Election deniers could make deep changes to Arizona voting laws
With a new study showing that early voting is a waste of time for a lot of people who don’t vote for state offices, and with some signs of disenfranchisement, the potential impact of voter suppression may be a little less clear.
A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice has found that as many as 6.5 percent of voters may never have voted in a general election. And, those likely never to vote include minorities, rural voters, young voters and women.
And as a reminder: In 2016, the Arizona Republic found 3,500 registered voters in Maricopa County, who had never voted in a general election in the three years leading up to the 2016 election; and that was only 6 percent of voter registration — less than half those who were registered to vote that day.
And just this weekend, another new poll showed that with Trump’s presidency and his policies, the Democrats could pick up 10 seats in the Arizona House of Representatives — just the number that it took in 2016.
As a result, the state’s new voter suppression laws appear to be working. And the potential impact of the laws seem to be less clear.
But this new report by the Brennan Center for Justice may be a bellwether on what’s to come if the laws are allowed to stand.
“If our laws are not kept in place, and voters are suppressed, and non-voters are excluded from participating in our democratic system, we will have no checks or balances on power,” said Jonathan Simmons, the new report’s author.
Simmons, who’s known for his work on campaign finance and electoral integrity issues, said he wanted to study the early votes.
And he says he took his findings seriously.
“What I found after three years of research,” he said, “is that voter participation is the most important ingredient that you need for a functioning democracy.”
How the study works
Simmons’s study looked at the participation