Arizona Secretary of State Proposes Alternative to Defunded National Election Security Program | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

After the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) cut funding to its election security programs, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) is taking matters into his own hands and forming an alternative program to fill CISA’s void for state and local election offices. According to a memo obtained by Democracy Docket, Fontes’ office wants to form a new organization called VOTE-ISAC, “an independent organization committed to safeguarding elections and restoring international confidence in the integrity of our democratic processes.” The idea for the program is to fill the void left by CISA’s crucial Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). Read Article

Arizona voter proof-of-citizenship laws blocked by federal appeals court | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Two Arizona laws that restrict voting by people who don’t prove their U.S. citizenship are “unlawful measures of voter suppression,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. The appeals court on Tuesday upheld a 2023 decision from the U.S. District Court of Arizona that found many provisions of two 2022 Republican-backed laws unconstitutional. That includes one provision that prohibits voters who don’t prove citizenship from voting for president, and another that prohibits them from voting by mail. The judges also found that the state must allow voters who don’t prove citizenship to vote in federal elections even if they use a state voter registration form. Read Article

Arizona: Critics of new ballot security bill zero in on sponsor’s links to key vendor | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona Republican lawmakers are again proposing to require security features on the state’s ballot paper, but Democratic skeptics are responding by pointing to a potential conflict of interest involving the proposal’s leading advocate. State Sen. Mark Finchem’s bill, SB1123, would require the state to use ballot paper with specific security features — such as a hologram, barcode and watermark — that he says would ensure only “legitimate” ballots are cast in the state’s elections. Finchem, a Republican, attempted to get the requirements into law a few years ago, and they were written into the rules for a pilot program that the state approved funding for in 2022. But that pilot program was scrapped, amid concerns about the potential conflicts involved. Read Article

Arizona proposal to speed up election results faces Hobbs veto threat | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Republican lawmakers in Arizona pledged after the November election to find a way to speed up election results, but it appears unlikely this year that they’ll send Gov. Katie Hobbs a bill that she would actually sign. The most likely alternative: Voters will see a related question on their ballot in 2026. Republicans have been moving ahead on the conventional legislative route. The Arizona House voted Tuesday to advance a bill, HB2703, that would rein in one major cause of vote-counting delays: the ability of voters to drop off their mail ballot at polling places on Election Day. That’s how nearly 1 in 10 Arizona voters cast their ballots last November, which meant election officials had to spend days afterward checking voter signatures on hundreds of thousands of ballot envelopes before they could be counted. The bill is likely to move to the Senate soon and the Senate president has introduced an identical bill, signaling this is likely to reach Hobbs’ desk soon. Read Article

Arizona election officials struggle to resolve proof-of-citizenship mixup | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Because of a 20-year-old government foul-up, about 200,000 Arizona voters will need to come up with proof of their citizenship soon in order to protect their full voting rights, and they might not even know about it yet. County officials waited six months for the Secretary of State’s Office to give them the final list of affected voters who need to be contacted, and clear legal guidance on how to do that so voters are treated fairly across the state. After all, in a few counties, the next elections are coming up in March or May. Read Article

Arizona State senator revives election conspiracies in Senate committee | Joe Duhownik/Courthouse News Service

An Arizona Senate committee advanced three bills aimed at election integrity in a meeting rife with unproven conspiracy theories about the 2020 and 2022 elections. In the Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee meeting Wednesday, state Senator Mark Finchem, a Republican from Phoenix, parroted a theory from the popular documentary “2,000 Mules” that “hundreds of thousands” of fraudulent ballots were shipped into Arizona and other swing states during the 2020 election. The creator of “2,000 Mules” has since admitted that the film was inaccurate and removed it from all platforms. In order to combat the apparently nonexistent threat, Finchem introduced Senate Bill 1123, which would require all paper ballots to be outfitted with watermarks, holographic foil, unique barcodes, invisible ink or any other unique marker that could be used to track ballots and ensure they were printed and distributed in the state. Read Article

