The Arizona Senate passed a new bill on Tuesday aimed at improving election integrity.
“Number one, only eligible, qualified citizens can vote in elections, and that means when you are going to a voter registration process, you have to give election officials time to be able to actually review the registration and make sure someone is qualified to vote. When you do same-day or Election-Day voter registration, that takes away that time to actually be able to conduct that check,” Jason Snead, the Director of the Honest Elections Project told The Arizona Sun Times.
Snead said he approves of the Arizona Senate passing HB 2237, sponsored by State Representative Jake Hoffman (R-AZ-12). The bill’s passage by the state’s upper chamber marks the final stop before landing on Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk. The measure, which prohibits same-day voter registration, was transmitted to Ducey following the party line vote by lawmakers Tuesday. There is no word on when Ducey may address it.
Snead spoke further with The Sun Times to explain why this bill is important to Arizona Election integrity.
“Number two is that same-day registration actually puts a great strain on election officials and workers because they’re trying to simultaneously manage an election and deal with people coming in to vote,” Snead said; adding, “To also then have someone show up at a polling place and go through the registration process adds a greater strain.”
However, there are claims this bill is unnecessary because Arizona already does not allow same-day registration. Under Arizona law, a citizen must register within 29 days of the election to vote.
Nonetheless, Snead still believes HB 2237 is important to election integrity.
He said, “I actually think that it’s fairly wise at this point to put these sorts of affirmative prohibitions in a statute if indeed you don’t want these practices done. Because one thing that you saw in 2020 in the midst of COVID was a willingness of some officials across the country to sort of read silence in the law as consent, so, if you didn’t affirmatively say you can’t mail absentee ballot applications to everybody, or you can’t do a 24-hour drive-through voting, or you can’t do unsecured, unmonitored drop boxes, a lot of these policies got rolled out.”
Snead noted, “Even though when you typically read state law, and it says this is the way we’re going to do voting, that’s typically the way people think about it, right? So, I do think there’s a lot of utility to getting these sorts of markers down in state law to prevent people from changing the rules in the future for whatever particular reason.”
The Sun Times asked what else Arizona might need to further election integrity.
“Well, I think one of the big things that Arizona needs is voter ID for mail-in ballots.” Snead said.
“The reality is that while Arizona has voter ID laws in place for a person voting, I think it’s something like 75 to 80 percent of voters typically cast by mail where there is no voter ID provision.”
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Neil Jones is a reporter for The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Neil on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Jason Snead” by Honest Elections Project.
