(C) Arizona Mirror
This story was originally published by Arizona Mirror and is unaltered.
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Republicans want Arizona to count votes like Florida. It’s not that simple. [1]

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Date: 2025-02-10

Republican lawmakers in Arizona say that voters are desperate for “Florida-style” election reforms that would speed up the state’s slow finalization of results. Those legislators have proposed numerous changes that critics say would disenfranchise some voters, but they argue would put an end to the state’s elections being viewed as the “laughingstock of the country.”

“If you give your right to vote a priority, then you have plenty of options to vote,” Rep. Khyl Powell, R-Gilbert, said during a Feb. 3 Federalism, Military Affairs and Elections Committee meeting. “The Constitution of the United States was written to protect our rights, not to provide equal things.”

Arizona’s Republican lawmakers have made changing election processes — and specifically faster results — a key part of their goals this year, and have proposed several pieces of legislation that would make our elections more like Florida’s

House Bill 2703, the proposal that House Republicans have most recently rallied around, would cut off voters’ ability to drop off their mail-in ballots at any polling location in their county at 7 p.m. the Friday before the election. It would also require voters on the Active Early Voter List — who receive a ballot in the mail automatically — to confirm their address each election cycle or be booted off the list.

Currently, voters can drop off their mail-in ballot at any polling place in their county through the end of voting on Election Day, typically without waiting in line. If this proposal becomes law, voters could still drop off their early ballot through 7 p.m. on Election Day, but only at their county recorder’s office, or after standing in line at a polling place so they can show ID and feed their ballot through a tabulator.

Proponents of the bill say that putting an end to so-called “late earlies” or early ballots dropped off on Election Day and the weekend prior, would significantly speed up the tabulation of results. The more than 200,000 late earlies dropped off on Election Day during the past couple of elections slow down the reporting of results because workers have to process them and verify voter signatures before they can be tabulated.

The proposed changes would still leave Arizona with 27 days to vote, significantly more than Florida.

Those who support the bill say it will speed up results, providing Arizonans with more confidence in their elections, and that it won’t disenfranchise voters — something its authors asserted in the text of the bill.

“By enlarging the overall early voting period and maintaining other voting rights and processes such as in-person early voting, in-person election day voting, early voting by mail through the Friday before election day…the proposed changes in Arizona election administration processes will not have a substantial net effect on either access to or the ease of voting in Arizona,” the text of the bill says.

Florida has put a lot of hard work into improving its elections over the past seven years, and election experts like Genya Coulter, an elections analyst for the OSET Institute, told the Arizona Mirror that voters are generally happy with them and trust the results. Some changes in Florida election law since 2020 include more restrictions and security for ballot drop boxes and a requirement to request a mail ballot before each election. But Coulter, who has a background as a Florida poll worker and trainer, said voters there think those trade-offs are worth the feeling of security they provide.

“If you have a population that generally trusts their election officials, implementing changes generally goes a lot more smoothly than if you have widespread distrust, even if it’s unwarranted distrust,” she said.

Over the past 18 years, Arizona has posted its final election results in an average of 13 days after the election. But it’s only been in the last several years, when Democrats began winning statewide races that had previously been dominated by Republicans, that the delay in finalizing results has become a problem for Republican voters and elected officials. The result has been fabricated claims that a longer counting time is designed to let Democrats commit fraud and steal election victories.

Many of those people point to Florida, where nearly all election results are posted on election night, as the ideal system. But there are marked differences between Florida and Arizona when it comes to county size and geography, who administers the elections and how the population is dispersed.

“There is always something you can learn from another jurisdiction,” Coulter said. “Never underestimate that. But before you do a comparison, you do have to realize that there are differences in the infrastructure that allow for certain things to be easier to do than others.”

Geography

One of the most notable differences between Arizona and Florida are the size and number of counties in each state, as well as the distribution of the population among them.

Florida has 67 small counties, compared to Arizona’s 15 geographically giant ones. Collier County, Florida’s largest by land mass, takes up nearly 2,000 square miles, compared to Coconino County in Arizona at more than 18,500 square miles.

That means that the Floridian who has to drive to their Supervisor of Elections office to drop off their early ballot on Election Day will have, at most, a one-hour drive. In several Arizona counties, that drive could take more than two hours. And voters who live in the northernmost part of Apache County, on the Navajo Nation, are more than three hours away from their county recorder’s office.

Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, the chairman of an ad hoc committee created this year to workshop the numerous Florida-style proposals and to hear input from stakeholders, told the Mirror that this drive time was only an issue for a small group of people and that he would be open to solutions for the small number of people it might impact.

George Diaz, the lobbyist for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, urged the lawmakers on Feb. 3 to take into account the long drive from Chinle to the Apache County Recorder’s Office in St. Johns, and to consider creating an alternative drop-off location in the northern part of the county.

GOP committee members did not agree to that change.

Instead, Kolodin argued that another change in the bill, to allow counties to continue in-person early voting over the weekend prior to the election, would actually provide more opportunities for Arizonans to vote. Currently, in-person early voting ends the Friday before the election.

There are different requirements for dropping off an early ballot and voting early in person. Voters who drop off an early ballot don’t have to show ID because they sign an affidavit to prove that they’re registered to vote. Voters who cast an early ballot in-person at a polling place have to provide identification.

