After Maricopa Voting Debacle, Arizona Must Reform its Election Laws
If Arizona is genuinely interested in enacting much-needed state election reforms — and it should be, especially after this month’s voting debacle in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county — it’s now or never. Or at least for the next four or eight years.
Term-limited outgoing Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey should call a lame-duck special session of the Legislature for the sole purpose of enacting voting reforms before the presumptive governor-elect, Democrat Katie Hobbs, can take office on Jan. 2 — after which it definitely won’t get done.
(Ms. Hobbs leads her Republican opponent, Kari Lake, by 0.6 of 1%, or 17,150 votes, out of more than 2.55 million counted. The race has been called by the news media in the Democrat’s favor, but Ms. Lake has yet to concede.)
“The way they run elections in Maricopa County is worse than in banana republics around this world,” Ms. Lake was quoted as saying by London’s Daily Mail newspaper, adding: “I believe at the end of the day that this will be turned around.”
The Daily Mail reported that Arizona Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright on Nov. 19 wrote to one of Maricopa County’s top election officials that “detailing reports of a string of irregularities from printer problems that stopped ballots being tabulated, to confusion about procedures for transferring voters to alternate sites if they were unable to vote at the first location.”
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Continue reading at The Washington Times.
