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A Republican proposal that would have closed Arizona schools on Election Day and forced them to allow their gymnasiums to be used as polling places was vetoed Tuesday for being “nonsensical and objectionable.”
It was one of a series of election-related bills that GOP lawmakers sent to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs that were rejected.
One of those bills would have effectively created a bounty system to reward Arizonans who sued local governments that present election information “in any manner that is not imperial or neutral,” while another would have required the Arizona Department of Transportation to also send voter registration information directly to county recorders instead of solely to the Secretary of State’s Office.
A third would have barred Arizona from participating in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate partnership to cross-check for duplicate voter registrations across state lines.
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Hobbs was pointedly critical of Senate Bill 1097, the measure that would have turned public schools into polling places. The legislation would have shut down every Arizona school on every primary and general Election Day. But while students would be home, it would be illegal for teachers and staff to have the day off — they would have been mandated to report to in-service or professional development training.
And for schools with a gymnasium, if the county elections department asked to use the facility as a polling location, it would have to comply. Similarly, county elections officials could have forced state, county, city and school district offices to open up their doors to be polling places.
That was in service of another provision tucked into the bill: A requirement that every county return to precinct-style voting with “specifically designated polling places.” Counties could still operate vote centers, where anyone registered in the county could show up to cast a ballot, but could only do so in addition to the precinct voting sites.
Arizona’s two largest counties, Maricopa and Pima, exclusively use the voting centers, as do six other counties. Another four use a hybrid system with both vote centers and precincts. Only three counties use precincts exclusively.
Under the precinct model, only voters assigned to a precinct can vote there, and if they vote at the wrong location, their ballot won’t be counted.
“This bill is Detrimental, Ineffective, Nonsensical, and Objectionable,” Hobbs wrote in her veto letter.
Other vetoed election bills include Senate Bill 1036, which would have expanded the existing prohibition on using government resources to influence an election to include presenting information about the election “that is not impartial or neutral.” It also aimed to give every Arizona resident the chance to sue the governmental body — and directly collect the civil penalty of up to $5,000 if a court agreed an election was illegally influenced.
Hobbs called the bill “far too broad and subjective” in her veto letter and said it “opens the door to infringe on First Amendment rights and general public discourse.”
And the two voter registration bills — House Bill 2767, directing ADOT to send voter information to counties, and House Bill 2206, barring participation in ERIC — both place “significant” costs on county recorders, the governor wrote in her veto letters.
In two other vetoes, Hobbs took aim at GOP lawmakers for what she said was clear hypocrisy.
One measure, House Bill 2927, would have required public bodies — city councils, school boards and more — to post meeting minutes online within three days and leave them on their website “indefinitely.” It also would have ordered that public records be provided “in the least expensive manner possible,” with electronic records being the default, and it would have limited any charge for the records to the cost of the materials.
But Hobbs said it was bold for lawmakers to insist that the rest of Arizona government retain records indefinitely considering they exempted the legislature from public records law in 2023.
“As the legislative body changed rules to allow their own public records to be discarded after just 90 days, it is unclear as to why this bill attempts to hold others to a more lengthy and costly standard,” the governor wrote.
And Hobbs sharply criticized GOP lawmakers for their push to remove qualification requirements for their own appointments to a litany of state boards and commissions.
The governor and Senate Republicans have been fighting for two years over Hobbs’ nominees to lead state agencies, with legislators accusing her picks of being overly partisan and unqualified as they subject the agency heads to intense grillings, often focusing on political beliefs and comments they’ve made in the past that are unrelated to the agency they were chosen to lead.
“It is the height of hypocrisy for this Legislative majority to attempt to exempt themselves from the standards to which they hold others,” Hobbs wrote in her veto letter.
In all, Hobbs vetoed 13 bills on Tuesday, bringing her total for the year to 137 — just six shy of the record 143 she vetoed in 2023, her first year as governor. Since taking office, Hobbs has vetoed 353 bills, the most of any governor in Arizona history.
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This post was originally authored and published by Jim Small from AZ Mirror via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
