The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office has begun revising its website and may also change its forms to make clear that first-time felons automatically get their voting rights restored when they complete their sentences, including paying any fines and restitution. The Campaign Legal Center found that the automatic process wasn’t clear on forms, which misleadingly…
Tempe’s upcoming election will be an all mail-in election, but some worry that as cities and school districts increasingly move to postal voting, homeless people and those with certain disabilities could be disenfranchised. All Maricopa County school districts opted to have voters cast ballots by mail last fall. Cities including Tempe, Fountain Hills, Queen Creek and Surprise are pursuing mail-in ballots this year. Renaldo Fowler of the Arizona Center for Disability Law, along with the Arizona Clean Elections Commission, are among those working to ensure voting by mail doesn’t leave some people out. They’ve been working to educate Arizona’s homeless population on how they can still vote without a home address. And to educate voters with visual impairments and other disabilities that special ballots can be requested, such as large print or braille.
A quirk in state law could force top contenders to replace Trent Franks to choose between a run for Congress and keeping their current jobs in the Legislature. Gov. Doug Ducey is expected to announce Monday the date for the primary election for those who want to vie for the now-open post in Congressional District 8. That can be between Feb. 26 and March 8. But by law, the deadline to submit nominating petitions will be Jan. 10. And that’s what creates the dilemma for sitting lawmakers.
A coalition of voting rights groups is charging that state agencies are violating federal laws designed to provide opportunities for people to register. In a 15-page complaint Tuesday to Secretary of State Michele Reagan, attorneys for the groups detailed what they say are flaws in both state statutes and the processes used by state agencies in getting people signed up to vote. The lawyers say if the problems are not corrected within 90 days they will sue. Attorney Darrell Hill of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona defended the 90 day deadline. “The state has been aware of some of these problems for quite some time,” he told Capitol Media Services. Hill said groups have filed similar complaints in the past.
A 2016 Arizona law that expanded the ability of some groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections without disclosing their donors was challenged in court Wednesday by a group of Democratic lawmakers, a union and a voter advocacy group. The lawsuit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court seeks to overturn parts of the law allowing corporations and some non-profit groups to avoid disclosure. It also seeks to overturn the removal of the Citizens Clean Elections Commission from enforcement authority over some outside campaign spending, and to invalidate another part that allows political parties to pay for lavish fundraisers for candidates.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich says county election officials can maintain separate voter databases but are legally required to send voter information to the secretary of state’s office. Brnovich also said in an opinion released Monday that Secretary of State Michele Reagan can’t refer public records requests or legal subpoenas to counties since she also maintains the voter rolls. The opinion also clarified what voter registration information county recorders are required to provide to Reagan’s office. Solicitor General Dominic Draye wrote that includes everything, and immediately.
Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, a week after apologizing for insulting a voter, flubbed an election place rule Tuesday as he was trying to promote Election Day. Fontes, a lawyer and Democrat who took office this year following voting-day problems with his predecessor, recorded a Facebook Live video promoting Election Day within 75 feet of the Surprise City Hall ballot center. Arizona law restricts photography and video recording within that area at voting locations. Fontes downplayed the apparent violation, and a Republican election law expert said no harm was done. Voting otherwise appeared to be going smoothly at ballot centers across the Valley for school-district and city bond and override measures, a year after former Recorder Helen Purcell came under fire for long lines at too few polling locations. And this year’s voter participation seemed on track to exceed previous low-profile elections.
A new lawsuit charges that thousands of Arizonans are illegally being denied the right to vote in federal elections. Legal papers filed Tuesday in federal court here acknowledge that state law requires would-be voters to produce certain identification when registering. That requirement has been upheld in prior court rulings. But attorneys for the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Arizona Students Association point out that the U.S. Supreme Court has said that state law does not — and cannot — prevent people from registering to vote for federal elections using a federally approved registration form. And they contend that those whose state registrations are rejected for lack of citizenship proof are not informed of that option.
Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes apologized Wednesday for recent inflammatory online comments made to a candidate for the Arizona Legislature who had criticized the design of election ballots. In a five-minute video on his Facebook page, Fontes said he was sorry for his “inappropriate and rude comments” to State House District 13 candidate Nathan Schneider and apologized to all county voters and residents and the elections department. Schneider complained on his own Facebook page Sunday that the county’s Nov. 7 election date was hard for him and his mother to find on the mail-in ballot and ballot inserts and wasn’t printed on the envelope.
When a Goodyear voter complained on Facebook that his Nov. 7 ballot was confusing, Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes insulted him, attacked the voter’s mother and told him to “go F- yourself.” The social-media tirade comes as Fontes, the only Democrat to run Maricopa County elections in recorded history, is under a microscope. He beat a longtime GOP elections chief in 2016 with promises of better representation and communication with voters and has faced suspicion from Republican officials and voters. Tuesday’s local election is a litmus test for Fontes. Fontes responded angrily to the Goodyear voter, Nathan Schneider, who complained that the election date was hard for him and his mother to find on the mail-in ballot and ballot inserts, and was not printed on the envelope. “The public should not be forced to make assumptions when voting,” Schneider, a Democratic candidate for Arizona Legislature, posted on Facebook. “Adrian Fontes doesn’t listen to me, but if any of you have his ear, maybe you could ask him why they are not labeling the Election Day on the ballot and making it more legible, easier to find, and easier to identify.” Fontes responded by asking if Schneider’s mother ran his campaign and writing “go F- yourself.”
Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan broke the law when her office failed to mail publicity pamphlets to hundreds of thousands of voters in time for the May 2016 special election, a state-appointed investigator has concluded. But, the investigator found, there is no provision in state law to punish anyone for not delivering the pamphlets on time and Reagan and her staff did not act criminally. That’s the outcome of a long-awaited investigative report released Wednesday by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. Michael Morrissey, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, led the review as an appointed special investigator. “Approximately 200,000 households did not receive the publicity pamphlets in a timely manner,” Morrissey’s report states. “That is a violation of law.”
The failure of Secretary of State Michele Reagan to get ballot brochures on time to the homes of 200,000 voters ahead of last year’s election broke state law, according to a new report released Wednesday. Attorney Tom Morrissey, asked to investigate by Attorney General Mark Brnovich, said his year-long inquiry found Reagan’s staff failed to follow various procedures designed to ensure that Arizonans knew what they were voting on in the May 2016 special election. Potentially more significant, Morrissey said Reagan was aware of the problem more than two weeks before she notified the public that many of them would not be getting the brochures on time describing the details of Proposition 123 to put more money into public education and Proposition 124 to make changes to public pension plans.
The Arizona Democratic Party goes to federal court Tuesday, Oct. 3, in a bid to overturn a ban on “ballot harvesting” and ensure that ballots cast in the wrong precinct are counted anyway. The Democrats’ attorney, Bruce Spiva, contends the Republican-controlled Legislature acted illegally last year in making it a felony for an individual to take anyone else’s early ballot to a polling place. Spiva said he will present evidence that the measure will cause undue harm to minorities and other groups. But Sara Agne, attorney for the Arizona Republican Party, who is defending the law, will argue that lawmakers were entitled to put procedures in place designed to prevent fraud. Spiva could have an uphill battle.
The American Civil Liberties Union launched a nationwide campaign Sunday on voting rights, with an emphasis in Arizona on restoring the voting rights of people convicted of a felony crime. The Let People Vote campaign is working with community members to help pass a bill in the Arizona Legislature to restore the voting rights of citizens with felony convictions upon the completion of their sentence. Alessandra Soler, ACLU Arizona executive director, said the organization aims to take back the vote in direct response to the Trump administration’s investigation of voter fraud, a problem she said “doesn’t exist.”
