Voters wait in line at a Mesa polling location on Nov. 8, 2022. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
In most Arizona counties, voters can show up at any polling location to cast their ballot on Election Day.
But some Republican lawmakers want to do away with that system and instead assign every voter a neighborhood polling location that could accommodate no more than 1,000 voters — and throw out the ballots of voters who go to the wrong polling place. Doing so, they say, is more convenient and will restore confidence in the system.
And it seems those Republicans have a short memory when it comes to elections in the Grand Canyon State.
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Arizona has a long history with the precinct-style voting that the GOP lawmakers are pushing. Before the shift to voting centers — the model that lets voters show up at any polling place in the county — Arizona elections were often plagued by long lines and technology issues, and tens of thousands more people cast ballots in those elections that were never counted because the voters showed up at the wrong location.
On Jan. 22, members of the House Federalism, Military Affairs and Elections Committee voted 4-3 along party lines to forward House Bill 2017 and mirroring House Concurrent Resolution 2002 to the full House of Representatives.
The bill will almost certainly get a veto from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. The resolution would dodge Hobbs and instead be sent directly to voters in 2026.
The idea is a repeat of one that its sponsor, Rep. Rachel Keshel, R-Tucson — a member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus — proposed last year. But she informed the committee that former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, the only Republican who voted against the bill last year, blocking it in the Senate, failed his reelection bid and no longer stood in the way.
Bennett was the only Republican on the Senate Elections Committee during the 2022 and 2023 legislative sessions who consistently agreed with complaints from elections officials that his Republican colleagues’ proposed election law changes might be unworkable.
Rep. Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, claimed during Wednesday’s committee meeting that the use of vote centers in place of precincts disenfranchises voters in his district, the opposite of what many election officials say is their intention. Kolodin is also a member of the Freedom Caucus and chairs the new Ad Hoc Committee on Election Integrity and Florida-style Voting Systems.
Most Arizona counties, including Pima and Maricopa, use a vote center model. Yuma and Yavapai counties have both used vote centers for more than a decade.
In a precinct-only model, each voter can only cast a ballot at their designated location, and if they don’t cast their ballot at the correct location, it won’t be counted. Some counties use a hybrid model with both vote centers and precinct locations.
Apache, Pinal and Mohave counties are the only Arizona counties that continue to use precinct-only voting.
Maricopa County began transitioning to the use of vote centers in 2018 and switched over to vote centers only in 2020.
“Prior to 2020, we didn’t have these issues with lines backing up because we had issues with tabulators, we didn’t have issues with lines backing up because printers ran out of ink or printers were printing ballots incorrectly or any of that stuff,” Kolodin said. “Those are problems that are inherent to a vote center model.”
The Legislature should consider working parents like him who don’t have time to wait in the long lines caused by voting centers, Kolodin said.
Ballot-on-demand printers are necessary for a vote center model because voters living within the same county live in different congressional and legislative districts as well as different cities and school districts. In a precinct, elections officials pre-print ballots specifically for that location, and then must estimate how many ballots to have on hand.
Kolodin, along with new Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, both spoke during the Wednesday meeting of the issues and long lines caused by the county’s ballot-on-demand printer problems on Election Day 2022.
While the decrease in Election Day voting locations that came with a switch to vote centers has caused long lines in some counties, there have been plenty of other reasons for long wait times at the polls in Arizona’s recent history.
A short memory
The last Maricopa County voter cast their ballot in the 2004 presidential election at 12:15 a.m. the next day, according to a Nov. 4, 2004, article by the Arizona Republic. That voter got in line before polls closed at 7 p.m. and waited more than 5 hours to vote.
“There was one polling place with only five workers,” Delight Hogan, a Maricopa County voter, told the Republic on Election Day 2004. “This is absolutely pathetic and unacceptable. I feel as if I was robbed of my opportunity to exercise my right as a citizen of this country.”
The Republic reported in a Nov. 8, 2000, article that many voters during that presidential election waited in line for between two and three hours, with 350 people still in line at Gilbert High School when polls closed.
In a Nov. 12, 2016, article, the Republic reported that a broken tabulator left one woman waiting more than two hours at her precinct, and other voters complained about lines due to e-poll books crashing.
Heap and Kolodin both said on Wednesday that voters were disenfranchised by long lines at vote centers in Maricopa County in 2022, and that some people got out of line and never ended up voting.
That was one of the arguments that failed 2022 Republican gubernatorial and 2024 senate candidate Kari Lake made in her unsuccessful attempt to overturn the results of the race for governor that she lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs. But Lake was unable to find a single voter to testify during her trial that they had shown up to a polling place and ended up not voting due to long lines. Instead, she used an extrapolation of an exit poll, which the judge said could not be used as evidence that anyone was actually disenfranchised.