Arizona: New GOP-led elections committee in House signals voting debate isn’t over | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Republicans in the Arizona House have created a new committee that will take a comprehensive look at how the state’s elections are run, another sign that the state’s debate over election policy didn’t end with the 2024 election. GOP state Rep. Alex Kolodin will lead a panel called the House Ad Hoc Committee on Election Integrity and Florida-Style Voting Systems, according to an announcement Thursday, ahead of the Monday start of the new legislative session. Republicans have been saying for months that they want the state’s elections to be run more like Florida’s. Kolodin said he believes that means quicker election results, cleaner voter rolls, and better security for mail-in ballots. But it’s already clear that not everyone will agree on the changes, or that such changes would make the state’s elections better. Read Article

Arizona: Maricopa County’s new leaders pledge another election audit — but not like the last one | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Maricopa County’s new leadership will move immediately to commission an independent audit of the county’s election system, incoming supervisors announced at their first meeting Monday, but they promised that it will not be a repeat of the partisan, chaotic review of the county’s 2020 election results. The announcement came as the county swore in three new Republicans on the five-member board of supervisors. Minutes after being elected chairman, returning Supervisor Thomas Galvin affirmed that supervisors would soon hire what he described as a reputable firm to do a “comprehensive review” of election procedures and recommend improvements. Read Article

Arizona counties block access to cast vote records, citing law, privacy | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

After Kari Lake lost her U.S. Senate race in November, some skeptics cried election fraud. They doubted that so many people who voted for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who carried Arizona, would split their ticket and back Ruben Gallego, Lake’s Democratic opponent. In the past, local election analysts could counter such claims by analyzing a dataset known as the cast vote record — an electronic record of each anonymous ballot cast and all the votes recorded on it, including split-ticket votes. But for this election, they’ve hit a roadblock: They can no longer get that data. The counties that gave out their cast-vote record in the past now say that it is not a public record, or that they’ll provide only a heavily redacted version, without ruling specifically on whether the public is entitled to see it. Read Article

Arizona official who delayed county’s 2022 election certification didn’t have immunity, court says | Associated Press

An appeals court has rejected an Arizona official’s argument that felony charges against him for delaying certification of his rural county’s 2022 election results should be dismissed because he has legislative immunity. In an order Tuesday, the Arizona Court of Appeals concluded Cochise County Supervisor Tom Crosby’s duty to certify the election results wasn’t discretionary. The court also said certifying election results is an administrative responsibility and that legislative immunity doesn’t apply to Crosby’s situation. Read Article

Arizona Judge blocks new election rules, including on certifying results | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes exceeded his authority in several instances when making changes to the state’s election manual last year, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled Thursday. The state will now be blocked from enforcing these particular rules, including one that would have allowed the secretary of state to finalize statewide election results without the results of a county, if the county failed to certify its results by the deadline. That rule had already been suspended by a federal judge in a separate case challenging Fontes’ manual. That challenge was filed in July in federal court by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. Read Article

How Arizona can get election results faster | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Four days after the election, with several congressional and state contests yet to be called, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen declared that it had “taken too much time” to count ballots. So Petersen made a promise to voters: He would reintroduce bills in the upcoming legislative session “to get election results, night of.” It was perfectly normal to not yet have final results at that point. In fact, it has sometimes taken as long as two weeks to finish counting ballots in the state, a timeline similar to that of other states that are friendly to voting by mail, such as California and Utah. But as national attention on Arizona, a swing state where contests can be close, has ramped up, pressure has mounted to count faster. And as unexpected delays sprang up across the state this year, including in rural counties that typically count quickly, the longer timeline fueled consternation among candidates and voters waiting for final results. Read Article

Arizona: With new leaders, Maricopa County’s well-guarded elections may see shake-up | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

A new crew of Republican politicians will soon take control of Maricopa County’s high-profile elections, a major change for a key swing county that has for years contended with unproven claims of widespread voter fraud. The outgoing Republican officials built national profiles for fiercely defending the county’s elections against critics within their party. But the newcomers — also all Republicans — have signaled a different approach, saying they will be looking for ways to improve the system. The incoming recorder, Justin Heap, in particular, has been a consistent critic of the county’s elections, and is pushing for major changes. Heap, currently a Republican state representative, defeated incumbent Recorder Stephen Richer in the primary and went on to win the general election in a race that drew national attention. Read Article

