Arizona Republicans post $50,000 reward for vote-buying evidence

The Republican Party of Arizona is offering up $50,000 rewards to anyone with information on incidents of "vote-buying" in the party's Aug. 2 statewide primary.

State GOP leaders will grant up to two payouts should such information lead to an arrest and subsequent conviction, according to the Epoch Times.

Republicans, in a July 20 letter, defined vote buying as an instance in which someone receives compensation to complete a mail-in ballot in front of the vote buyer and hand over both the ballot and signed return envelope.

“We suspect that the primary source of the trafficked ballots was vote-buying,” the party said, referring to claims of illegitimate ballots in the 2020 presidential election.

Arizona voted for then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020 by a razor-thin margin, which became the subject of intense scrutiny by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, who alleged that voter fraud affected the results.

While Trump, did not succeed in overturning Biden's win in the state, Arizona Republicans have enacted reforms to secure statewide elections and prosecuted ballot harvesters. The state currently faces a lawsuit from the Department of Justice over a law requiring voters to show proof of citizenship before casting their ballots.

The state employed ballot drop boxes in 2020, which the GOP has pushed to ban over security concerns. The state party, in its letter, lamented the movement toward mail-in ballots. “There is historical precedent of vote-buying fraud, which ultimately led to secret ballot laws. Unfortunately, the movement towards mass mail-in voting completely undoes secret ballot reform,” the party wrote, per Epoch.