The new #AZ election law overhaul bill #HB2596 is a culmination of "fixes" for nearly every unfounded conspiracy theory brought up in 2020.
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It starts off by: 1) Requiring voter id to receive and cast a ballot, which is already pretty common place in AZ except a small cohort called "federal only" voters.
2) Prohibit early non-excused early voting entirely. 3) Removes vote centers 4) Manual by-hand tabulation.
It removes county recorders from the election process entirely since they don't actually do any of the things written in the language.
Managing polling places is already a function of the board of supervisors by way of the county election departments.
Limits election day precincts to fifteen hundred registrants. We've already gone over how this would be a logistical nightmare both in acquiring the places and the staff to run them.
Polling places cannot be changed unless registrants are notified two years in advance, which just adds a layer of logistical nightmare to the base nightmare layer.
It wants precincts to be public buildings...of which there would not be enough to accommodate precincts of 1,500.
Prohibits the use of machines in tabulation. Makes a point to say ADA compliant machines could not be used for those with disabilities.
It then makes the same repeated mistake of thinking that Arizona isn't already a full paper ballot state.
Removes the L&A requirements for some reason and just says they shall be tested for logic and accuracy.
Can't forget adding a hologram to the ballot, which no election machine is certified to tabulate, but since the bill removes them from the process I guess it doesn't matter?
The next section converts Arizona to an excuse only absentee ballot state complete with affidavit. Arizona has been using ballot by mail for over two decades.
Oh look, a mask mandate prohibition.
This section gives the power of election certification to the legislature, if the legislature rejects, a court action can be filed to request a brand new election.
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It is true, like hundreds of millions of voters elsewhere, federal only voters attest to their citizenship status. Many don't think that's good enough, which is fine. It's an opinion.
Like I said on another post, you don't have to like it. But to change it you need Congress to actually do something other than TV appearances and speaker changes.
A breakdown of the FY2023 migrant encounters at the southern border.
-Nearly 2.5 million encounters in FY2023, the highest on record.
-Three consecutive years of increasing encounters.
-#4 and #5 annual encounter rankings are 2000 and 2001.
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Full demographics by encounters is only available 2019 on, but FY2023 ranks #1 for encounters with Family units (823k), #2 for single adults (1.5MM) and #3 for unaccompanied minors (137k)
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Despite popular belief, the number of encounters between ports of entries is actually down 7% from FY2022. Although both are still the lions share of encounters at >2MM. Encounters at ports of entry are up 180% this year to nearly 500k.
Mohave County Elections completed a hand count test run of 850 ballots. 36 contests on the ballots so a count of ~31k marks.
Biggest takeaway:
46 errors were made for a rate of 0.15%. Machine error rate, which does apply , is 0.00001%. (1 in ten million)
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Ballots were tallied over three, 8 hour days, by seven part-time staff members. Four full time staff administered.
It took three minutes to tally one ballot with 36 contests on it. The county forecasts at 105k ballots in 2024 one seven member team would need 5,250 work hours, 657 eight-hour days to complete the tally.
Note: Calculation does not include reconciliation of errors or write-ins.
At some point a group will come forward and say they spent thousands of hours doing a full verification of 2020 signatures using the illegally obtained @MaricopaVote data. It will likely include a high failure rate.
It will be mostly worthless.
Why?
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The group is exclusively using signatures from voter registration forms. The VAST majority of which are MVD digitals. Comparing handwritten signatures to digital, is not great as you can imagine. Easy to fail if you ignore things like official address and matching phone.
But here is the kicker. The VAST majority of signatures used for comparison are OTHER handwritten signatures from previous early votes. A MUCH easier comparison to make. It's so easy in fact, it can be done in very, very little time.
Recorder @stephen_richer lays out election reform suggestions in a 28 page document released today. He begins by noting election admins are put in an untenable situation. He shows an email death threat that he received right after the primary.
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The primary reason results take longer in AZ, as laid out by @stephen_richer is the political landscape (battleground status) and a phenomena in AZ called "late earlies" ie. early votes dropped of on election day. They rose nearly 70% between 2020 and 2022.
A solution, he says, could be to eliminate late early ballots. That makes our system resemble Florida statute.
The pros are that enough ballots would be counted on election night to call most races.
The cons: Late early ballots are popular in AZ with voters.