A person hold Stop the Steal sign at a rally at the Arizona Capitol on Jan. 26, 2022, in favor of House Bill 2596, which would make sweeping changes to how elections are conducted in Arizona. The biggest change would be to allow the legislature to overturn election results for any reason, but it also would require all ballots to be hand-counted within 24 hours of the polls closing and would end on-demand early voting, which is used by about 80% of Arizona voters. /Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
By Ray Stern | Arizona Republic
Republicans lawmakers have introduced a second wave of election-related bills in the past week that would alter the voting system more dramatically than those heard just days ago in a legislative committee.
Newly introduced bills include House Bill 2596, which would let Legislature reject the results of a state election and order a new one, along with a multitude of other fundamental changes to election law.
It incorporates several features demanded by election conspiracy theorists, like limiting all voting to Election Day, requiring all voting be in-person and mandating that officials count all the ballots by hand within 24 hours. It also states that the Legislature “shall call itself into session” to review the ballot-counting process “and on review shall accept or reject the election results.”
If lawmakers reject the results, any voter could sue in county Superior Court to request a new election. It was introduced by Rep. John Fillmore, R-Apache Junction and 15 other co-sponsors in the House and Senate.
“We need to get back to 1958-style voting,” Fillmore said in a committee hearing on Wednesday.
The federal Civil Rights Act passed only one year prior to 1958, and Arizona — with a population of 1.2 million at the time — still had strict literacy tests for voter registration that had enormous impacts on Black, Latino and Indigenous voters.
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