As next year’s statewide elections get closer, several Arizona agencies are locked in a bitter feud to determine who has the power to police so-called “dark money” groups that spend millions to influence races. The dispute is playing out in complicated legal tit-for-tats, but the heart of the fight is simple: Should the office of Secretary of State Michele Reagan or the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, a voter-created body, play the role of enforcer? And is there room for two policemen? It’s unclear how the dispute will get resolved. Ultimately, courts may have to decide.
On the day of the general election in 2016, Maricopa County voters experienced problems at the polls. Some of those problems, according to elections officials, were the result of the “epollbooks” used in the place of paper voter rolls. Officials say the software had trouble handling the sheer number of voters the Phoenix metro area…
President Donald Trump has called voter fraud an issue that may have swayed the outcome of the 2016 popular vote. Without proof, he claimed that millions of people voted illegally in the election. Through an executive order in May, he created a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission likely could replicate work done in Arizona since 2008. Since that year, state officials have examined hundreds of thousands of cases where someone might have voted twice in an election. After scrutinizing those cases, 30 were sent to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. Twenty resulted in convictions. The path to those convictions started with the work of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, now run by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
A judge on Tuesday refused to block a new state law making it easier for opponents to challenge citizen initiatives, but she sidestepped a decision on whether the law violates the state Constitution. The ruling from Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sherry Stephens said opponents of the law passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature haven’t yet been harmed because there are no pending initiatives that would be affected by the new standard. “The Court finds this matter is not ripe for judicial review,” Stephens wrote. “Plaintiffs believe House Bill 2244 will affect their future initiative efforts but this Court finds that expectation is not sufficient to make this matter ripe for judicial review of the constitutionality of HB 2244.” The law goes into effect Wednesday and will apply to all future initiatives.
On Feb. 22, Laura Sue Cates registered to vote in Sullivan County, Tennessee. Previously, she had been registered to vote in Arizona’s Coconino County, so the Sullivan County Election Commission sent Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan a formal notice to ensure that Cates’ voter registration would be removed from Arizona’s rolls. Every day, the thousands of voting jurisdictions in the U.S. share information about current voter registrations to guard against people being registered in multiple places. The Arizona secretary of state receives hundreds each week and forwards them to the appropriate county recorder, as voter rolls in Arizona are maintained at the county level. A sample of a week’s worth of these notices, received between March 1 and March 7, obtained under the state’s public records law, shows 240 voters were identified by out-of-state voting jurisdictions.
Arizona election officials had sharp words Wednesday for President Donald Trump after he suggested that states that are withholding voter information from a presidential commission have something to hide. “What are they worried about?” Trump asked, during remarks at the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. “There’s something, there always is,” Trump said. “We could say the same thing about him,” shot back Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez. “What is he hiding in his taxes?”
The Arizona Republican Party sent out an email Wednesday — and a similar tweet last week — that is raising some eyebrows about both the method and the timing. The blast email was titled, in screaming all-caps, “IMPORTANT INFO MISSING” and tells the reader that their “voter profile status has been marked incomplete.” It then directs the reader to fill out a form “in the next 24 hours to remain active in our system.” The email is clearly marked with the state GOP logo and is signed by the Arizona Republican Party. It was sent to the party’s general subscriber list. Communications Director Torunn Sinclair declined to say how many people received it.
For more than six years, the panel charged with drawing Arizona’s political boundaries was the target of criticism, protests and repeated lawsuits. It even suffered a break-in at its Capitol Mall office. But despite the headwinds, the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission triumphed in the key legal and policy battles it faced. After closing its doors for good late…
Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan is denying a sweeping request by a federal voter commission for registration information of all voters in Arizona. President Donald Trump created the Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May after he claimed without evidence that 2 million to 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. Last week, the commission sent letters to secretaries of state of all 50 states requesting all “publicly available” information of voters including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliation, and last four digits of Social Security numbers. … Reagan said after she received the request letter on Monday she conferred with her attorneys and decided that releasing any information to the commission would not be “in the best interests of the state.”
