Arizona

Arizona: Maricopa County recorder privately lobbied supervisors for election control | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap privately pleaded with two county supervisors to support his bid for more power over the county’s elections, text messages obtained by Votebeat show. The messages, which county supervisors provided to Votebeat in response to a public-records request, include previously unreported behind-the-scenes conversations and confrontations as Heap negotiated with the supervisors board early this year over how to divide election duties in the closely watched swing county. “I really thought you guys would come through for me,” Heap wrote to Supervisor Mark Stewart, a fellow Republican, in March after a counterproposal from the supervisors. “This was the last straw for me, Mark.” Heap sued supervisors in June after the negotiations over an agreement governing the division of election duties fell apart. County supervisors countersued this month, and the lawsuit is pending in county court. The breakdown means that as the time to start preparing for next year’s midterm elections approaches, the division of duties between the recorder and supervisors remains in dispute. Read Article

Arizona election officials unload on Trump’s CISA after website hack | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Arizona election officials say a hack targeting a statewide online portal for political candidates resulted in the defacement and replacement of multiple candidate photos with the late Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. While officials say the threat is contained and the vulnerability has been fixed, they also blasted the lack of support they’ve received from the federal government, claiming the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is no longer a reliable partner in election security under the Trump administration. Michael Moore, the chief information security officer for Arizona’s Secretary of State, told CyberScoop that his office first became aware that something odd was happening on June 23, while many officials were at a conference. One user managing the candidate portal noticed that one of the candidate images uploaded to the site didn’t “make sense” because it appeared to be a picture of Khomeini. The next day they were notified that candidate profiles going back years had also been defaced with the same picture. Read Article

Arizona: Hackers who breached election website aimed at other targets, too | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona officials say they have “moderate confidence” that the Iranian government or its affiliates are responsible for a cyberattack that breached the state’s candidate web portal last month, and say the same actors attempted to breach servers for other agencies in Arizona and elsewhere. The hacker gained access to a server at the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office on June 23 and began changing candidate profile photos that appear on the state’s election results website, according to office officials. The hacker changed all of the photos to the same image — a red and black image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution that established Iran as an Islamic republic. Read Article

Arizona: Hacker breaks into election website with candidate profiles –  Jen Fifield/Votebeat

A hacker gained access to the web portal Arizona candidates use to upload information about themselves and changed candidate profile photos that were live on the election results website, just three weeks before the special congressional primary election, Votebeat has learned. The Secretary of State’s Office realized the system had been breached, shut down the candidate portal the week of June 23, and kept it offline for a week, according to JP Martin, an office spokesperson. Martin said officials flagged the problem upon noticing unusual activity. He said he did not know what kinds of photographs had been improperly posted, or which candidate photos were changed. Read Article

Arizona’s Democracy Shield, Secretary of State’s Office Fights Off | Taylor Johnson/Hoodline

Arizona's Secretary of State's office recently managed a cybersecurity skirmish, fending off what it described as a "malicious adversary" that had eyes on the state's election-related systems. According to an official statement released by the office and obtained by AZ SOS, the attempted incursion focused on the website, specifically the Candidate Portal, which required temporary offline measures to beef up security protocols. The attack hit home the message that threats to election integrity are not just hypothetical but pressing and immediate. The state's top election official, Secretary Adrian Fontes, laid out a stark picture of the digital battlefield where Arizona's voter registration database remained unscathed during the cyber assault, noting, "Since day one, I've warned that foreign adversaries, particularly Iran, are actively targeting our election infrastructure and political systems." Read Article

Proposed Arizona settlement recommends more warnings for voters coming off early-voting list | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona election officials would be instructed to provide more notice to voters who are at risk of being removed from the state’s early-voting list, under a conditional legal settlement with voting rights groups. The settlement, which was filed in court Monday and is still subject to final approval, would resolve a longstanding challenge to a 2021 law that eliminated the state’s Permanent Early Voting List. The agreement says voters who face removal should be notified two additional times before they are taken off the list, and once afterward. The agreement does not appear to impose any new notification requirements on county recorders, who manage county voter rolls. What it would do is provide suggested best practices for how the recorders should implement the law, including the schedule of notices. Because the additional notices wouldn’t be required, voters across the state could face unequal treatment as recorders begin implementing the law for the first time in 2027. Read Article

