Ray Stern|Arizona Republic
A bill that would ban most mail voting and require hand counts of all elections, among other extreme measures, received a second chance at life Thursday during a rowdy hearing at the Arizona Legislature.
Senate Bill 2289, sponsored by Rep. John Fillmore, R-Apache Junction, passed on a 4-3 party-line vote following a 90-minute debate and after Fillmore said he would entertain an amendment to allow some machine counting of votes.
Senate Government Committee chair Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction, set the tone of the afternoon hearing by announcing at its start that she had issued a subpoena to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a target of election deniers for supervisors’ alleged failure to help their cause.
In the subpoena, Townsend demands county election information that the state Attorney General’s Office has requested.
Fillmore’s bill stands out among the 100-plus election-related proposals submitted by Republican lawmakers at the start of the session, many of which came from disproven conspiracy claims of the 2020 election. That election lives on in Arizona, where leaders of the Republican Party still claim it was rife with fraud and the Senate’s review of the election in Maricopa County remains ongoing.
It was standing-room-only in the committee’s hearing room, which was packed with about 100 people. Supporters of the bill were most numerous, many wearing T-shirts for the occasion that read “One Day One Vote” and spelled out the provisions of the bill.
“We’re trying to get the point across that we need election integrity,” said Darrell Daniels, a Tempe resident who was among those wearing the shirt.
Daniels said he doesn’t know if Fillmore’s election-system reboot would actually work, but he would “keep his fingers crossed.”
Sen. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, said he was skeptical that election workers could count millions of votes in a single day without machines and that his support was contingent on amendments to the hand-count portion. He pointed out that in Maricopa County alone, about 150 million votes would need counting, considering that the county’s election involve about 2.5 million ballots, each of which contain 70-80 races.
“The feasibility of this matters,” he said, adding that lawmakers who pass the bill would be responsible if it turned into a “catastrophe.”
A voter takes her ballot to an early voting site at the Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix on Oct 28, 2020.
Feasibility of proposal questioned
Besides the hand counting and return to in-person voting, Fillmore’s bill would end early voting, require paper ballots and ban the use of machines to vote or to count votes — yet require results within 24 hours after the polls close.
The bill would eliminate mail voting as it has happened in Arizona since 1992, except for military personnel and their families or people are are visually impaired, hospitalized or otherwise medically unable to vote in person or who would be out of the state on Election Day. About 90% of Arizona voters used mail voting in the 2020 election.
The bill would also prohibit voting centers, emergency voting centers, on-site early voting, electronic vote adjudication and duplication of ballots.
Fillmore told the committee that 16 states don’t use mail voting, a procedure that was “almost begging for voter fraud,” he said. He dismissed concerns that it would take away a convenience, comparing it to eating too much chocolate, and said questions about election integrity were raised long before the 2020 election.
“Joe Six Pack and Marylou on the block need to know their vote counts,” he said.
With the support of Trump supporters and election conspiracy theorists, Fillmore introduced his plan last month in the House, having previously said he wanted to take voting back to 1958. The earlier iteration of the bill would have let the Legislature reject voting results of a state election and allow a new election to be called.
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House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a critic of the Senate’s review of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County who rejected pressure from Trump and his team to help overturn the results in Arizona, seemingly killed Fillmore’s bill by assigning it to 12 committees.
After some critics complained his bill would mean potential voter suppression for minority voters, Fillmore said the proposal was killed in a “12-committee lynching,” further inflaming his critics.
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Townsend resurrected the bill with a procedural move and made it the latest attack on mail voting by Republicans; the state Republican Party filed a lawsuit earlier this month in the Arizona Supreme Court, arguing that the voting method is unconstitutional.
Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, warned that poll workers who begin their shifts when polls open in the morning can’t be expected to stay late and count the votes, too. New volunteers with “fresh eyes” would need to do that.
Mesnard, who called the alleged lack of election security in Arizona a “crisis,” asked her if an amendment to allow vote-counting machines would make the plan would more workable.
“That would definitely make it easier,” she said, indicating that results within 24 hours would remain questionable.
‘Back to the 50s’ intention criticized
Townsend scolded members of the audience several times during the hearing for clapping, laughing or remarking on the proceedings inappropriately, at one point directing a security officer to eject anyone who spoke out turn.
“This is pretty much a Jim Crow law,” said Brent Whiting of Tomorrow We Vote, provoking loud groans from the bill’s supporters the crowd.
Undeterred, Whiting noted that multiple states were trying to pass laws that would “suppress” the vote of people of color, “almost like each state is trying to be worse than the rest.”
Auditors from a private auditing company, SLI Compliance, do an audit of the tabulation machines and the voting system at the Maricopa County Elections Headquarters in Phoenix on Feb. 9, 2021. The five-member team was spending five days at the Maricopa County Elections Headquarters on the audit.
He predicted “10-hour lines” to vote if the bill becomes law. “It won’t just hurt Republicans and Democrats. It will hurt the older, the elderly, the disabled,” he said.
Supporters pushed back on that argument, saying that the bill wasn’t about suppressing votes.
Steve Daniels, chair of the Arizona Patriot Party, said people concerned about securing elections don’t plan how they could “make it harder for a certain segment of people to vote.”
Townsend, who submitted more than a dozen bills this year that address voter fraud that Arizona election officials say didn’t occur, praised Fillmore’s bill at the hearing and defended it against allegations of racism.
While it would take the system “back to the 50s,” she said, that doesn’t mean anyone would face discrimination. Rather, “it is to bring us back to a time that is more secure.”
Fillmore’s bill won’t likely pass the full Senate, which Republicans hold by a one-vote margin. Sen. Paul Boyer, R-Glendale, another skeptic of election fraud claims, has doomed more than a dozen election-related bills in the Senate, sometimes joined by Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale.
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In an election-related development, Townsend wants a Board representative to appear before her next week with data requested by the state attorney general, including examples of voter signatures and notes regarding the county’s contacting of voters whose ballots contained errors or missing information. The county’s “withholding” of information makes it impossible to fact-check a finding by Shiva Ayyadurai that 250 samples of voter signatures did not appear to match the voter’s actual signature, the subpoena states.
Townsend ordered the Board or its representative to appear before her committee at 4 p.m. on March 28.
“They can show up here with it, and if they don’t show up here with it, they can tell us why they’re obstructing this investigation from the attorney general,” she told The Arizona Republic.