Arizona: As Cochise County certifies election, Peggy Judd looks back at the vote that upended her life | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Peggy Judd knew exactly what she needed to do. Judd, a Republican on the board of supervisors in Cochise County, Arizona, had to vote yes Wednesday on whether to certify the county’s presidential election results. If she didn’t, she would be not only breaking the law, but also violating the terms of her plea agreement. That’s because, two years ago, after the 2022 midterms, she made a different choice. She and another Republican supervisor voted to delay the certification of that election past the legal deadline. That decision made her one of a handful of local Republican officials around the country who unsuccessfully tried to halt or delay certification of an election. It also upended Judd’s life. Read Article

Arizona Supreme Court rejects request to extend ballot curing deadline | Coleby Phillips/Arizona Republic

As ballot results continued to trickle in after Election Day, concerns over vote count delays and ballot signature issues led voter rights groups to file an emergency petition to the Arizona Supreme Court. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center on Saturday requested a four-day extension for voters to “cure” their ballot beyond the original 5 p.m. Sunday deadline, arguing that “tens of thousands of Arizonans stand to be disenfranchised without any notice, let alone an opportunity to take action to ensure their ballots are counted.” In the petition, ACLU and CLC claimed that thousands of mail-in ballots in Arizona wouldn’t be processed until after the deadline, meaning some voters wouldn’t know if their ballot had an issue until it was too late to cure it. Read Article

Arizona: Pinal County takes 24 hours to release Election Day results | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

In the early morning hours after Election Day, shortly after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had claimed victory, thousands of ballots from polling places were still piled up high in this town’s elections building, waiting to be tallied. This was the moment, Pinal County Recorder Dana Lewis later recalled, that she realized her staff needed to start taking breaks. She began to tell some of the workers who were feeding paper ballots into tabulation machines to find a spot in the building to take a short nap, or to go get some food. She realized, in other words, that it was going to be a while until they were done counting Election Day ballots, and they weren’t going home until they did. Pinal County, the fast-growing neighbor of Maricopa County, ultimately took more than 24 hours to count all the ballots cast at polling places. Read Article

Arizona: Maricopa County is prepared for safe presidential election, sheriff says | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Concrete barriers sit along the sidewalks outside Maricopa County’s election center in downtown Phoenix. A chain-link fence with privacy covers encloses the parking lot. Surrounding the building itself is another black steel security fence, this one permanent. And inside the building, there are locked doors behind locked doors. Outside on Tuesday, the gate on the security fence buzzed, followed by latches opening, then slamming shut again, as workers walked in and out. With seven days to go, this is what it looked like at the site where ballots will be counted for the Nov. 5 presidential election, in the most populous swing county in the nation. Read Article

Arizona GOP county recorder candidates campaign on election distrust | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona’s election system has been thrown into turmoil over the past four years by false claims of widespread fraud and some real instances of mistakes in running elections. Now, Republican candidates for county recorder across the state are playing up those false claims and errors as they try to get elected. Their opponents acknowledge that Arizona elections can be improved, but warn voters to be wary of turning over crucial decisions about voting to candidates who seek to leverage distrust in the system. The most closely watched race is in Maricopa County, where Republican state Rep. Justin Heap is running for recorder against Democrat Tim Stringham on a pledge to “secure our elections.” Heap defeated the current recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, in the August primary after claiming that Richer ran “the worst election in history” in 2022. Read Article

Arizona’s mail ballot signature verification disproportionately affects new voters | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Nate Kennedy was in a hurry when he arrived at a Motor Vehicle Division office in 2021 to get his driver’s license. He’d just moved back from out of state and marked the box to register to vote, quickly scribbling his signature on the electronic pad. He was all set to become one of the thousands of voters not affiliated with a political party who would play a key role in determining the state’s leaders in the next midterm election. When he submitted his mail ballot in November 2022, however, that messy signature would cost him his vote. Election officials who compared the signature on his mail ballot envelope to the electronic scribble on file weren’t convinced they came from the same person. So, as the law requires, they rejected his ballot. He didn’t find out until weeks later. Read Article

