A curbside postal collection box in Phoenix was set on fire early Thursday, damaging an estimated 20 mail-in ballots before firefighters extinguished the blaze, the city’s Fire Department said.
The arson came at a sensitive time in a tense presidential race in Arizona, a swing state, but a man arrested in connection with the fire said he did not intend to affect the election, according to the authorities.
It was unclear whether the man,Dieter Klofkorn, 35, had a lawyer. The Phoenix police said he told investigators that he had set the postal box on fire because he wanted to be arrested. He was charged with one count of arson.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service said it had taken possession of the damaged ballots. Michael Martel, a spokesman for the service, said in a statement that inspectors were working to “ensure any affected election mail is remedied.”
Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said that the voters whose ballots were damaged would be contacted to make sure that they would be able to get a new ballot.
The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which is responsible for mail-in voting and voter registration in Arizona’s most populous county, which includes Phoenix, encouraged voters to check the status of their ballots through an online portal. Friday is the last day that Arizona voters can request replacement ballots, according to the office.
Arizona, which could be decisive in this year’s presidential election, has been a hotbed for election conspiracy theories since Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeated Mr. Trump there in 2020, flipping the state, including Maricopa County.
Arizona has also been vexed by threats of election-related violence.
In Tempe, near Phoenix, a Democratic Party campaign office was closed after being damaged in three shootings across four weeks. (No one was hurt in the shootings.) A 60-year-old Arizona man, Jeffrey Michael Kelly, was arrested on Tuesday in connection with the shootings and charged with three counts of terrorism.
Neha Bhatia, a lawyer with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, said in a court hearing on Wednesday that Mr. Kelly had more than 120 guns, 250,000 rounds of ammunition and a grenade launcher at his home and that the authorities believed he had been “preparing to commit an act of mass casualty.”
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