Conservative activist James O’Keefe has been warned against placing hidden cameras at voting locations in Arizona — an act that would be completely illegal — after he claimed to be in the process of sending the devices out. Maricopa County attorney Rachel Mitchell spelled this out in a letter sent to O’Keefe.
“If you were to send a poll worker a hidden camera to record audiovisual in a voting location, you might be guilty of conspiracy to violate Arizona law,” she wrote in the message obtained by the Washington Post via the state’s public-records law.
As ABC15 political analyst Garrett Archer explained of O’Keefe’s plans on X, “So…this is illegal. It’s a privacy violation against voters.”
On Oct. 26, O’Keefe wrote on X, “If you’re a poll worker, election judge, or election clerk who wants to record in your polling location,@okeefemedia will ship you a specialized OMG hidden camera early this week ahead of the election.”
Yes, the acronym for O’Keefe’s organization, O’Keefe Media Group, is OMG.
O’Keefe specified that his organization will also “determine if you’re in a Jurisdiction where it’s legal to record.” He also previously shared a video secretly recorded at a polling site in Arizona.
The conservative activist has a history of using undercover video to try to expose what he has claimed are nefarious deeds by the mainstream media and liberal groups, but he has frequently been criticized for using deceptively edited videos and other dubious techniques. He was fired from the organization he founded, Project Veritas, last year, with comedian John Oliver celebrating the firing on “Last Week Tonight” and calling O’Keefe the “alt-right Borat.”
Voter privacy is of utmost importance in the United States — it is not legal for anyone to find out who you have voted for unless you consent to it. O’Keefe did not specifically identify Arizona as one of the states he has targeted, but officials in the state are on alert because of the video he posted, as well as his history posting a video secretly recorded at an Arizona voting location.
Each state has its own laws that pertain to video recording and photography at polling sites. For example, Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawai’i, Indiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah allow ballot selfies; Florida allows voters to take a picture of their ballot, but not of them inserting the ballot into voting machines.
All ballots in Oregon are by mail, and voters are allowed to take photos of their ballots. But Texas does not allow any wireless communication devices or recording devices when voting, which makes legally taking a photo of a ballot with a phone impossible.
The topic of voter privacy has been hyper-relevant to this year’s election and has even pervaded social media, where a “no one will ever know” trend has dominated most platforms in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Videos — mostly made by women — have shown people voting to “cancel out” their partner’s opposing vote, usually with the implication that the women will be supporting more liberal policies than the men, including reproductive rights. The videos are often funny, but highlight a real concern that many people contend with in their relationships or marriages.
Of particular concern to Democrats and Kamala Harris is the votes of conservative — and often white — women, who have historically tended to vote along the lines of their husbands in an act of deference to their decisions. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told The Guardian, “Women often give deference to the presumed expertise of their husbands on politics, and then the men reinforce that presumption and express their intensity and so-called greater expertise.”
“We try to reinforce to women that you have your own way of doing things, your own point of view, you focus on what’s good for the whole family. Then we emphasize that the vote is private,” Lake shared.
