GOP Defeats Arizona Rule Allowing Ballot Fixes After Nov. 3
Ruling Giving Arizona Voters 5 Days to Supply Signatures Blocked
(Bloomberg) -- A federal appeals court agreed with Republicans that a ruling in Arizona went too far by giving absentee voters five days after Election Day to correct missing signatures on mail-in ballots.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Tuesday put the rule change on hold, saying it was reasonable to require voters to fix their missing signatures by Election Day and that Arizona officials were likely to succeed in their challenge.
“All ballots must have some deadline, and it is reasonable that Arizona has chosen to make that deadline Election Day itself so as to promote its unquestioned interest in administering an orderly election and to facilitate its already burdensome job of collecting, verifying, and counting all of the votes in timely fashion,” the appellate court said.
The ruling halts a Sept. 10 order by a lower-court judge for Arizona to give voters five days after Election Day to fix missing signatures. The Arizona Democrat Party had sued to extend the deadline so that voters who forgot to sign their mail-in ballots would get the same amount of time to fix the ballot as voters whose signatures didn’t match those on file.
Marc Elias, the lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee in the suit, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the decision.
The appeals court said that the state has a good reason for giving a grace period for fixing mismatched signatures but not for curing a missing signature.
“Whereas the failure to sign one’s ballot is entirely within the voter’s control, voters are not readily able to protect themselves against the prospect that a polling official might subjectively find a ballot signature not to match a registration signature,” the court said.
Separately, in a ruling Monday, a federal judge in Arizona extended the state’s voter-registration deadline to Oct. 23. It had been set to end Monday.
U.S. District Judge Steven Logan agreed with two voter organizations that the Covid-19 pandemic had hampered their efforts to register voters and noted that 31 states have registration deadlines that are later than Arizona’s.
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