The Arizona Supreme Court has issued an opinion, explaining how it cheated to deny the public a chance to decide on a voting rights initiative.
The Initiative would have provided for automatic voter registration, election-day registration, campaign finance reform and lobbyist registration, as well as fixed a number of discriminatory provisions in state election law.
The court, writing nearly a year after its controversial decision, attempted to explain how it denied ballot access to a petition drive that had nearly 100,000 more valid signatures than needed.
To put it simply, the court double counted the deductions from the signature total.
Starting from a count of 399,833 valid signatures, the court disqualified 96,237 signatures based on right-wing lawsuits, claiming circulators had changed addresses during the petition campaign, had failed to include apartment numbers on their service of process addresses, had signatures from individuals who registered to vote after signing, etc.
Deducting these challenged signatures would have left the petition with 299,181 signatures, well over the required 237,645 signatures.
Using an alternate method, county recorders had checked a 5% sample of the petitions and determined the validity rate and projected there were 100,715 invalid signatures. This still would have left the initiative well over the required signatures.
Then, without statutory authority or a clear explanation, the court added the signatures invalidated by the actual challenges with the projections from the county recorders and determined that the petition had fallen just short.
“The legislature provides two distinct methods for determining whether the constitutionally required number of valid petition signatures supports placing an initiative on the ballot, which I describe as a “projected-count method” and an “actual-count method,” wrote Justice Ann Timmer in dissent. “The majority blends the two to create a hybrid calculation method that is unsupported by our laws. Because the plaintiffs did not prove that Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections lacked enough valid signatures using an authorized methodology, I would have permitted the Arizona Fair Elections Act initiative to be placed on the November 8, 2022 General Election ballot.”
I’m not quite sure where we go from here. The Legislature is rabid in their hatred for voters. The courts are unwilling to follow the Arizona Constitution. It is hard to look for a way forward. Fortunately, we have the governor’s office and the secretary of state. We are one seat away from taking control of the state Senate and two seats away in the state House. The state Republican party is broke and the fake electors scam continues to hang over them. We really need to make 2024 the year we take control.
I wrote much of our voting rights initiative, and I’m taking it hard to lose through cheating. But we are determined and we will get voting rights in Arizona.