By Nick Phillips | Arizona Capitol Times
After months of misfires and threats that spilled into the courts, the Secretary of State’s online signature-gathering system removed some functionality to begin updates on Thursday night, a minute before midnight.
On Friday, voters who hoped to sign a nominating petition for a congressional or legislative candidate through the E-Qual online portal were instead greeted with a message: “Your 2022 congressional and legislative districts will not be reflected in E-Qual until all counties finish implementing the updates into the statewide voter registration database. Until the counties complete this work, E-Qual will be unavailable for voters to sign petitions or contribute $5 Qualifying Contributions for congressional and legislative candidates.”
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Though Attorney General Mark Brnovich previously threatened Secretary of State Katie Hobbs with prosecution if she went through with plans to update the system with newly-approved electoral districts, the AG’s office wouldn’t comment on its plans on Friday. “It would be inappropriate to speculate on any potential action(s) by our office,” spokeswoman Katie Conner wrote in an email.
The partial E-Qual outage marks the start of a process, months in the making, to implement the congressional and legislative maps approved earlier this year by the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. It comes after the threat from Brnovich, who claimed that taking away access to E-Qual during the candidate filing period would be illegal; and after Hobbs sought a preliminary injunction from a Maricopa County judge that would have effectively given her the legal go-ahead to proceed with the update.
