A group that advocates for additional restrictions on voting wants a judge to outlaw the use of ballot drop boxes in Arizona.
Attorneys for the Free Enterprise Club say Arizona law only allows a ballot to be submitted in certain ways: delivered to county election offices, dropped in the mail or returned to a polling place.
But the Secretary of State's Elections Procedures Manual allows counties to set up unmonitored drop boxes and have "retrievers'' collect ballots left there to be tallied. And whatever is in that manual is backed up by state law.
Tim La Sota, a lawyer for the group fighting the boxes, said the manual can’t allow what’s not specifically authorized by the Legislature, which includes drop boxes. He added that they're a potential source of problems and that mailing ballots is safer.
"From the outside, it is impossible to determine whether a particular mailbox contains early voted ballots,'' he said. "A person seeking to interfere with ballots being returned by mail would have very little certainty that a particular mailbox contains any ballots at all.''
By contrast, La Sota said, a drop box has only completed ballots.
But an aide to Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said the Free Enterprise Club has the law wrong.
Paul Smith-Leonard said state law requires his boss to prescribe rules not only to achieve and maintain impartiality, uniformity and correctness but also for collecting ballots.
"The drop boxes are used by the county recorders to collect early ballots,'' Smith-Leonard said, adding that drop boxes comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act "and provide a reasonable accommodation to voters with a disability.''
La Sota wants a Yavapai County Superior Court judge to declare the manual provision illegal and bar Arizona elections officials from using them.