Arizona tries again to ensure that manual audits of election results get done | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

In Arizona, where distrust in elections runs high, many people agree that a manual check of election results could help boost confidence. And state law requires counties to do such audits. Yet they aren’t always happening. That’s because state law has strict conditions on who appoints the workers, who participates, and when it happens. If those conditions can’t be met, the elections director cancels the audit. Lawmakers have tried to change state law before to make sure the audits — which examine votes cast on a certain percentage of ballots in a set number of races — actually happen in each county. This year, they are trying again. Read Article

Arizona lawsuit centers on power struggle over elections in Maricopa County | Sejal Govindarao/Associated Press

The top elections official in one of the nation’s most pivotal swing counties is suing the Maricopa County governing board over allegations that it’s attempting to gain more control over how elections are administered. County Recorder Justin Heap filed a lawsuit Thursday in state court with the backing of America First Legal, a conservative public interest group founded by Stephen Miller, who is now the White House deputy chief of staff. Heap, a former GOP state lawmaker who has questioned election administration in Arizona’s most populous county, has been at odds with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors for months over an agreement that would divide election operations between the two offices. Read Article

How Arizona is lining up the next generation of election workers, as more people leave the field | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

In Arizona, where each election is closely watched, officials are under such intense pressure to conduct elections perfectly, that some counties hire a person whose sole duty is ensuring that all laws are followed. Filling that compliance officer spot isn’t easy. It needs to be someone who knows the complex, technical side of conducting elections, and also is well-versed in all the rules officials must follow. This year, though, Pima County had a candidate who not only had the right skills and interests, but also had been trained already. Constance Hargrove, elections director in the state’s second-largest county, said she was thrilled when a young law student named Carly Morrison came to her and said she wanted the job. “I’m like, ‘Yes!’” Hargrove said, pumping both of her fists. “That was awesome.” Read Article

Arizona: Maricopa County Recorder sues county supervisors over election powers | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap is suing the county’s supervisors, claiming they are illegally trying to seize control of the county’s elections. The lawsuit, which Trump-aligned group America First Legal filed Thursday on Heap’s behalf, claims that the supervisors “engaged in an unlawful attempt to seize near-total control over the administration of elections.” It specifically states that Heap wants control over the information technology staff that manages the county’s voter registration system, and that the board has prohibited him from accessing certain areas of the elections building that he needs entry to for early voting purposes. The legal action comes after a months-long feud over control of elections between Heap, a Republican who took office in January, and the Republican-controlled board. The dissension has cast doubt on the officials’ ability to work together to run the elections in the closely scrutinized swing county. Read Article

Arizona: Mohave County supervisor pushes for legal immunity for hand counted ballots | Howard Fischer/Arizona Capitol Times

Ron Gould contends that Mayes constitutes a “real threat” to his powers and duties to certify elections simply because he believes that supervisors should be able to order a complete hand count. However, so far, he has been unable to make his arguments after a trial judge last year dismissed his lawsuit, stating that he had not shown any imminent threat of prosecution. Now Gould is asking the state Court of Appeals to issue a ruling declaring he has a legal right to pursue the case and directing Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bradley Astrowsky to let him present his evidence. The new bid is getting a fight from Assistant Attorney General Alexander Samuels. He is telling the appellate court that Gould’s claims are “speculative,” especially as he has “not articulated a concrete plan to violate the law” in the future. And there’s something else. Samuels pointed out that state law requires the use of electronic tabulation of ballots, not the kind of hand count that Gould has pushed for in the past and may be seeking in the future. He noted that Gould is not challenging the legality of that law, but simply wants a declaration that he can’t be prosecuted for breaking it. Read Article

Arizona: Ruling lets Cochise County throw out local election result over mail-ballot mistake | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

