Pamela Karlan, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann in late April warning that Cyber Ninjas having custody of the ballots for an undetermined amount of time may run afoul of federal elections laws requiring election officials to preserve ballots for 22 months after an election.

She also warned that a subsequently-scrapped plan to knock on voters’ doors in order to hunt down suspected cases of voter registration fraud could violate anti-voter intimidation provisions in the Civil Rights Act.