PHOENIX — Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is proposing a change to when votes can be counted, but the state’s GOP chief charges it’s an end-run around a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Hobbs is proposing to require county officials to count votes for certain offices even if the voter shows up at the wrong precinct. Votes for president and statewide offices would be tallied despite being cast at the wrong polling location.
That comes less than three months after the high court rejected a bid by the Democratic National Committee to force the state to count such out-of-precinct votes. The majority concluded there is nothing legally wrong with the current practice of discarding such ballots.
But the ruling does not preclude Hobbs from changing the rules, according to Bo Dul, the general counsel for her office.
“There’s nothing in statute that requires these ballots be rejected,’’ she told Capitol Media Services. What there is, Dul said, is a provision in the current Election Procedures Manual that only ballots cast in the correct polling place be counted.
It was that policy, effectively, that the Democrats unsuccessfully asked the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional, based on claims that is more likely to affect minority voters.
Dul said state law requires the secretary of state to create the manual. More to the point, since the prohibition on counting those ballots exists only within the manual, Hobbs is free to change it, she said.
Hobbs aide Murphy Hebert defended the move. “It simply ensures that ... eligible voters who accidentally go to the wrong polling place are not completely disenfranchised solely for that reason,’’ she said.
But it drew an angry reaction from state Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward.
“Katie Hobbs is trying to run an end-run around current Arizona election laws,’’ Ward said.
The new rules would affect how the 2022 elections are handled, a year when Hobbs hopes to get the Democratic Party’s nod for governor.
5 counties still precinct-based
At issue is what happens when people show up at polling places on Election Day and their names are not on the list of those registered to vote there.
That isn’t a problem in much of the state, where counties set up “voting centers’’ where anyone from anywhere in the county can cast a ballot. Technology makes it possible to print a ballot specific to that voter — right down to local and school board races — on site.
But five Arizona counties — Pima, Pinal, Mohave, La Paz and Apache — still retain precinct-based voting.
If the would-be voter is simply at the wrong place, poll workers can direct them to where they need to go. But voters who insist they are registered and entitled to vote there are given a “provisional ballot.’’
After other ballots are counted, county election officials go through their records to see if that person was entitled to vote at that place. If not, the ballot is not counted.
That’s what Hobbs seeks to change.
So if a voter from, say, Marana, showed up at a South Tucson precinct, any vote for a legislator from the area would not count. But any vote for president, governor or any statewide officer would be tallied.
Ward said Arizona law is based on a “precinct-based voting model,’’ and that it was effectively upheld by the Supreme Court ruling.
Ward said the change would turn every polling place into a de-facto voting center. Most of the state’s counties already have such a system, where a county resident can vote at any county voting center. She clearly isn’t a fan of even that practice.
“Precinct-based voting is essential to election integrity,’’ Ward said.
But Hebert said there is no reason residents of the counties with precinct-based voting should end up losing out on their right to vote simply because they ended up at the wrong polling place.
Dul said her office checked with election officials in the affected counties.
“They agreed it would not be a significant burden,’’ she said.
Hobbs’ role
There is no question that elections have to be run in compliance with the statutes approved by the Legislature. So, for example, Hobbs has no authority to determine the hours that polls must be open.
But state law, Dul pointed out, “explicitly directs the secretary to spell out rules for counting and tabulating ballots.’’ The Elections Procedures Manual, in hundreds of pages, addresses detailed elements of how elections are supposed to be run.
Hebert said the court ruling never addressed the manual.
But Hobbs has one other legal hurdle.
She is required to submit any changes by the end of this month to Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich, both Republicans. They will have until the end of the year to approve or reject the revisions.
