A man who was convicted of voting in Arizona and New Hampshire for the same election has continued voting in Arizona. Court documents show Sigmund Boganski, 77, voted in both states in the 2016 election, but according to the Maricopa County Recorder, he requested an early ballot for the 2020 election.
New Hampshire prosecuted him, but officials in Arizona appear to have filed no charges almost six years later. An arrest warrant was issued for Boganski out of New Hampshire on Oct. 19, 2020, and he was indicted on Nov. 4, 2020 by a grand jury in New Hampshire on a felony of voting in multiple states. He pleaded guilty earlier this month on May 4, and will pay a fine of $1,000 and a penalty assessment of $240. A 90-day jail sentence will be suspended on the condition of good behavior. His right to vote in New Hampshire was terminated.
States share voting information to ensure that people aren’t voting in multiple states, known as “crosschecks,” so if New Hampshire caught the double vote, Arizona should have also. Yet from 2016 to 2020, Maricopa County apparently did not.
ARS 16-1016(4) makes it a class 5 felony where someone “knowingly votes in this state in an election in which a federal office appears on the ballot and votes in another state in an election in which a federal office appears on the ballot and the election day for both states is the same date.” They lose their right to vote.
Some voters have residences in multiple states, or move and change their voter registration to a new state while not bothering to cancel their old registration, which is fine, since it is not illegal to merely be registered to vote in multiple states.
According to Jay DeLancy, executive director of North Carolina volunteer voting watchdog group The Voting Integrity Project, double voting is a real problem. “It’s a lot more widespread than what people think, because the general public thinks there is no voter fraud,” he told Fox News. “As proof they look at prosecutions, but we have learned how difficult it is to get prosecutions.”
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office said they could not confirm whether or not Boganski is being investigated.
Arizona legislators have proposed bills to clean up the state’s voter rolls, such as by requiring regular purging of people who have moved to other states, but many of them have failed to make it into law. SB 1380, sponsored by State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff), would have required county recorders to verify voter residences every month, using the U.S. Postal Service’s address database, the National Change of Address, through which residents voluntarily notify the postal service of their residence changes. Currently, county recorders are allowed to use it but not required to. That measure failed to pass the State Senate by a slim two-vote margin, with State Senator Paul Boyer (R-Glendale) joining Democrats with his “nay” vote.
Similarly, HB 2617, sponsored by State Representative Joseph Chaplik (R-Scottsdale), would set requirements for county recorders to determine if voters have drivers’ licenses or non-operating identification licenses from other states. It passed the State House 31-26 along Party lines (with three Democrats casting “no vote”), but has not been brought up for a vote in the full Senate.
The Maricopa County Recorder’s office did not respond to an inquiry from The Arizona Sun Times by press time.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