An Arizona judge is allowing Cochise County officials to throw out the results of a local tax election after challengers identified a requirement in state law that they said the county didn’t follow — one that applies only to a specific kind of election and that other counties haven’t followed in the past. The case involves the county’s May 2023 all-mail election on a proposed tax to fund construction of a new jail. The Arizona Court of Appeals found last year that the county erred by not sending ballots to its 11,000 inactive voters. Because of that error, the county supervisors’ plan to redo the election is reasonable and legal, visiting Judge Michael Latham of the Cochise County Superior Court ruled May 22. Arizona counties typically send ballots only to active voters, but the appeals court found that for local taxing district elections — such as the Cochise jail election — the law required officials to send ballots to inactive voters as well. Read Article

Arizona: Maricopa County proposal to send out unsolicited mail ballots has a history | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

When Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap proposed sending mail ballots for a July election to a group of voters who hadn’t requested them, the suggestion seemed to come out of nowhere. Heap’s plan especially shocked his fellow Republicans, including the county supervisors, who have been clashing with him over election policy and who quickly voted to try to block it. GOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda told Heap in a letter that his plan would be ill-advised and illegal. But Heap has defended his plan as a way to avoid disenfranchising rural voters who would otherwise have to drive unreasonably long distances to vote in person. And there’s some history that helps explain why Heap, who is aligned with the GOP’s arch-conservative Freedom Caucus and who campaigned on a platform of “election integrity,” would suggest such a move. Read Article

Arizona judge deals blow to case over 2020 Republican electors | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

An Arizona judge has ordered state prosecutors to send back to a grand jury a case in which Republicans were charged last year for their alleged roles in trying to overturn the 2020 election, potentially jeopardizing the high-profile indictments. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam J. Myers sided with the Republicans and found that prosecutors failed to provide the grand jury with the text of an 1887 federal law that is central to the Republicans’ defense. The law, known as the Electoral Count Act, spells out how presidential electoral votes are to be cast and counted. “We are extremely pleased with the court’s ruling, and we think the judge got it exactly right,” said Stephen Binhak, the attorney who spearheaded the effort to get the case back to a grand jury. The decision is a major setback for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D), who promised to appeal the ruling so she could keep the prosecution going. Read Article

Arizona Secretary of State seeks legal guidance as counties chart their own path on voter registration glitch  Mary Jo Pitzl/Arizona Republic

To ensure equal treatment of all voters, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is seeking legal guidance on how to address more than 200,000 voters whose registrations do not meet the state's citizenship requirements. Fontes wrote in a May 7 letter to Attorney General Kris Mayes that county recorders, who handle voter registrations, have approached the issue differently. He's seeking uniform guidance in order to avoid potential lawsuits challenging election outcomes. Read Article

Arizona GOP passes ‘impossible’ voting bill requiring 4,000 new polling locations | Caitlin Sievers/Arizona Mirror

Republican lawmakers passed legislation that would cost Arizona counties tens of millions of dollars every election year and would force them to attempt to find 4,000 new voting locations, something that county election officials described as impossible. House Bill 2017 passed through the Senate by a 17-12 party line vote on Tuesday. Sponsored by Rep. Rachel Keshel, a Tucson Republican and member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, the proposal would ban in-person early voting and the use of vote centers where any registered voter within a county can cast a ballot. Instead, it would require the use of precincts capped at 1,000 registered voters apiece. Most counties use voting centers, which allow any registered voter to show up and cast a ballot at any polling site in the county. Under the precinct model, only voters assigned to a precinct can vote there, and if they vote at the wrong location, their ballot won’t be counted. Read Article

Arizona: American-made voting equipment might not be ready by 2029 | Howard Fischer/Arizona Capitol Times

On party-line votes, both the Republican controlled House and Senate have approved legislation spelling out that, beginning that year, the Secretary of State’s Office cannot certify vote-recording and vote-tabulating equipment unless each and every part of the machine, including all components and software, are “sourced from the United States.” House Bill 2651 also says the equipment must be assembled in the United States. The measure now goes to Gov. Katie Hobbs. The only thing is, there are no voting tabulation machines available that meet those conditions according to Jenn Marson, a lobbyist for the Arizona Association of Counties. And it is her organization’s members who would have to comply. She told lawmakers there are probably companies that could meet the deadline. But the problem, Marson said, comes down to this: What if they can’t? Read Article

Arizona: As Cochise County trial approaches, a judge throws out rules for certifying elections | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

