This week a new voter suppression bill reared up in the Arizona Legislature.
This week Republican Rep. Townsend introduced a bill (HB2616), which would prohibit anyone employee of any organization (except political parties) from registering people to vote. This would include some of Arizona’s leading voter registration organizations and is yet another move by the Arizona GOP to make it harder for people to register to vote. For example, NextGen workers registered hundreds of voters in Flagstaff alone in 2018.
This awful bill follows on the heels of SB 1046, which would prevent voters who receive their ballots in the mail from dropping them off at polling places or elections office locations. Instead, voters would have to mail the ballots back. In 2018, over 225,000 Arizonans voted by dropping their mail ballots at election locations in the last few days leading up to and on Election Day. Some say this bill is dead because two Republicans have come out against it; however, we’re not going to stop worrying until the legislature adjourns.
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