PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona decide on Monday declined a request by the state Republican Get together to dam most mail ballots for the 2022 election, preserving the voting technique utilized by the overwhelming majority of voters.
Mohave County Superior Courtroom Decide Lee Jantzen dominated that nothing within the Arizona Structure prohibits the Legislature from permitting residents to vote by mail.
The case is the most recent piece of a multi-pronged effort by the Arizona Republican Get together and its firebrand chair, Kelli Ward, to roll again a system of no-excuse absentee voting that the GOP-controlled Legislature has constructed since 1991. They’ve pushed to require practically everybody to forged a poll in particular person on Election Day as former President Donald Trump repeats the lie that he misplaced the 2020 election due to fraud linked to mail ballots in Arizona and different battleground states.
Arizona is among the many states with the best ranges of mail voting, a system that has grown overwhelmingly widespread with voters from each events in addition to independents. Hanging down these legal guidelines would have had main implications for the 2022 election in Arizona, which incorporates one of many handful of races that may decide which social gathering controls the U.S. Senate.
Attorneys for Ward and the GOP argued that voting by mail is inconsistent with the Arizona Structure’s requirement for a secret poll. Lawyer Alex Kolodin pointed to a number of clauses within the structure that he says, taken collectively, show that the framers meant to ban mail ballots.
Solely the voters, not the Legislature, can authorize mail voting by amending the structure, Kolodin argued in courtroom final week.
Attorneys for state and county election officers, in addition to state and nationwide Democratic Get together committees, mentioned the vote-by-mail legal guidelines have loads of secrecy safeguards in-built. The decide, appointed by former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, agreed.
“The legal guidelines are removed from excellent and no one anticipated thirty years in the past that roughly 90 p.c of Arizona voters would vote by mail-in poll throughout a pandemic, however these legal guidelines are NOT in violation of the Arizona Structure,” Jantzen wrote.
Ward and the state GOP initially filed their lawsuit instantly with the Arizona Supreme Courtroom earlier this yr, a extremely uncommon step, however the justices mentioned it ought to undergo a trial courtroom first and they might solely contemplate it on attraction. They refiled the case final month in Mohave County, essentially the most conservative county within the state, the place Trump bought 75% of the vote in 2020.
Republican Lawyer Normal Mark Brnovich, who has earned Trump’s ire for failing to extra aggressively advance the previous president’s lies concerning the 2020 election, declined to defend the mail voting legal guidelines in courtroom. Brnovich is working in a crowded GOP major for U.S. Senate.
With Brnovich on the sidelines, the legislation was as an alternative defended by attorneys employed by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, together with the Maricopa County Lawyer’s Workplace, which represented seven county recorders. The Arizona Democratic Get together and three nationwide Democratic Get together organizations additionally intervened to defend the legislation.
“Arizona Democrats defended democracy and gained, hanging down the AZ GOP’s shameful, embarrassing, and unconstitutional effort to attempt to finish early voting in our state,” Arizona Democratic Get together Chair Raquel Teran mentioned in an announcement.
The Arizona Republican Get together mentioned in an announcement late Monday that it’s exploring its subsequent steps, together with a doable attraction.
“We knew moving into that asking a superior courtroom decide to take it upon itself to strike down this unconstitutional system was a giant ask,” the assertion mentioned.
