Arizona Republicans propose giving lawmakers — not election officials — final review of election results
GOP Sen. David Gowan, the bill’s sponsor, said the legislation “is not meant to override the vote of the people,” but provides a process for auditing the election.”
Democrats and voting rights advocates have pushed back on the legislation, saying that it could disenfranchise voters by potentially placing election results into the hands of state lawmakers.
Arizona became one of a handful of states that had its election results scrutinized following the November election, when President Joe Biden became the second Democrat in more than seven decades to win the state. The Trump campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state seeking a review of all ballots cast on Election Day, alleging some voters were confused on Election Day and feared that their ballots were not counted. The campaign later dropped the suit.
Also under the proposed amendment, the legislature would have the authority to pick the state’s presidential electors.
Choosing the slate of electors is of critical importance in presidential elections when even the slightest of margins can result in victory. In November’s election, Biden’s win in Arizona was pivotal in getting him to the necessary 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
Gowan said his proposal would bring “back the authority of the Electoral College to the legislature.”
Republican lawmakers introduced a similar bill in the Arizona House.
Democrats and advocates denounced the Senate bill as perpetuating baseless allegations of voter fraud and potentially risking disenfranchising millions of voters, saying it could potentially give the legislature the power to override the election results.
“Why even have a presidential election, why have voters vote on it if, essentially the legislature is going to be able to override whatever the voters vote for,” state Sen. Sean Bowie, a Democrat, said at a Tuesday meeting.
The bill is one of more than a dozen election bills Republicans in the state have introduced following Biden’s win in November, many of which focus on the mail-in voting process that spiked in 2020 with roughly 80% of Arizonans voting by mail.
Overall, according to Brennan, at least 250 restrictive voting bills are being weighed by state legislatures, an effort led by Republicans — more than six times the number of bills for the same time last year.
Voting rights experts and advocates see a link between Republicans’ state-level proposals and Trump’s conspiracy theories surrounding his 2020 election loss.
“This policy is driven by lies and it disenfranchises voters. It’s time to silence the people. Because the people were heard in November and some people don’t like what they heard,” Alex Gulotta from All Voting is Local Arizona said in an interview with CNN.
“It really is the tyranny of ignorance. A subset of people who are so concerned with maintaining their power they are willing to do anything, and part of it is to continue this falsehood about our elections,” he added.
Even GOP members of the state legislature have doubts about the necessity of some of the bills, including Republican Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers.
“In order to reestablish some feeling of credibility of elections themselves, people have introduced lots of bills. Some of them, I think are valid. We need to clean voter rolls, make sure people are here to vote, that’s pretty standard stuff. But other things are not as acceptable to me,” said Bowers, who added that he disagrees with a proposal that voters get their absentee ballots notarized.
“No I’m not going to do that,” he said.
“I wasn’t happy with the outcome, but I don’t have to be happy with the outcome to know that honorable people did an honorable job,” Bowers said while touting the security and integrity of the state’s election system.
This story has been updated with additional details about the status of the bills.
