The same day an attorney was in a federal courtroom challenging an Arizona law about cancellation of voter registrations, attorneys for Abe Hamadeh told a Mohave County judge they have records showing hundreds of Arizona voters had ballots rejected in 2022 due to questionable voter registration cancellations.
The voter registration dispute heard May 16 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Phoenix involves Senate Bill 1260. It was signed into law last year and in part revised Arizona Revised Statute 16-165 to add a mandate for when a voter’s registration must be cancelled if it appears the voter has moved to a new county within Arizona.
Several provisions of SB1260 are currently on hold due to a legal challenge by the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, which contends the new requirement violates the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA). The NVRA requires due diligence on the part of elections officials before cancelling a voter’s registration without their consent.
Arizona law already required a county recorder to cancel a voter’s registration in various situations, such as when a voter dies or changes addresses within the county without filling out a new voter registration form.
But SB1260 included a now disputed provision requiring a county recorder to cancel someone’s voter registration upon “confirmation” from a second county recorder that the voter is now registered in the second county.
The new law, which went into effect Sept. 26, does not require the original county to send the voter a notice of the cancellation or undertake any further verification.
On Sept. 28, U.S. District Judge Murray Snow issued a preliminary injunction that blocks the new county to county cancellation provision. His ruling followed arguments by attorney Aria Branch of the progressive Elias Law Group that cancelling someone’s voter registration based solely on election officials communicating amongst themselves violates the NVRA.
It is an argument Branch renewed last week when addressing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The point of the NVRA is to make sure that there has been direct contact between the cancelling recorder and the voter to ensure that the person who registers in that new county is actually the same person whose registration is going to be cancelled,” she argued.
Branch further argued that ensuring Arizona’s county recorders have a procedure in place to communicate with the voter, as NVRA requires, “takes the guess work out of determining” the voter’s intent and ensure there are no mistakes made by elections officials which could lead to “erroneous cancellations.”
But county recorders across Arizona appear to have cancelled hundreds of voter registrations since 2020 without any notice to those voters. It is an issue that was mentioned during a hearing, also held on May 16, in Hamadeh’s election challenge against Kris Mayes in the attorney general race.
Many of those voters did not learn of the cancellations until after they tried to vote in their county of residence, only to be told they were not registered. They were allowed to cast a provisional ballot in the 2022 General Election but most were rejected.
Some of those cancellations can be traced to change of address reports from the U.S. Postal Service and third party vendors, often involving attempts by voters to have their mail temporarily delivered to a summer location or college.
Other voters found out the cancellation of their voter registration was cancelled in their county of record after utilizing the state’s ServiceArizona website to renew a vehicle registration.
Attorneys for Hamadeh say the number of Arizona voters who were disenfranchised in the last general election could have been drastically reduced if then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs had taken steps to ensure the 15 county recorders were complying with NVRA’s requirement of attempted contact with a voter before cancellation based on a second county registration.
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