GQP Voter Suppression Bills Moving Through Arizona Legislature – Gov. Hobbs Will Veto

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The Arizona Mirror reports, Every Arizona voter would be purged every decade under GOP proposal:

Every Arizona voter would be purged from the rolls once a decade and have to re-register under a proposal Republicans in the state Senate advanced this week.

The move not only flies in the face of democracy, but it is a blatant violation of federal law, critics told GOP state senators, some of whom agreed but still ignored their pleadings.

The measure from Sun City Republican Sen. Frank Carroll, Senate Bill 1566, would cancel every voter registration in the Grand Canyon State on April 2 of 2031 and every 10 years after that, forcing all voters to re-register each decade.

Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, told the Senate Elections Committee on Monday that her organization opposes the bill simply because it violates the National Voter Registration Act, which limits the reasons for which a person can be removed from a state’s voter rolls to a voter’s death, if they move outside of the jurisdiction or if the voter requests to be removed.

That federal law also specifies that a voter must be informed prior to being removed from the voter rolls, not afterward, as is outlined in the proposed law.

Carroll didn’t attend the meeting to explain or defend his bill, but Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, [a QAnon election denier] said that the voter rolls needed to be cleaned up, repeating the debunked claim that workers during Senate’s partisan review of the 2020 election found numerous instances of ballots cast in the name of voters who died prior to the election.

How could such a complete nut rise to Senate Majority Leader?

Last August, then-Attorney General Mark Brnovich informed the Senate in a letter that, out of 282 allegations of deceased voters casting a ballot in the 2020 general election, only one claim was found to be valid. 

Ben Scheel, executive director of the left-leaning nonprofit Opportunity Arizona, called the proposal “illegal and entirely unworkable” for county election departments, which would collectively have to re-register millions of voters every 10 years. As of January, there were nearly 4.2 million registered voters in Arizona.

“This bill flies in the face of American democracy by simply removing voters for no stated reason,” Scheel said.

Other Republicans on the Elections Committee, including Sens. John Kavanagh of Fountain Hills and Ken Bennett of Prescott, also criticized the bill, with Sen. T.J. Shope, R-Coolidge, admitting that he didn’t view the legislation as “legitimate.” But they all voted for the bill anyway, and it passed through the committee along party lines.

No integrity and no principles, other than do whatever the MAGA/Qanon crazy base demands. Ken Bennet is a former Secretary of State and should know better. Of course, he has always been a conspiracy theorist (a Birther), and served as spokesman for the QAnon Cyber Ninja “fraudit.”

Democratic Sen. Juan Mendez of Tempe said that cleaning up the voter rolls is not the same as kicking everyone off of them.

“This is probably the most insulting bill we’ve entertained this session,” Mendez said.

The measure is one in a slew of Republican-backed election reform bills that are all but certain to be met with a swift veto from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs if they make it past the full legislature.

Since the start of the legislative session last month, the Senate Election Committee, headed by prominent election conspiracy theorist Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, has invited in a parade of election-deniers and believers that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump to give presentations on their view of the failings of elections in Arizona, with a focus on Maricopa County.

Many of the proposed bills the committee has forwarded so far this year aim to fix alleged issues detailed by these speakers, including unproven claims of election tampering or fraud.

Another proposal that won the approval of the Senate Elections Committee on Feb. 13 was Senate Bill 1140, which would ban the state from using voting centers where anyone in a county can vote and force counties to return to a precinct voting model, where voters are required to show up at a specified voting site that serves a small, set population. Supporters say doing so would get rid of issues with lines and problems with ballot-on-demand printers that caused uproar and delays in Maricopa County’s November election.

But detractors say precinct voting is less convenient because voters are stuck with one location and can’t choose to vote near their work or school. It also leads to fewer votes being counted: Voters who show up at the wrong polling site can cast a provisional ballot, the vast majority of which end up being rejected because if a voter shows up at the wrong precinct, their vote can’t be counted.

The bill would also require public schools to allow counties to set up polling places in their gymnasiums, unless they provide a written statement detailing that they don’t have enough space or believe that hosting a polling place would put student safety at risk.

The committee also forwarded bills that would:

      • Put new drafts of the Secretary of State’s elections manual before Joint Legislative Audit Committee for review
      • Publish a list of registered voters, along with their birth year and precinct, ahead of each election, as well as a list of voters and images of all ballots after the election
      • And push up the deadline to drop off an early ballot ahead of an election, in an effort to speed up tabulation

NBC News adds, Arizona House GOP votes to restrict secretaries of state from overseeing their own elections:

The Arizona House passed HB2308 along party lines Tuesday, a bill that would make it illegal for state secretaries of state to oversee and confirm the results of elections in which they are also candidates.

Does this include a Secretary of State running for reelection? Because this happens frequently. Only two Secretaries of State have been elected governor without having first ascended to the office upon the death, resignation, or impeachment of a sitting governor: Sidney P. Osborn (D-1940) and Katie Hobbs (D-2022). Several secretaries of state have run for governor but lost.

The bill was initially introduced when Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, was secretary of state while she was running for governor last year. Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake, who was backed by former President Donald Trump and pushed his false claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Hobbs refused to debate Lake, with her campaign saying it wouldn’t be fruitful to debate “a conspiracy theorist.” Lake has made several unsuccessful attempts to overturn her defeat in the governor’s race.

Hobbs has not publicly commented on the bill’s passage in the House. As governor, she would have to sign the bill for it to become law.

The House passed the bill after its Municipal Oversight and Elections Committee passed it last month alongside three other election-related bills sponsored by Republicans.

State House Democrats slammed the party-line vote as one of Republicans’ “bad election bills” on Twitter.