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AZ Republicans are trying to put the ‘early’ in early voting — but Democrats say it's suppression

A "vote here" sign in downtown Phoenix.
Kiersten Edgett/KJZZ
A "vote here" sign in downtown Phoenix.

Republicans at the state Capitol are moving fast to move some of their favorite legislation and, at the top of their list is Arizona’s elections, and putting the “early” back in early voting.

It’s an attempt to speed up the counting of ballots so we can get results in our state faster. In Arizona, there are often races where the winners weren’t clear for several days or even up to two weeks — especially in close races.

In order to do that, Republicans want to stop people from being able to drop off early ballots at polling places until 7 p.m. on Election Day. Democrats at the Legislature have called it a power grab. But, our next guest says they should find something else to complain about.

Laurie Roberts, columnist for the Arizona Republic, joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so tell us first just why you think this is a good idea, why you think this is a good fix to this issue that is becoming, you know, louder and louder every election cycle that our elections take too long, the races take too long to count.

LAURIE ROBERTS: Well, I think the problem is we've always taken a long time to count, but as Arizona races have gotten closer, we've just begun to notice. And it started maybe in 2020, as it takes so much longer to, to find out than the rest of the nation, the conspiracy crowd immediately goes to getting riled up and say, you know, there's obviously a problem with our elections, the fix is in.

And, and it erodes confidence in our elections. We need to get with the rest of the country, or most of the rest of the country, I should say, and be able to find out who actually wins our election within a few days, rather than waiting 10, 12, 13, 14 days to find out who wins some of these vital key races that have become oh so close in recent years.

GILGER: Right. And it turns out that those early lates that I described there, the people who drop off their ballots, those early ballots at the polling place late on Election Day. Those are the ones kind of that are the culprits here.

Democrats are calling this a power grab. They say it's voter suppression essentially though, that it, it's like another way to restrict voting. A lot of people who vote this way, too, a quarter of a million in November. What do you think of that argument? Like, do you think it would make it harder for a whole lot of Arizonans to vote?

ROBERTS: Well, let's talk about the different ways in which you can vote now. You have 27 days in the 27 days leading up to the election, you can mail in your early ballot. That's 27 days that you have to vote.

Or in those last final days because the mail wouldn't get it there quickly enough, you can drop it off at any voting center. You can drop it off, you know. In a dropbox, there are a couple of them around the county as well. You can vote in an emergency basis the Saturday and Monday before the elections, or you can come to the polls, vote the old-fashioned way.

I don't see how it's suppression to say that you ought to put a little effort in and get your early ballot, which you've had for nearly a month, get it in the, in time for it to be counted by the Friday before the election.

GILGER: One of the worries in election circles, right, though, in, in, in politics is that it's too hard for voters already. Like it's confusing. There are these incredibly long ballots we're facing now, like that ballot takes time to research, to figure out what you think about things, what things actually mean. I mean, do you think that, that people are not putting in an effort?

ROBERTS: Well, I think that people are putting in an effort at the end, at the very end of the cycle, or maybe not much of an effort. But if you want to vote early, you have 27 days to get it done. How many more days do you need to do research on these things?

And the other thing I should mention is you can still bring your early ballot to a polling place. You just have to show ID and then feed it into a tabulation machine under this proposal …

GILGER: Because of the wait in line. 

ROBERTS: Because of the problem is that when you just drop off an early ballot and it has to have signature verification and all those things that can't by law then begin to happen until the day after the election. That's what's holding up the results.

So if you brought your, if you want to bring your early ballot to the polls, all this bill does is say rather than dropping it into a box to be processed in a day or two or in a week, you have to show ID to bypass that signature requirement and then just tabulate it right there.

So again, it doesn't really change what you can do. It simply means you might have to stand in line for a few minutes. It's, I don't see the suppression involved here. I mean, is it inconvenient to have to stand in a line? Sure, it is, but when you go to buy eggs at the grocery store, don't you also stand in line? Isn't our democracy worth at least that?

I see plenty of efforts in Arizona to suppress votes over the years, but I just don't see this as one of them.

GILGER: And you said this does work differently in other states, in most other states.

ROBERTS: Yeah, most other states, you can find out who won the election before a week, week and a half. Now some states still have a hard time figuring these things out, but this particular bill is modeled after the law in Florida, where, where they, it can count ballots fairly quickly, and this idea of cutting off early ballot drop offs the Friday before the election seems to make a difference in the handling of these ballots so that, election officials aren't just have an avalanche of ballots dropped on them at the last minute that they can't even get to until the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, week from Friday after the election.

GILGER: So this bill had no trouble getting through committee at the state Capitol. Very likely though that Katie Hobbs would veto something like this if it reaches her desk. Do you think Republicans might go around her, send this to voters, and if so, I mean, like, would voters say no thanks?

ROBERTS: I think this is a pretty popular idea. I've seen polls on both sides, but the poll that I saw that was done by a Democratic-leaning group didn't really explain to voters the tradeoff. It just said, do you, do you want the right to drop off your ballot at the polls? It didn't go on to explain that that's a trade off for having election results later.

So the polling that I've seen that I think is maybe more or more representative of what people think is that I think most people think. I think it's a reasonable trade-off to, you know, put the early back in early ballots, as I like to say. So I think it's a pretty popular idea.

I think it will breeze through the Legislature, and I think that it will be vetoed by this governor. And quite likely they'll put it on the ballot next year. And it'll be a great election issue for them. It'll be a great election issue for them.

We'll talk about it more then.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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