Heap and Kolodin failed to acknowledge a key difference between voters who faced long lines at vote centers in 2022 — who could drive to another nearby voting center and cast a ballot — and the voters who dealt with extended waits prior to that, when Maricopa County used only precinct locations, and the voter either had to wait in line or not vote.
One of the top complaints from voters in 2016, according to the Arizona Republic article, was that they showed up to the wrong precinct. If vote centers are banned and a voter shows up to the wrong precinct, they have to either cast a provisional ballot that likely won’t be counted or head to the correct precinct and possibly wait in a second line.
Republicans who claimed voters in 2022 were disenfranchised by long lines caused by vote center printer problems were unable to produce evidence of that, but numbers of provisional ballots cast in past Arizona elections are readily available. They have decreased dramatically in Maricopa County since it began using vote centers.
During its last all-precinct election in 2016, Maricopa County received more than 52,000 provisional ballots. About 15,000 of those were not counted, including nearly 2,200 from voters who showed up at the wrong precinct — something that happened at 47% of polling sites.
There were an estimated 22,000 provisional ballots in the 2024 election — mostly due to people not being registered or registered too late to vote in November — and only 3,500 were ultimately counted.
We’ll just vote at peoples’ houses
During the November 2024 election, Maricopa County opened 246 Election Day vote centers, and hired more than 4,000 workers. The last time Maricopa County held an election with only precinct-based polling places, it operated 671 locations.
Keshel’s bill would force Maricopa to procure 2,600 precinct locations, almost four times the number it operated in 2016.
Jen Marson, director of the Arizona Association of Counties, repeated many of the same arguments she made against the proposal last year, chiefly that the counties simply can’t find enough polling places or people to staff precincts capped at 1,000 registered voters.
“If it’s mandated to go to a precinct model and we literally don’t have enough locations, what do we do?” she asked the lawmakers.
Keshel’s proposal doesn’t include a contingency plan for how the counties should deal with that, Marson said, adding that the struggle to find polling places and poll workers was a driving factor in the switch from precinct polling places to vote centers.
Kingman Republican John Gillette, who chairs the committee, said he found that difficult to believe, adding that counties could use county jails, parks, fire stations and police stations.
But Marson pointed out that, especially in smaller communities, those buildings tended to be located within a few blocks of one another, and precinct polling places must be located within that precinct.
Kolodin countered by saying he thinks that plenty of private citizens — or AirBnB owners — would be happy to rent out their homes as polling places, saying that if the counties pay them enough they’ll be happy to oblige.
Marson answered that she didn’t think any counties had contemplated renting private homes as polling places, but that most homes likely would not work for that purpose since all voting locations must be ADA-accessible and have ample parking.
Heap told the committee that he personally supported Keshel’s bill, but that he thinks 1,500-voter precincts would be more realistic in Maricopa County, home to around 2.5 million of the state’s 4.3 million registered voters.
Heap, who was sworn in as recorder just a few weeks ago, often dismissed the counties’ concerns about their ability to implement proposed changes when he was a state representative on the House Elections Committee. But the former Freedom Caucus member seemed to change his tune after being sworn in as recorder, saying that the counties sometimes had valid logistical concerns.
A 1,500-voter precinct cap would still require Maricopa County to find more than 1,700 polling places, seven times more than it operated in 2024 and two-and-a-half times more than in 2016. Even if it only staffed those locations with three poll workers apiece, the county would have to find at least 1,000 more workers.
Closer to home
During Wednesday’s hearing, Kolodin claimed that precinct-based voting was preferential for voters like himself who prefer to cast their ballots in person on Election Day, because they tended to be in their neighborhoods and closer to home.
“Frankly, those voters feel disenfranchised, because the people setting the locations of the vote centers are Democrats, and sometimes it doesn’t seem like a priority to put vote centers in convenient locations for Republicans,” Kolodin said.
The Maricopa County Elections Department sets Election Day voting locations, and that department is overseen by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which approves those locations. The board has been controlled by Republicans for decades.
Tyler Stein, a lobbyist for Rural Arizona Action, told the committee that his organization believes Keshel’s bill will make voting less convenient for rural Arizonans, many of whom need flexibility to fit in voting and long commutes for work.
“The 1,000-voter criteria seems arbitrary and inappropriate,” Stein said. “While in metropolitan areas this could be a matter of a few city blocks, in rural areas this could represent significant travel time, and again, would be inconvenient to rural communities. Voting should not be made more difficult for rural voters.”
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