Veto the Voter Suppression Act, HB 2305
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Howard Fischer from Capitol Media Services has a decent explanation of the Voter Suppression Act, HB 2305, passed by the Tea-Publican controlled Arizona legislature before sine die. GOP OKs series of changes in election law:
Republicans used the final hours of their just-ended legislative session
to push through a series of changes in election laws that could give
them advantages in future elections.
* * *
Among the additions:
• Making it a crime for volunteer
political workers and organizations to collect early ballots from voters
and take them to polling places;
• Increasing the number of signatures that minor-party legislative and congressional candidates need to get on the ballot;
•
Imposing higher legal standards on voter-sponsored initiatives, making
it easier to throw them off the ballot if they do not strictly comply
with each and every provision of the law;
• Adding some procedural requirements to recall laws.
Let's unpack some of these changes. If you are a member of the Libertarian Party, or the Green Party, or the new Americans Elect Party, you now have a big problem qualifying your candidates for the ballot.
Current law sets the number of signatures a candidate needs to qualify for the ballot based upon the number of registered voters in the candidate's political party. For example, in a Democratic voter registration advantage district, a Democrat may need 385 minimum number of signatures to qualify, a Republican may need only 165 minimum number of signatures to qualify, and minor political parties have a ridiculously low number of minimum signatures to qualify.