Arizona Republicans introduce election subversion bill

The proposal would end all voting by mail and allow legislature to reject election results, part of nationwide rightwing effort to overturn elections

Arizona Republicans have introduced a bill that would impose significant new voting restrictions and allow the state legislature to reject election results.

The measure would require the state legislature to convene after primary and general elections to review the ballot counting process and “shall accept or reject the election results”.

The proposal does not require lawmakers to find evidence of fraud or lay out any factors they would have to consider in order to overturn an election. If the lawmakers were to reject the results, any voter in Arizona would be allowed to petition a local judge to hold a new election.

The same measure would also require Arizona voters to give an excuse if they want to vote by mail, even though mail-in voting has long been used by the vast majority of voters in the state. It also would restrict voting to election day and prevent the use of vote centers, essentially mega voting precincts where anyone in a county can vote, regardless of where they live.

One of the co-sponsors of the bill is Mark Finchem, a state representative who believes the 2020 election was stolen, has ties to the Oath Keepers, and was at the Capitol on 6 January. Finchem is running to be Arizona’s chief election official and Donald Trump has endorsed him.

“We need to get back to 1958-style voting,” John Fillmore, another Republican state representative who introduced the bill said on Wednesday, according to the Arizona Republic. Arizona had a racist literacy test in place in 1958, the Republic noted. The Voting Rights Act, which wiped out many blatant efforts to keep Black people from the polls, passed in 1965.

Fillmore did not respond to an interview request from the Guardian.

“What’s clear from this bill is that there are some members of the Arizona legislature who are prepared to replace the judgment of Arizona voters with their own,” said David Becker, an election administration expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

It’s unclear if the measure will ultimately pass. Republicans hold a 16-14 majority in the state senate, which means, if Democrats unanimously oppose it, any Republican could kill the bill by voting against it. A Republican bill last year that would have allowed the legislature to override the results of a presidential election stalled.

“I can’t imagine that they will move forward with that idea because I think the outrage from the community would be pretty big,” said Martin Quezada, a Democrat in the state senate. “But the fact that they’re even talking about this issue just shows what kind of a space that we are in right now.”

Even if Republicans drop the provision allowing the legislature to overturn elections, Quezada said, the measures that roll back vote-by-mail access in Arizona would still be extreme.

“The impact would be tremendous. It would drastically change the way elections work in the state of Arizona. I mean right now the overwhelming majority of voters vote by mail,” he said. “The turnout overall would be suppressed tremendously … The process of actually showing up at the polls to vote would be so frustrating and time-consuming that many people would feel even if they did want to vote, it’s just not worth it to deal with that type of problem.”

The proposal comes as there is increased alarm over Republican efforts across the country to make it possible for partisan actors to overturn election results, something scholars have begun calling election subversion.

“This bill follows a worrisome anti-democratic trend of legislation introduced in statehouses across the country that would make it possible for legislatures to overturn election results they don’t like,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at the watchdog Protect Democracy who is tracking election subversion bills across the country.

“This brazen power grab reveals the cynical strategy behind the deceptive big lie movement: to create a pretext for interfering in election outcomes by undermining confidence in elections.”

The bill also underscores how Arizona, where Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in 2020, has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the election. The state senate authorized an unprecedented months-long post-election review of 2.1m ballots in the state’s most populous county that fanned lies about the 2020 race but ultimately affirmed Biden’s win.

Some provisions in the legislation appear to be connected to conspiracy theories that flourished during that review, including the debunked belief that voting equipment was tampered with and ballots had bamboo fibers in them. The bill would require a hand count of ballots within 24 hours of an election and require the use of a hologram or other unique mark to verify the authenticity of ballots.

“They keep inventing solutions where there are no problems,” said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former election official in Arizona.

Changing the paper used for ballots would probably make it more costly for counties to run elections and more difficult to reprint ballots if there is an error in the printing process, she said. And requiring election officials to complete a hand count of ballots within 24 hours just isn’t feasible in Arizona, where the ballot can be extremely long, with dozens of races.

“It’s not feasible, it’s not accurate, and it’s cost prohibitive … To think that you can do a full ballot hand count within 24 hours is ridiculous,” she said. Humans are also prone to make counting errors. “Everyone who has done a hand count will tell you that machine counts are more accurate,” Patrick said.

Jennifer Morrell, a former election official who now works as a consultant and election administration noted that Cyber Ninjas, the firm that conducted the unusual election review in Arizona, took months to count ballots by hand.

“The idea of hand counting all ballots within 24 hours of election day is completely unrealistic and shows how little the bill’s sponsors understand about the mechanics of counting ballots,” she said. “Besides the time frame being unrealistic, the process of counting by hand is prone to error. That’s part of why it takes so long. You have to go at it in a way that is slow and methodical to get it right and include enough time to verify the counting was done correctly.”

“Hand counting ballots is problematic to begin with. The time frame they’re suggesting is completely unrealistic,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official who now works as a consultant on election administration.

Earlier this week, Republicans in the state legislature advanced several other bills that would change election processes in the state. One bill would expand the threshold for an automatic recount from 0.1 percentage point to 0.5 (Biden defeated Trump by 0.3 points). Other bills would require the state to make ballot images public after an election while another would end all mail-in elections for school boards and cities.