A Maricopa County official who may have been at the center of the now confirmed SharpieGate scandal, as well as having overseen the hiring of more than 4,000 temp workers to help run last year’s general election, gave a $100 donation to Democrat candidate Mark Kelly — now a U.S. Senator — just six weeks before Election Day.
Kelly Dixon, the then-assistant director for training and recruitment at the Maricopa County Elections Department, directed the money to ActBlue, a small-donation aggregator site that makes it more difficult to trace where campaign funds originated.
However, a note on her donation, according to the Federal Election Commission, stipulated that the funds should be earmarked for Kelly, who was running at the time to unseat incumbent Republican Martha McSally in the special election to replace the late John McCain.
Kelly ostensibly won the race by a statewide margin of 78,806 votes. In Maricopa County, he won by an official margin of 80,193 votes. He faces re-election again next year to claim the seat outright.
But Dixon’s small donation may have been chump change in comparison with the other ways she helped her candidate to prevail in Arizona‘s most populous county.
An Oct. 22 email revealed that Kelly required election officials to use ballpoint pens in the lead-up to Nov. 3, but then told them that on Election Day itself, when more Republicans were projected to show up and vote at the polls, they would “NEED to use Markers,” the Gateway Pundit reported.
During testimony last week for the state Senate, Cyber Ninjas’ Doug Logan, who has led recent audit efforts, confirmed that the reliance on Sharpie markers, cheap-stock paper used at polling places for on-demand ballots, and misalignment of the printers themselves might have resulted in more than 168,000 ballots containing errors.
Democrat Joe Biden officially defeated then-President Donald Trump by a margin of only 10,457 votes statewide and beat Trump by 45,109 votes in Maricopa County.
In addition to being the possible mastermind behind SharpieGate, Dixon, who was called to testify during a related case last November, also may have helped initiate many of the county’s other election-related issues.
According to her LinkedIn page, her office was responsible for filling “more than 4,000 temporary worker positions to support election day sites and elections activities.”
In Georgia, where similar vote-fraud issues occurred, an independent auditor noted that temp workers in Fulton County—who had been hired in coordination with anti-election-integrity activist Stacey Abrams—made alarming comments threatening to “f*ck sh*t up” the day after the election.
“I must keep an eye on these two,” auditor Carter Jones wrote in his notes. “Perhaps this was a bad joke, but it was very poorly timed in the presence of a poll watcher.”
Dixon left her position with Maricopa’s Elections Department in April to begin working in a similar role at the county’s Department of Transportation. There, however, she could feasibly undermine future elections by issuing driver’s licenses to the millions of illegal immigrants expected to cross the nearby US–Mexico border.
