PHOENIX — Republican lawmakers have been saying for months that Arizonans want additional voter identification requirements.
They’re going to get a chance to find out if that is the case.
Thursday, the state House gave preliminary approval to put a measure on the November ballot to require the 80% of Arizonans who use early ballots to provide additional identification if they want their votes counted. Now, they need only provide a signature on the envelope which county election officials are supposed to match with documents already on file.
And the proposed constitutional amendment, approved with only Republican votes, also would narrow the types of identification that the state considers acceptable
Hours later the Senate, also along party lines, gave final approval to an identical proposal. That paves the way for a final House vote this coming week.
The bill would then be referred to voters for their approval or rejection. The views of Gov. Doug Ducey are irrelevant, as the Arizona Constitution gives him no role on what goes on the ballot.
The party-line votes are the culmination of efforts by the business-oriented Arizona Free Enterprise Club to impose new requirements on early voting.
Organizers announced plans last August to gather the signatures to put the issue to voters. But the just-approved measures, sponsored by Sen. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, and Rep. John Fillmore, R-Apache Junction, allows them to avoid having to pay circulators to get the 237,645 valid signatures on initiative petitions by July 7 to secure a ballot slot.
The move comes over the objections of several Democrats. They argued there's nothing wrong with the current system, established three decades ago by a Republican legislature and approved by a Republican governor, which allows any voter to request getting an early ballot by mail and then being able to return it, whether in the mail, a drop box, or delivering it personally.
But Mesnard said that its popularity and the fact that most ballots now are cast this way requires lawmakers to reconsider the controls — or lack thereof.
“We do not require ID for 80% of ballots,” he said.
By contrast, someone who shows up at the polls on Election Day has to provide some form of identification. And a signature, Mesnard said, is not identification.
What the measure would require is that all early ballots would also need an affidavit with the voter’s date of birth and the number off of one of several acceptable forms of identification. These include a driver's license, a state-issued non-operating license, the last four digits of the person's Social Security number, or a unique number issued by the secretary of state to those who lack the other types of ID.
But that’s not all.
If approved in November, it also would require those who go to the polls to present a photo ID. Gone would be an alternate option of bringing in two different documents without a photo that contain the person's name and address, like a utility bill, vehicle registration certificate or property tax statement.
Sen. Vince Leach, R-Tucson, said he sees both mandates as no big deal.
For example, he said, anyone who wants to go to an Arizona pharmacy to buy Sudafed has to provide a photo ID. And Leach said he can't check into a hotel without providing similar documentation.
“A photo ID is an everyday part of life,” he said.
Leach also pointed out that the measure says those who do not drive but need voter ID can go to any Motor Vehicle Division office and, with certain documentation, get a non-operating license for no cost at all.
But it was the issue of the new requirements for early ballots that caused the most concern for Democrats.
Sen. Martin Quezada, D-Glendale, pointed out that Texas recently enacted a similar requirement. It is getting its first test now, with ballots being returned for the state's March 1 primary.
The Texas Tribune is reporting that in Harris County alone, where Houston is located, about 40% of the mail-in ballots already received, were being rejected because they lacked the necessary ID number. The requirement there is similar to what is in the Arizona proposal, including a driver’s license or partial Social Security number.
“That could be your ballot, it could be your neighbor’s ballot, it could be your mother’s ballot, your brother's ballot, your wife’s ballot,'' Quezada said. “It could be the ballots of not only Democratic voters but Republican voters.”
And what could exacerbate it, he said, is that each county could have somewhat different rules.
Mesnard has spoken of a system where the required affidavit would be on the ballot envelope, but hidden in a way so as not to be visible to anyone until the envelope is opened.
But he acknowledged that counties would be free to create an entirely separate affidavit that voters would have to insert in the envelope with the ballot. And Quezada said that raises additional questions about what happens if voters, who have never faced such a requirement, simply forget to insert the extra piece of paper.
Mesnard said that this can be addressed with explicit instructions sent to voters.
Then there’s the question of whether there is fraud in the current system.
Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction, cites a report by Shiva Ayyudari, one of the people hired by Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott, to work on the audit she ordered of the 2020 election returns from Maricopa County. He claimed to have looked at signatures on 499 early ballot envelopes and then compared them to publicly available signatures from deed records of people at the same address.
Townsend said his team of three handwriting experts and three lay people found “upwards of 90 obvious mismatches.” Extrapolating that out to all ballots cast in Maricopa County, she said, that translates to about 240,000.
By contrast, county officials reported that no more than 1.3% of signatures did not match.
There also is the fact that if there is a mismatch, voters are given an opportunity to “cure” the problem with a phone call to election officials verifying they are the ones who signed the envelope and that there may be a reason signatures don't match, like illness or age, things that might not be obvious when comparing a ballot envelope with a deed.
The claim of massive numbers of early ballots with mismatched signatures also is undermined by the only actual court-ordered review of ballot envelopes.
After the November vote, Kelli Ward, who chairs the Arizona Republican Party, filed suit challenging the results that awarded the state’s 11 electoral votes to Joe Biden. Among her allegations was that signatures on envelopes containing early ballots were not properly compared with those already on file.
But Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner pointed out that a forensic document examiner hired by Ward’s own attorney reviewed 100 of those envelopes. At best, Warner said, she found six signatures to be “inconclusive,” meaning she could not testify that they were or were not a match to the signature on file.
And the judge said the witness found no signs of forgery.
Mesnard, for his part, said all of this is irrelevant.
The senator said a large number of Arizonans believe the voting system is not secure, to the point where he said some people have simply decided it's not worth voting because they’re not sure their votes will be accurately counted. Mesnard said adding the additional requirements, including the affidavit to go with early ballots, could go a long way to reassuring people of that the system works and produces accurate results.
And there’s something else.
There are some in the Republican Party who want to eliminate entirely the ability to vote early. Mesnard opposes such a move. And he said he believes in early voting and that having additional ID requirements could blunt such moves.
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