breached protocols during the 2024 general election. The congressman shared similar concerns with the Justice Department, such as the mixing of blank ballots with mail-in ballots and whether proper security procedures were followed. 
Concerns about election counting in Arizona, and specifically Maricopa County, stretch back more than a decade as the state moved to mostly mail-in ballots. In the old days, Democrats were the early complainants. 
More recently, Republicans like President Donald Trump, former gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake and now-U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh have raised concerns about the state’s ballot distribution and counting systems.
200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures
The Arizona Senate conducted a massive audit after the 2020 election affected by COVID-19 and concluded there were severe irregularities. One of the Senate’s most stunning findings was an estimate that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures may have been counted without being reviewed, or “cured” in Maricopa County, more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches requiring curing that had been acknowledged by the county.
The audit did little to resolve disputes, as Democrats and Maricopa County officials argue the concerns are overblown, while Republicans say they fear there are still vulnerabilities. Those clashes continue into planning for the 2026 election. 

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