Arizona legislature passes a critically needed bill to protect the upcoming presidential election, aligned with ERN recommendations.

Last summer, ERN developed and distributed recommendations for fixing a critical problem in Arizona election law. Those recommendations are part of work we've done in several states to align state laws with changes to presidential elections passed by Congress in the Electoral Count Reform Act.

This month, Arizona lawmakers passed a bill that helps secure Arizona’s elections and enables Arizona’s presidential election results to be properly transmitted to Congress. This change ensures that the will of the voters is reflected, and not diluted by a quagmire of competing state and federal rules and deadlines.

For a while it looked like a standoff between the parties might block changes to the overloaded election timelines we and others had warned about. In the end, the GOP-controlled legislature and Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs reached a compromise, and a bill including most of the changes we had recommended passed.

This is an important win for Arizona voters, and perhaps an inducement for further bipartisanship ahead.

But from a bigger picture perspective, we need to rethink the dynamics that lead to such brinksmanship. Our peer democracies are not facing election shutdowns because of fights over details like how mailed ballot-envelope signatures are verified. In peer democracies, this level of detail is managed by election professionals, not legislatures. When we interviewed Greg Essensa, Ontario's appointed nonpartisan Chief Electoral Officer, we learned that it was in his power—not the provincial assembly’s—to decide what types of ID voters could present and how to increase voting by mail in response to COVID.

Although it's hard to imagine US political parties ceding control over such matters to election professionals, we should know that it works that way elsewhere, in democracies that are much calmer and saner as a result.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash