SHAWNNA LM BOLICK: The Fight For Election Reform In Arizona

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