Arizona: Pinal County’s $150,000 audit confirms that its primary election was accurate and secure | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Pinal County spent at least $150,000 on an independent audit of its primary election after a losing candidate claimed fraud, a county spokesperson said Thursday, and the audit came back completely clean. The county’s supervisors, all Republicans, commissioned the audit in August to prove that the election was fair after one of them, Kevin Cavanaugh, blamed his loss in the sheriff’s race on malfeasance and voted to certify the results “under duress.” Brett Johnson of Snell & Wilmer, the law firm hired to lead the audit, presented the findings at a public meeting Wednesday afternoon, saying that the firm and the three technical experts hired to conduct the audit found no evidence of fraud or data manipulation. Read Article

Arizona can force counties to certify November results, despite federal court ruling | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

A federal judge has blocked an Arizona rule aimed at enforcing timely finalizing of election results, ruling that the state can’t simply exclude a county’s results if local officials there refuse to certify them, and noting the various legal alternatives that should make the rule unnecessary. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes had added the rule to the state’s most recent Election Procedures Manual, giving the secretary the power to move forward with the statewide certification without a county’s results. Read Article

Arizona official who certifies elections alleges fraud after his defeat | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

Fresh off losing a campaign for sheriff, Pinal County Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh (R) voted “under duress” in August to certify the county’s primary election results. This week, he threatened to sue the Arizona county that employs him, claiming — much like President Donald Trump did after his 2020 defeat — that the election had been rigged against him. In a formal notification signaling he intends to pursue a legal claim, Cavanaugh alleged that the Republican county recorder and five other election officials conspired to “modify the results” of the July 30 primary election. Cavanaugh’s board term does not end until the end of the year, so he will play a role in certifying the general election results, including the presidential race. Cavanaugh has said he will fulfill his duty to accept those results, but his handling of his own loss worries county and state election officials. Read Article

Arizona: Errors in citizenship checks put 97,000 voters’ eligibility in limbo | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

The eligibility of nearly 100,000 registered voters in Arizona is up in the air because of an error in state systems uncovered just before the scheduled sending of mail ballots, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced on Tuesday. The state incorrectly marked these voters when they registered to vote as already having provided documented proof of U.S. citizenship, when really, it’s unclear whether they have, Fontes said. The error stems from the way the Motor Vehicle Division provides driver’s license information to the state’s voter registration system. The voters affected by this particular error are people who first obtained their Arizona driver’s license before October 1996 and then were issued a duplicate replacement before registering to vote sometime after 2004, according to Fontes. Read Article

Arizona tries to bridge language gap for Native voters | Jen Fifield/ICT/Votebeat

The group of Navajo speakers gathered at the Coconino County Elections Center were deep into translating the pages stacked in front of them when they began deliberating over how to best describe fentanyl. It wouldn’t be a straight translation — almost nothing is, from English to Navajo. But these county and state election officials, charged with translating Arizona’s long and complex ballot for a key group of voters on the Navajo Nation, would try their best to get it right. “Not azee’,” someone said. “Azee’ is medicine. It’s to heal.” They looked down at the English text: “Criminalizes selling fentanyl that causes the death of a person.” Azee’, they decided, gave the wrong impression. The group would need new wording, and quickly. This was just a single sentence, a small piece of just one of the 13 propositions set to appear on Arizona’s November ballot. By the end of the day, the group had to finish translating all of them into Navajo. Because Navajo is a historically oral language and many who speak it cannot read it, the goal was to come up with an audio translation that voters who are not proficient in English could listen to at the polls. Read Article

Arizona: Pinal County begins audit to prove integrity of primary election | Sasha Hupka/Arizona Republic

