Don't blame late early ballots for Arizona's slow election results
Laurie Roberts recently wrote a column, 'Sorry, Democrats. There's no plot to suppress Arizona voters now,' in which she makes the case that a new bill to shorten the early voting period won't suppress voters but will make sure 'we don't grow old waiting to find out who won the freaking election.'
As someone who has both won and lost elections, I can relate to the frustration of waiting to get accurate results. I can also relate to worries about growing old.
That said, I don't think the solution to this problem is to make it harder for older people to vote, which is what would happen if the Legislature won't allow people to turn in a ballot on Election Day.
Because most early ballot voters are older, this new restriction would force those who turned in ballots on Election Day to stand in line to vote, making it more difficult.
The legislators pushing Senate Bill 1011 complain that it took too long to count the votes.
These are the same folks who gave Arizona our longest ballot in decades — two separate pages — by referring so many proposed laws to the ballot in 2024. With 3.4 million of us voting, county governments had to count up to 6.8 million ballot pages, instead of half as many.
So, the Legislature made the vote-count slower and now blames the public for how long it took! Some trick. Let's try to remember that elected politicians work for the people, not the other way around.
Still, the problem remains: how can we get accurate election results more quickly?
More than 3.4 million Arizonans voted in our 2024 election. Yet it's estimated that fewer than 10% of those folks handed in their ballots on Election Day. So, the obvious question to ask is, were the remaining 90% of results reported on election night?
No.
People handing in their early ballot on Election Day is not the real cause of our inability to count all the votes within a day or two.
The actual cause for county governments taking more than a week to accurately count the ballots is that they don't have the staff or the equipment to quickly verify and count the glut of early ballots that come in in the last few days before the deadline.
SB 1011 will not solve that problem.
It will remove one proven method of voting: allowing voters to turn in an early ballot on Election Day. If we ban a voting practice used by hundreds of thousands of people, the result will be hundreds of thousands more people waiting in line, or not voting at all.
Opinion: Early voting is key to a quick, orderly election
More people in line could just make the problem worse.
In November, Navajo Americans encountered real obstacles to voting in person. Specifically, voters in Apache County waited outdoors in long lines in cold temperatures due to the county having broken machines, lacking pens and other problems.
The Navajo Nation attorney general has publicly said that 'Apache County disenfranchised Navajos voters in the 2024 general election.'
We need to balance a few key priorities:
Giving every voter a simple and convenient way to vote.
Getting an accurate count of how the people voted.
Getting votes counted quickly.
Arizona does reasonably well on the first two priorities, though there is a lot of room for improvement. Getting votes counted more quickly will take more money to hire more workers and deploy more machines to verify voters and signatures on Election Day.
There are other ideas worth consideration:
Expand early voting during the full weekend and Monday before Election Day. Then-Sen. Ken Bennett introduced a bill (SB 1467) to do this in 2023 but never received a hearing.
Allow ballots to be returned to central processing throughout Election Day and allocate the necessary resources to verify and tabulate them in real time on Election Day.
Limit the number of legislative referrals on the ballot.
I would like faster election results, so let's get that job done. But not by restricting options for voters.
Jonathan Nez is former president of the Navajo Nation. Reach him at jonmnez2@gmail.com or on X, formerly Twitter, @FormerPrezNez.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona should not cut off early voting to speed results | Opinion
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