WASHINGTON — If a voter accidentally casts a ballot in the wrong precinct, should it be counted? Should early voters be able to give their sealed ballots to someone else to drop in the mail or deliver to a polling place?
In Arizona, the answer to both questions has been a resounding “no” — until this week.
On Monday, a federal appeals court ruled that those restrictions, in a state with some of the nation’s more stringent voting rules, should no longer stand. The result? In Arizona, which is seen as a battleground in the presidential race this fall, many voters will find their ballots considerably easier to cast and less likely to be excluded from election-night tallies.
In the past, Arizona voters who cast ballots in the wrong precinct had their votes thrown out. And since 2016, the state has outlawed a popular voting aid — letting campaign workers and other outsiders collect voters’ early ballots for delivery to polling places.
Democrats and voting rights advocates had argued that the rules made voting too hard, especially for minorities. But the Republican-controlled State Legislature, which had put the strict rules in place, said they kept elections free of fraud.
Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, says the state will appeal this week’s decision to the Supreme Court, seeking to overturn the 7-to-4 finding from a full panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
But any appeal would almost certainly be delayed until the court’s next term, keeping ballot collection and out-of-precinct voting legal during this spring’s primaries and the closely-watched November general election.
Why did the court overturn the laws?
The judges said both laws violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act because they had a lopsided impact on Latino, Native American and African-American voters, which the act was designed to shield from discrimination. In 2016, for example, those groups were roughly twice as likely to cast out-of-precinct ballots as were white voters.
In the new ruling, the judges called the 2016 ban on ballot collectors a deliberate attempt to discourage voting by minority voters, who used ballot-collection services far more than white voters and tended to vote for Democrats.
Ballot collectors, usually party workers or members of civic groups, are common in many states. They help shut-ins, people without regular mail service and other voters with difficulties get their ballots to the polls — and they help ensure that candidates’ supporters actually vote, instead of forgetting to cast ballots or being diverted by other tasks.
The Arizona ban still allowed family and household members to deliver a voter’s early ballot, but made it a felony for campaign workers and others to do the same thing. Few Republican campaigns used ballot collectors, because their supporters did not need them. But testimony showed that many minority voters had a more difficult time mailing their ballots. One example: Registered voters who were white were more than four times as likely to have home mail pickup and delivery as Navajos and other Native Americans.
Ballot collectors were central to a voter-fraud scheme in North Carolina. Isn’t that a reason to ban them?
Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature said the ban was needed to control fraud. But the court said “there is no evidence of any fraud in the long history of third-party ballot collection in Arizona.” In any case, the judges wrote, existing Arizona law outlaws ballot-tampering like that in North Carolina, making a ban unnecessary.
The court said Republicans had a different reason for barring ballot collectors: They were important to the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote strategy. In fact, the federal Justice Department had criticized an earlier version of the law in 2011, saying an elections official had admitted that it was “targeted at voting practices in predominantly Hispanic areas.”
Will any of this affect election outcomes?
That’s hard to say. Ballot collectors undoubtedly delivered tens of thousands of ballots in big elections before 2016, but it is impossible to know how many people decided not to vote after they were outlawed.
There are more precise tallies of people who voted outside their precincts in Arizona — 38,335 from 2008 to 2016, the bulk of them in general elections. Because more and more Arizonans are casting early votes by mail instead of at polling places, the number is dropping: In 2016, just 3,970 voters cast out-of-precinct ballots, among 2.6 million total votes. That year, President Trump won Arizona by more than 90,000 votes.
The out-of-precinct ballots may seem small, but elections are becoming increasingly close in Arizona, where booming population growth and changing demographics have eroded Republicans’ onetime dominance of statewide races.
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January 28, 2020 at 10:39PM
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Voting Will Be Easier in a Key State for the Presidential Race - The New York Times
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