AP: “An impassioned effort by some Arizona Senate Republicans to ban the use of ballot drop boxes failed Monday. Scottsdale Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita’s efforts to change a proposal requiring drop boxes to have video monitoring was blocked by fellow GOP senators who knew House Republicans weren’t on board with the harsher proposal. And the whole exercise ended up being in vain after Republican Sen. Paul Boyer of Glendale joined all Senate Democrats in rejecting the measure outright. Ugenti-Rita said drop boxes are rife with possibilities for ‘ballot harvesting,’ a pejorative term for dropping off completed ballots for other people. The Legislature in 2016 made it a felony to return another person’s mail ballots unless it is for a family member or if the person returning the ballot is a caregiver. She pointed to recent documentary that alleged thousands of ballots were illegally cast in 2020 battleground states . Fact-checkers have shown the arguments made in ‘2000 Mules’ are full of unsupported allegations that thousands of ballots were illegally deposited into drop boxes. ‘If you think ballot boxes contribute to ballot harvesting and can be manipulated, you would ban them, not require that we tape them,’ Ugenti-Rita said. ‘It’s too late at that point.'”

“But GOP Sen. J.D Mesnard noted that banning drop boxes outright would essentially kill the bill, because there’s no support in the House for going as far as Ugenti-Rita was proposing. ‘I don’t want to kill the bill. I want something done in this area that leaves us better. And I strongly disagree that doing nothing is better than having them monitored with cameras.’ The original House measure would have completely banned unmonitored drop boxes, but it did not have the votes to pass so it was watered down to allow counties to set up video monitoring where practical.”