As the fight over voting rights heats up in Arizona, the grassroots are working to beat the U.S. Supreme Court on a couple of bitterly fought issues. It’s fun to push back on Sam Alito and his anti-democracy mob.
As Arizonans increasingly adopted mail voting in the last 30 years, the rightwing knew that the end was near. They needed to find ways to stop people, particularly Native Americans, from voting. One of the ways was to make it harder to get ballots turned in. Before 2016, if you lived 200 miles from the county seat and your car was broken down, you could give your ballot to a neighbor to turn it in.
The right wing thought they had found gold in blocking these ballots from being counted. A new law made the neighbor guilty of a felony. Of course, this law has never been enforced in wealthy communities like Paradise Valley, but if you live in a remote Native community you are made to believe that the law is out to prosecute “ballot harvesting” as they call it.
So, the lawyers took up the six-year fight through the courts. Of course, the voters won at every level. Until, it came before Justice Samuel Alito and the U.S. Supreme Court. Alito determined “the plaintiffs in the case hadn’t adequately demonstrated that the ban had a disparate impact on minority voters.” You wonder if Alito would ever find that anything “adequately demonstrated” an impact on minority voters.
So, the Arizona Fair Elections Act will repeal the statute, leaving nothing for Alito and his friends to uphold.
If you would like to help us, secure.actblue.com/... or volunteer secure.everyaction.com/... , we could sure use the help. We are falling short of the $20,000 goal we need to meet our payroll this month.
The Initiative, one of only two major Voting Rights initiatives in the U.S. this year, is now in the signature collection stage to be on the November 2022 ballot. In addition to taking a few things back from Sam Alito, the Initiative will give Arizona one of the best voting laws in the country, protecting voting now and into the future. Think election-day registration, automatic voter registration, and blocking the Legislature from stealing the state’s electoral votes.
In the same case that prohibited helping a neighbor turn in a ballot, Alito ruled that out-of-precinct ballots had to be thrown out. This wasn’t much of an issue for many Arizonans because their counties have “voting centers” that support voting for residents of all precincts. But, you guessed it, the heavily Democratic counties of Pima (Tucson) and Apache (Window Rock) had many individual precincts and no voting centers. It was a chance to throw out Democratic votes.
The Initiative will take care of this problem by allowing a voter to cast a ballot in any precinct in the county. And, we take it one step further, allowing for inter-county agreements that could allow voters from the Navajo Nation to vote in any of the three counties into which the reservation is divided. Take that, Sam.
Our small organization, Arizona Deserves Better, now has a field director on the ground and we have filled the positions of three of his five regional organizers. Organizations like the League of Women Voters and Indivisible are rallying to the cause. I have a meeting with the leaders of the Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona today.
Meanwhile, our partners at the Arizona Democracy Resource Center are doing great with their paid circulators.
We would appreciate your continuing support as we get more staffers on the ground.
If you would like to help us, secure.actblue.com/... or volunteer secure.everyaction.com/... , we could sure use the help. We are falling short of the $20,000 goal we need to meet our payroll this month.
Also, I want to remind you that we are working with Health Care Rising sponsoring the initiative called Arizona Predatory Debt Collection Protection Act which protects people from predators and keeps medical debt from being so devastating for Arizona families. Also, Stop Dark Money is protecting against the influence of anonymous contributions in politics.
