Arizona GOP passes ‘impossible’ voting bill requiring 4,000 new polling locations

Voters wait in a long line outside of the vote center at the Tolleson Civic Center on Nov. 5, 2024. Photo by Caitlin Sievers | Arizona Mirror

Republican lawmakers passed legislation that would cost Arizona counties tens of millions of dollars every election year and would force them to attempt to find 4,000 new voting locations, something that county election officials described as impossible. 

House Bill 2017 passed through the Senate by a 17-12 party line vote on Tuesday. 

Sponsored by Rep. Rachel Keshel, a Tucson Republican and member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, the proposal would ban in-person early voting and the use of vote centers where any registered voter within a county can cast a ballot. 

Instead, it would require the use of precincts capped at 1,000 registered voters apiece. 

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Most counties use voting centers, which allow any registered voter to show up and cast a ballot at any polling site in the county. 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.

During a March 5 Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee hearing, Keshel said that capping precincts at 1,000 voters would make the election process more manageable and trustworthy. 

“I think some of us would agree that the voting centers haven’t really caused more faith in our elections,” Keshel said. “They haven’t caused less chaos. They’ve done the opposite.” 

She cited issues at voting centers in Maricopa County during the 2022 general election, when printer problems caused long lines and frustration for voters. But her claims that long lines weren’t a problem prior to that were untrue. Long lines and other Election Day problems occurred in Arizona long before Maricopa County started using voting centers in 2018. 

Keshel’s proposal is all but guaranteed to get a veto from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, but the Senate could still vote on its mirror, House Concurrent Resolution 2002, which would bypass the governor’s desk and head straight to the 2026 ballot to be decided by the voters. 

The Joint Legislative Budget Committee wrote in an April 11 fiscal note that HCR2002 would cost the counties a total of around $53 million in its first election year and more than $21 million each election year after that. 

House Bill 2017 would have the same impacts, including the requirement that counties open 3,957 additional voting locations for each election, and find more than 27,000 additional poll workers to staff them. 

“HB 2017 would be impossible to implement and would add immeasurable burdens to our counties while hurting voters in the process,” Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Phoenix Democrat, said before voting against the bill. “So, even if this would be able to be implemented, it would have devastating impacts and is just another attempt to suppress the vote.” 

Jen Marson, the executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, has repeatedly told legislators that the counties would be unable to find enough voting locations or workers to comply with Keshel’s bill. 

Even Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, who spent two years on the House Elections Committee where he questioned Marson’s claims that some bills were impossible to implement, changed his tune only days after he took office. During a January committee hearing, Heap conceded that he didn’t think 1,000-voter caps would be realistic in the state’s most populous county, home to more than half of the nearly 4.6 million registered voters in the state. 

But far-right Republican Sen. Mark Finchem, an election denier from Prescott who made wild and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud when he unsuccessfully challenged his loss in the race for the Secretary of State’s Office in 2022, said he wasn’t buying it. 

“I find it interesting that, quite often when government officials say, ‘We can’t,’ it actually means, ‘We won’t.’” Finchem said. “It’s a big difference between the two. One has to do with the will to perform for the people, the other has to do with ignoring the calls for what the people want.”

Without further explanation, Finchem pointed out that Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador all use precinct-based voting. 

All three of those countries are under authoritarian rule and are often described as dictatorships, and elections in Venezuela and Nicaragua are widely considered not to be free and fair. The most recent presidential election in El Salvador was marred by corruption and bad practices. 

In 2016, the last time Maricopa County used only precinct-based polling places, it had 671 polling sites. In last year’s election, it opened 246. Keshel’s bill calls for 2,600 precinct locations in Maricopa County, more than 10 times the number it operated in 2024.

The county began using the vote center model because it struggled to find enough precinct locations, and because it stopped the problem of provisional ballots being thrown out because they were cast at the wrong location. 

Keshel admitted during the March 5 meeting that she hadn’t done the math to figure out how many precinct locations would be needed before drafting her proposal, and still hadn’t done so as of that date. But she brushed off the idea that finding nearly 4,000 new polling locations and 27,000 workers would be a problem. 

“We did this before,” Keshel said. “I feel like those are excuses to not go back to the way that we did it for decades in Arizona. It was a much better system.” 

But the state has not, at least in recent history, had precincts with only 1,000 voters nor has it operated 4,000 voting locations. 

Keshel’s proposal doesn’t include a contingency plan for what the counties should do if they fail to find enough voting locations and workers. During the January committee meeting Republican Rep. John Gilette said he found Marson’s claims hard to believe and suggested that the counties use jails, parks, fire stations and police stations. Marson explained that, because voting locations must be within the physical boundaries of each precinct, that wouldn’t work for small communities where those locations were typically within a few blocks of one another. 

Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin, of Scottsdale, suggested that counties could instead rent out private homes or Airbnbs. But Marson said the counties hadn’t contemplated doing that since those locations likely wouldn’t have the required number of parking spaces or be ADA-accessible. 

House Bill 2017 is a repeat of a bill that Keshel sponsored last year that failed to make it through the Senate when a single Republican, Sen. Ken Bennett, voted against it. Bennett, a former secretary of state, was often the lone member of his party to question GOP-backed proposals based on election conspiracy theories. He lost his reelection bid last year to Finchem in the Republican primary.

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