Observers suspect that the usual strategy of talking up voter fraud to justify voter ID laws was dragged down by election deniers elsewhere on the ballot
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By Alex Burnett || Bolt
(This article was originally published by Bolts, which covers local politics and policy around voting rights and criminal justice, and is republished with permission.)
History seemed to be on Proposition 309’s side. The Arizona ballot measure sought to toughen the state’s requirements that residents present identification to vote—a reform pushed by state conservatives in the name of combating fraud but fought by civil rights groups for erecting undue barriers to voting and depressing turnout among people of color. And there was plenty of recent evidence to suggest the proposal would pass.
Each of the previous three states to consider voter-ID ballot measures—Missouri in 2016, and Arkansas and North Carolina in 2018—had approved them by at least 10 points each. In Arizona, a 2004 voter-ID measure that was less stringent than Proposition 309, had passed comfortably, too. At least on this issue, the concerns of organizations like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters kept being ignored.
But Arizonans on Nov. 8 bucked this history, despite Proposition 309’s huge fundraising advantage and the lack of organized opposition. They narrowly rejected the measure by about 18,000 votes, or 0.76 percent.
It was the first defeat in ten years for a ballot measure increasing voter ID mandates in the U.S., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ database. (Minnesotans rejected a voter ID measure by eight percentage points in 2012.)
Local advocates on both sides of the measure told Bolts that they were surprised by the outcome but explained it by naming several factors, starting with antipathy to Trumpism.
“Fundamentally, I just don’t think we can look at this one in a vacuum,” said Sarah Gonski, a Phoenix-based elections lawyer who has represented Democratic candidates in the state in recent cycles.
The measure was placed on the ballot on a party-line vote by Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature, which spent much of the past two years rehearsing the former president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. This inextricably linked it to controversial, top-of-the-ticket Arizona candidates who ran for office this year on election denialism, local politicos said. Proposition 309 appeared just down the ballot from far-right election deniers Kari Lake, who lost the governor’s race, Blake Masters, who lost the U.S. Senate race, and Mark Finchem, who lost the secretary of state’s race.
“I think that rejecting this initiative, which is a policy proposal that gets a lot of support usually, is intimately tied up with rejection of the Big Lie narrative that has pervaded Arizona’s political environment for the last two years,” said Gonski.