Hugo Polanco, a lobbyist for All Voting is Local Action, told Kolodin during the Feb. 3 committee meeting that proposed changes in HB2703 disproportionately hurt rural and tribal voters who often live far from polling places and have unreliable mail service.

“For these voters, Election Day drop-off isn’t just convenient, it is essential,” Polanco said. “Arizona lawmakers should make it easier for eligible voters to participate, not harder. HB2703 is an attack on voting rights.”

Polanco also criticized an amendment to the bill that Kolodin said was made in response to feedback from voting rights advocates. The change would require voters in counties with fewer than 500,000 residents to verify their addresses to remain on the Active Early Voter List every two election cycles. Voters in the more populous counties — Maricopa, Pima and Pinal — would still have to verify every cycle.

This amendment “treats voters differently based on county size,” Polanco said.

In a heated exchange, Kolodin asked Polanco why the committee should work with voting rights advocates if they criticize the changes that they asked for.

“This change might seem from your perspective like it helps rural or tribal voters, but it does not,” Polanco answered. “And it’s not anything that voting rights activists asked for. Working with rural county election administrators is not the same as working with voting rights activists. Those are different things.”

After years of disagreements between the Arizona Association of Counties and Republicans who proposed election overhauls, the majority of counties support HB2703, due in part to Kolodin’s agreement to incorporate multiple amendments that they requested, including the less-frequent address verification.

During a Jan. 29 meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on Election Integrity and Florida-style Voting, Natalia Sells, another representative of All Voting is Local Arizona, told the committee that the requirement for voters to reaffirm their addresses every election cycle would put an additional burden on Indigenous voters.

Early ballots mailed to voters on the Navajo Nation already take weeks to arrive, Sells said, giving those voters significantly less time than others to fill out and return their ballots.

“I feel like this bill does not support the rural voters back home,” Sells, who is Navajo, told the panel.

Population

Florida’s population at 22 million is much larger than Arizona’s 7.4 million, but the people in Florida are more evenly dispersed among the counties.

Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest county has a population of around 2.6 million, compared to Maricopa’s 4.2 million.

“There are certain jurisdictions, I think, in some areas where, if you’ve got one gigantic county and then you’ve got a bunch of little tiny counties, obviously most of the funding is going to have to go to the larger county,” Coulter said. “And so I think the more evenly spread out you can allocate the funding, the more consistent performance you have with elections.”

Do voters want this?

Many of the Republicans backing the proposed Florida-style election changes are the same people who voted last year to get rid of no-excuse early voting in Arizona, which accounted for 85% of ballots cast early in the 2024 general election, according to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office. But last year’s proposal to end voting by mail, which was implemented by Republicans in 1991, didn’t make it through the Senate.

Kolodin repeatedly claimed during elections committee meetings over the past few weeks that, according to polling, a “supermajority of voters” supported all of the election changes that Republicans had proposed in HB2703.

But Kolodin refused to tell the Arizona Mirror what entity conducted the poll, much less provide the polling itself. Instead he read the questions, results and methodology aloud over the phone.

“I’m not not sharing that, it doesn’t matter if you have the methodology,” he said.

Kolodin claimed that it was not either of the House elections committees that commissioned the poll, which would be subject to an open records request, but another entity that he refused to name. That contradicted what Kolodin said during the Feb. 3 committee meeting, that “this body” — presumably meaning the elections committee or the House of Representatives — conducted the poll.

“We asked the voters and a supermajority of them say, ‘We want this,’” Kolodin said during the Feb. 3 meeting. “In what sense can this still be fairly classified as hurting voters?”

A more transparent poll found the opposite.

According to an August 2024 survey by the Center for the Future of Arizona — with questions methodology and results listed online — 63% of voters “believe we should encourage voter participation and continue to make it easy to vote over having election results sooner.”

The poll, conducted by Highground Public Affairs, surveyed 500 likely voters from across Arizona, 34% Democrats, 38% Republicans and 28% independent voters. The survey had a margin of error of +-4%.

Differences in administration

Critics of Arizona elections have been singing the praises of Florida elections for several years.

But a key difference between who administers elections in each state didn’t come up during several lengthy public committee meetings regarding the proposed changes to Arizona elections.

In Arizona, elections are administered at the county level through a partnership between recorders and the county board of supervisors.

In Florida, the whole job is handled by a county Supervisor of Elections, a position that focuses solely on elections.

That means Florida’s election supervisors don’t have to deal with coordination between two separate offices, and the people in charge of administering their elections aren’t also tasked with responsibilities like recording plats and deeds or the day-to-day operations of county government.

The bill was forwarded out of the Federalism, Military Affairs and Elections Committee to the full House of Representatives by a vote of 4-3 along party lines, but it’s unlikely to make it into law.

“If proponents want faster election results, they should come to the table with common sense reforms that speed up election results while protecting the right to vote,” Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs wrote in a Feb. 3 statement. “Instead, they are attempting to jam through a partisan, political bill that will make it harder for Arizonans to vote. I am willing to discuss how to get election results faster, but not if it costs Arizona voters their right to be heard at the ballot box. If this partisan bill reaches my desk, it will be met with my veto pen.”

But Republicans have a workaround for that, with House Concurrent Resolution 2013, another Florida-style election change proposal that would go to the ballot in 2026 if approved by both legislative chambers, circumventing the governor’s veto.

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[1] Url: https://azmirror.com/2025/02/10/republicans-want-arizona-to-count-votes-like-florida-its-not-that-simple/

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