Pinal County has begun an audit of its voting systems after one of its leaders raised doubts about the results of the recent primary election — a glimpse at how election denialism could possibly ensnarl local officials statewide in November. The examination, which county officials called “an election and cybersecurity technical assessment,” comes after Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh said he believed the outcomes of several races were “incorrect.” One of the contests he questioned was his own primary for county sheriff, which he lost by a 2-to-1 margin. He voted with the rest of the Board of Supervisors last month to certify primary results but said he did so “under duress.” His comments drew ire from his fellow supervisors and other county figures, all of whom are Republicans. Read Article

Arizona: Conservative groups sue to force more citizenship checks on voters | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Conservative groups want a federal judge to force Arizona counties to further investigate the status of voters who have not provided documented proof of citizenship. A lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Arizona claims that counties haven’t been checking the citizenship status of these voters using specific methods required under federal and state law, including two new state laws enacted in 2022. It’s the latest in a slew of Republican-backed challenges to voters’ citizenship status across the country just before the November election, based on the premise that voting by noncitizens is a pressing problem in the U.S. — even though the practice is illegal and, according to experts, rare. Read Article

Arizona: US Supreme Court partly grants GOP request to enforce proof-of-citizenship voting law | Lawrence Hurley/NBC

The Supreme Court on Thursday partly granted a request from the Republican National Committee to make Arizona enforce measures requiring people to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. In what is likely to be one of many election-related disputes to come before the court ahead of the November election, the justices allowed for one of three provisions of the state law to be enforced. The vote was 5-4 on allowing limited enforcement of the law with conservative justices in the majority. One conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined the three liberal justices in dissent. The court, in a brief order, did not explain its reasoning. Read Article

Supreme Court rejects GOP push to block 41K Arizona voters, but partly OKs proof of citizenship law | Lindsay Whitehurst and Jacques Billeaud/Associated Press

A divided Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a Republican push that could have blocked more than 41,000 Arizona voters from casting ballots for president in the closely contested swing state, but allowed some parts of a law requiring proof of citizenship to be enforced. The 5-4 order came after emergency appeal filed by state and national Republicans. It sought to give full effect to voting measures that were enacted after President Joe Biden won the state over Republican Donald Trump with less than 11,000 votes. The measures have drawn fierce opposition from voting rights advocates. The case could be one of multiple election disputes to come before the high court with the November election less than 90 days away. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch would have allowed the law to be fully enforced. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett would have joined with the court’s three liberals in fully rejecting the push, the order states. Read Article

Arizona: Disruptions as counties certify primary election may signal what’s to come in November | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Voting in Arizona’s July 30 primary went smoothly around the state, with no major technical or logistical issues, according to observers from both major political parties, elected officials, and candidates. But there were disruptions Monday in two of the state’s largest counties, as their boards of supervisors moved to certify the results. In Pinal, Republican supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh voted “aye under duress” to certify the results, later explaining that he felt forced to do so even though he doesn’t believe the results were accurate, including in the sheriff’s race, which he lost by a 2-to-1 margin. And in Maricopa, the epicenter of election conspiracy theories since 2020, residents yelled at the supervisors from the podium during the public comment period, with one saying she had more faith in Russia’s elections because “Maricopa is a joke.” The Republican-led boards in both counties ultimately voted unanimously to certify the results, but the disruptions may be a sign of what is to come in November. Read Article

Arizona: Court blocks enforcement of voter intimidation rules, just before election | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona’s rules aimed at preventing specific types of voter intimidation and harassment near polling places and drop boxes are too broad and violate free speech rights, a Maricopa County judge ruled. The rules, some of which have been in place for years, prohibit anyone from following, photographing, videotaping, or yelling at voters outside drop boxes or polling places, along with other activities that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes had declared were intimidating. Tuesday’s injunction from Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jennifer Ryan-Touhill temporarily prohibits Arizona officials from enforcing the rules, until the court can issue a final ruling in the matter. The ruling comes just two months before early voting begins for the presidential election, and as Republican groups pledge to watch over the polls. Fontes’s office said in a statement Tuesday that it will appeal the order. Read Article