PHOENIX — The Arizona Supreme Court on Sunday refused to extend the deadline for voters to resolve problems with mail-in ballots, a day after voter rights groups cited reports of delays in counting votes and in notifying voters with problematic signatures.
The court said Sunday that election officials in eight of the state’s 15 counties reported that all voters with “inconsistent signatures” were properly notified and given an opportunity to respond.
Arizona law requires that people who vote by mail be notified of problems such as a ballot signature that does not match the one on file and given a “reasonable” chance to correct it in the part of a process called “healing”.
“The Court has no information to establish in fact that these individuals were not given ‘reasonable efforts’ to repair their ballots,” wrote Judge Bill Montgomery, who was a duty judge for the court composed of seven members. He noted that no responding counties requested an extension of the deadline.
“In short, there is no evidence of disenfranchisement before the Court,” the court order states.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center on Saturday named clerks, including Maricopa County’s Stephen Richer, in a petition seeking an emergency court order to extend the original 5 p.m. deadline by four days ( Pacific Standard Time) on Sunday. Maricopa is the most populous county in the state and includes Phoenix.
The groups said that as of Friday evening, more than 250,000 absentee ballots had yet to be verified by signature, with the majority of them in Maricopa County. They argued that tens of thousands of Arizona voters could be disenfranchised.
Montgomery, a Republican appointed to the state’s high court in 2019 by former GOP Gov. Doug Ducey, said the eight counties that responded — including Maricopa — said “all of these affected voters” had received at least one phone call” as well as other email messages. , SMS or mail.
He noted, however, that the Navajo Nation informed the court that the list of Apache County tribal members who were required to correct their ballots on Saturday numbered more than 182 people.
Maricopa County announced early Sunday that it had about 202,000 ballots remaining to be counted. Arizona’s secretary of state said more than 3 million ballots were cast in the election.
