Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

SHAWNNA LM BOLICK: The Fight For Election Reform In Arizona

A voting booth in 2022. (Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)

Last month, Maricopa County broke ground on a new state of the art tabulation and election center where our county’s ballots are counted. Unfortunately, if the Arizona state legislature doesn’t modernize our current election laws this new state of the art facility won’t be worth the taxpayer funded resources invested in it because Arizona will continue to be viewed as a laughingstock who can’t count its ballots in a timely manner.

Arizona seems to be moving in reverse on addressing election integrity at its state legislature while other states have worked to pass election reforms over the past several years.  As most of America is aware, Arizona’s lengthy election season has created some challenges over the last several election cycles.  After one of Arizona’s best election turnouts of 80.34% in Maricopa County last fall, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors called on Arizona lawmakers like me and Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs to work together to adopt common sense election legislation to help speed up tabulation of ballots, mirroring some of Florida’s election reforms and deadlines.

Maricopa County is the second largest voting jurisdiction in the United States.  Last November, 2,078,460 ballots were cast of its county’s 2,587,197 registered voters.  Typically, Maricopa County is one of the last counties to finish counting its ballots each election. Last November, Maricopa County took 11 days to count over 2 million two-page ballots cast in the Nov. 5 election.  Due to our state’s current generous election law timeframes, Arizona’s election results aren’t readily available for a few weeks after an election. It has become commonplace for registered early mail-in ballot voters to walk in their late early mail-in ballots into designated early polling places or a drop box location after early voting has come to an end, which is the Friday before the election through election day.  Last fall, 30% (631,000 voters) of early voters dropped off their ballots, clogging up the ballot tabulation system.

I know the rest of the country is tired of waiting for Arizona to act.  Earlier this legislative session, the Republican majority of the Arizona legislature sent a bill to Gov. Hobbs to help speed up counting the election results, but it was promptly vetoed.  Hobbs claims this measure would have “disenfranchised” Arizona’s voters even though our state has a lengthy election season of 27 days of in-person early voting before election day.

For the past two legislative sessions the Arizona legislature has focused on legislation to replicate some of Florida’s election reforms implemented to more efficiently release its election results closer to after the polls have closed on Election Day and banning foreign donations in our elections.  Sadly, some of my fellow Republicans have helped to shut down important election integrity legislation, including a bill to speed up Arizona’s election results, a bill to keep foreign donations out of election administration, and a ballot referral that encompassed banning foreign contributions in election administration and banning foreign contributions for ballot measures.

This year isn’t the first time the Arizona legislature has tried to send a ballot referral to the ballot for voters to decide on ending ballot drop offs at 7 p.m. on the Friday before election day, banning foreign funding in elections, on-site tabulation of early ballots and a post elections process review.  Last year, I sponsored a bill to ban foreign donations in our elections.  Unfortunately, this bill did not receive a hearing in the House after it had passed the Senate, despite the Chair of the Committee on Municipal Oversight and Elections being the founding vice-chair of the Arizona Freedom Caucus. Knowing there was foreign influence coming into other state’s ballot measures and election administration, the State Senate was able to revive a House bill in the Senate last month, but the legislative referral failed to garner enough votes to make the ballot because the chair of the Arizona Freedom Caucus did not vote.

I have been involved with addressing election integrity since I was first elected to the legislature in 2018.  I served on the House Committee on Elections for two years and worked with this country’s center right election integrity experts onward.  In 2020, I actively worked to oppose moving to an all-mail-in ballot due to Covid.  Not only did I write about it HERE and HERE, but I joined other election integrity experts across the country to offer a solution to create a standard for mail-in ballots.  In the fall of 2023, I attended an election integrity gathering in Scottsdale with dozens of election experts from across the country hosted by the Honest Elections Project.  At this meeting we learned how foreign donations were pouring into the state’s elections and how Louisiana had proactively sent a ballot referral to its electorate to ban foreign donations, and the ballot measure was overwhelmingly approved by its voters by nearly 73%.

Last December, once again I attended a meeting convening national election integrity experts alongside the Honest Elections Project to continue to work on a similar bill to ban foreign influence in our state’s elections. We collaboratively worked together during the interim, and I sponsored a bill to send to the November 2026 ballot to let the voters decide whether or not Arizona should join other states in banning foreign influence in our elections as well as additional commonsense measures to help Arizona get election results closer to election day instead of waiting weeks after the election took place.  This bill went through an extensive stakeholder process with legislators in the House and Senate yet ultimately failed to gain enough votes to be referred to the ballot because of the inclusion of a last-minute amendment to the legislation from one of our fellow Republicans that would have removed a provision to help speed up the counting of Arizona ballots.

If you are wondering why election results are delayed in the future in Arizona, you can sadly place the blame directly on some so-called Republicans. I and other Republican members of the state legislature will continue to fight for election integrity to give voters the assurances and transparency they deserve.

Shawnna LM Bolick is an Arizona State Senator and chairs the Senate Committee on Regulatory Affairs and Government Efficiency (RAGE) and is a member of the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Elections as well as the Senate Committee on Finance.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)