Arizona has settled a lawsuit with a national voting-rights group, resulting in an agreement that allows the public to access voter information at a much lower cost. The settlement between Project Vote and the state was finalized late last week. Electronic access to the voter rolls will be available to the public at a cost of a few hundred dollars rather than thousands. For example, the price of obtaining the state’s database of about 3.6 million voters will drop from about $30,000 to around $500. Project Vote, a national nonpartisan voting-rights advocacy organization, sued the state, Maricopa County and Pima County to challenge the cost of acquiring voter-registration data after receiving bills for tens of thousands of dollars. Political parties get the same information for free, as is required by state law.
Arizona Rep. Bob Thorpe is getting a jump start on next year’s legislative session. His summer project? Restricting how college students vote. The Flagstaff Republican announced plans to introduce legislation next year to “address several problems with voting in Arizona’s college communities while ensuring that voting rights are preserved for all Arizona voters.” He alleges college students “unfairly influence” local elections by registering to vote using their college address, where they reside for “only six months out of the year.” That, he said, dilutes the votes of full-time residents. (And surely it has no connection to the fact that he and fellow Republicans narrowly held their seats in the district that includes Northern Arizona University.)
Calling the practice unethical, a Flagstaff Republican lawmaker wants to bar college students from voting where they may live most of the year. The proposal by state Rep. Bob Thorpe would put a provision that students who want to vote would be able to do so only by signing up to get an early ballot from the voting precinct where they were living before they went to college, presumably the address of their parents. They would not be able to use their college address. And that would apply not only to those who live in a campus dormitory but even those who have off-campus residences. … A similar proposal by Thorpe introduced earlier this year died when state Rep. Doug Coleman, R-Apache Junction, refused to give it a hearing in the House Government Committee which he chairs.
It’s Reagan vs. Recorders, again. This time, the dispute among Secretary of State Michele Reagan and the 15 county elections officials in Arizona is over who’s to blame for letting lapse a committee that makes sure the voter-registration database keeps working. But it’s really about simmering tensions over the upcoming creation of a new statewide voter-registration system — and who will be in charge. “I think the counties got tired of being pushed around,” said F. Ann Rodriguez, the Pima County recorder.
A Pima County Superior Court judge has ruled that ballot images produced by local voting equipment are “exempt from disclosure by Arizona election law.” In August 2016, county resident Richard Hernandez filed a complaint asking that digital ballot images from the upcoming primary election be preserved. It was then the county election department’s policy to delete those images, which are used to tally votes by the new system. A judge soon granted a temporary injunction mandating that the county cease deleting the images. In his May 24 ruling, Judge Richard Gordon made that injunction permanent, but also — citing the Arizona Constitution’s requirement of “secrecy in voting” and recent legislation — ruled that both ballots and images of them are exempt “from public disclosure.”
Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan said Wednesday her office is looking to update the state’s voter registration systems, but it has little to do with last year’s hack. “We’re updating, yes, and it’s not actually due to anything that happened last year,” she said. “It’s something that, by law, we’re required to go out to bid for this in 2017.” Arizona was one of the first states to introduce online voter registration and, 15 years later, it’s time to upgrade from the VRAZ-II, an aging platform that reached its peak use in the late 1990s. Reagan has issued a request for proposal for the development of the Access Voter Information Database. Bids should begin coming in during the next few weeks.
The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission has won another legal battle over the political boundaries it drew earlier this decade. It could be the final legal skirmish in the current commission’s seven-year existence. On Thursday, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge rejected challenges from a coalition of Republican voters that the commission used the wrong process in drawing boundaries for Arizona’s nine congressional districts. Superior Court Judge Roger Brodman also rejected claims that the five-member commission violated the state’s Open Meetings Law as it went about its work.