'Too late': Arizona court rules voting access law put in place last year can be ignored

The Republican-stacked Supreme Court of Arizona has shot down an attempt by Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to ensure an easier voting process in Pinal County, reported Votebeat Arizona on Tuesday.

In its ruling, "the court determined it is too late to force the county to follow the rule, which Secretary of State Adrian Fontes created in December 2023. It requires Arizona counties that assign voters to a specific polling place make it possible for voters to cast the correct ballot, even if they go to a site other than the one to which they’ve been assigned."

The opinion, written by Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer, found that forcing Pinal County officials to change their process to comply with Fontes' rule would cause “unacceptable risk of chaos, uncertainty, and confusion” — particularly since early voting is already underway.

Ironically, while Arizona's Supreme Court is mostly Republican appointees and Fontes is a Democrat, the ruling could potentially hurt former President Donald Trump and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, as Pinal County, which has roughly 500,000 people located between Phoenix and Tucson, is heavily Republican, voting for Trump by 17 points in 2020. In fact, Pinal County is the most populous county in Arizona that reliably votes for the GOP.

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Pinal County will be the only county in Arizona not to be following Fontes' guidelines on voters going to the wrong polling place. Moreover, "Based on past patterns, it’s likely that a few hundred of Pinal County’s voters will vote at the wrong location on Nov. 5 and will have their ballots rejected. That happened to 274 voters in November 2020 and 235 in November 2022."

Arizona is one of the most hotly contested battleground states in the 2024 election, with Republicans hoping to break a long string of narrow losses to Democrats that began after Trump became president in 2016. The voting process there is being heavily watched, with a reported incident of arson damaging mail-in ballots in a heavily Democratic area of Phoenix.