When two Republican Cochise County supervisors delayed their certification of the county’s 2022 election results, a judge forced them to certify, pointing to language in Arizona’s election manual that says they have no choice. A state grand jury later charged the two supervisors with two felonies — conspiracy, and interference with the secretary of state’s duty to certify the election. And two secretaries of state have sought to make the rules about supervisors’ duties more explicit. A recent court ruling, though, challenges the long-held presumption in Arizona that supervisors have no discretion when certifying election results. The court threw out that section of the Elections Procedures Manual entirely, saying it goes further than the statute supports. Read Article

Arizona’s Mohave County approves security marks on ballot paper for 2026 | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona’s Mohave County plans to add security features to its ballot paper for the 2026 midterm election, a measure officials hope will improve voter confidence. The features could include watermarks or invisible fibers, according to a contract with election printing vendor Runbeck Election Services that county supervisors unanimously voted to approve Monday. The features will cost somewhere between 10 to 15 cents a ballot, according to Runbeck’s proposal. About 83,000 Mohave County voters cast ballots in the last midterm election. Read Article

Arizona: Fox News report feeds false claim about 50,000 noncitizens on voter rolls | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona has not identified up to 50,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls, nor have counties begun canceling any voter registrations, despite news reports over the weekend suggesting otherwise. The misleading claims showed up in reports by Fox News and other outlets that mischaracterized a recent legal settlement between Arizona counties and the grassroots organization Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, known as EZAZ.org. Sunday’s Fox News story carried the headline “Arizona to begin removing as many as 50K noncitizens from voter rolls following lawsuit.” It said that the settlement led to all counties beginning “the process of verifying and removing noncitizens from their voter rolls, including nearly 50,000 registrants who did not provide proof of U.S. citizenship.” Read Article

Arizona voter citizenship rulings lead to disparate treatment for voters across state | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona voters who haven’t proven their citizenship are being treated differently across the state as they try to update their voter registration, in some cases seeing their registration suspended entirely until they provide proof, Votebeat has found. The disparate treatment across county lines comes as election officials decide how to comply with recent court rulings on state laws governing proof of citizenship, according to the responses nine out of 15 county recorder offices provided to Votebeat. The confusion over how to treat these voter updates is the latest complication arising from Arizona’s unique laws, which require voters to document their citizenship in order to vote in state and local elections. Read Article

Arizona: Longtime voters receive letters asking for proof of their citizenship | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona counties are starting to send letters to some longtime voters telling them that they must provide documentation proving their citizenship before they vote again, prompting annoyance and confusion across the state. Around 200,000 longtime residents, or roughly 5% of the state’s voter roll, will eventually get such letters because they were caught up in a decades-long state error tracking proof of citizenship. Affected voters will need to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other documents proving their citizenship. If they don’t, they’ll eventually be restricted to voting only in federal elections, or be kicked off the voter rolls entirely. Some of these voters have been registered for decades. Read Article

Arizona Secretary of State says Trump’s election order is a ‘power grab’ | Mary Jo Pitzl/Arizona Republic

President Donald Trump has issued a wide-ranging executive order that would wrest the ability of states to control federal elections, arguing the country has a "patchwork of voting methods" that his order seeks to streamline. The March 25 order sparked alarm among voting rights groups, with Democratic attorney Marc Elias promising an imminent legal challenge. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called it a "power grab," and predicted it could derail the mid-term elections of 2026. "(I)t appears as though this is another one of the administration’s building blocks in an attempt to avoid having to face the voters in 2026,” Fontes told Democracy Docket, an organization Elias founded that tracks election litigation. Read Article

Arizona judge could throw out a Cochise County election over quirk in state law | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

A quirk in an Arizona statute governing all-mail elections for local taxing districts could prompt a judge to throw out the results of one such election in a case that could have legal repercussions around the state. The case calls into question the results of Cochise County’s May 2023 election, in which voters narrowly approved a new tax for a county jail. But without a legislative fix to the way the statute is written, other similar elections could be vulnerable to challenges in the future. The dispute involves a claim by four residents who sued the county to have the election nullified, arguing that ballots for the jail-tax election should have been sent to the roughly 11,000 inactive voters in the county, among other complaints. Read Article

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