Justices reinstate Arizona ban on door-to-door ballot pickup

PHOENIX -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday reinstated an Arizona law that makes it a felony for volunteers to go door to door to collect early ballots, stepping into a contentious political issue days before the presidential election and dealing a blow to Democratic efforts to get out the vote.

The unsigned order from the nation's highest court overturns an appeals court decision from a day earlier that blocked the new law. Groups immediately launched renewed efforts to help voters deliver their ballots to the polls, then halted them after the high court ruling.

The Supreme Court decision called into question what happens to ballots that were legally collected from voters in the approximately 20 hours during which the law was blocked.

Arizona filed an emergency appeal hours after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the law Friday. Justice Anthony Kennedy referred the case to the entire Supreme Court, and the court issued a brief order overturning the appeals court. The 9th Circuit will now consider the law in a January session that it set when it made the decision to block the law.

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It takes at least five votes to issue such an order, and the high court is split 4-4 along conservative-liberal lines after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia earlier this year. That means at least one of the court's liberal justices agreed to allow the law to go back into effect. No dissents were noted in the order.

The case is part of a slew of election-related challenges filed by Democrats across the nation in the lead-up to Tuesday's election. Democrats in six states asked federal judges to block what they said were voter-intimidation tactics planned by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, his backers or the state and national GOP.

A judge in Ohio issued an injunction blocking the tactics Friday, but judges in Arizona and Nevada refused to do so. Lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania are awaiting hearings. In New Jersey, a federal judge on Saturday refused a Democratic Party request to sanction the Republican National Committee for what it said were violations of a more than 3-decade-old agreement blocking voter intimidation there. Republicans deny the allegations in all of those cases.

In Arizona, Democratic efforts to extend voter registration by a day were rejected in October. Democrats argued that because the deadline fell on Columbus Day, it should have been postponed to the following business day. And the 9th Circuit denied an effort to force the counting of ballots cast by voters in the wrong precincts.

As for ballots collected before Saturday's ruling, the Arizona secretary of state's office urged groups to turn them in Monday morning. County election officials have said they lack authority to enforce the law and that any valid ballot they receive through any means would be counted.

"All of those ballots, regardless of whether or not they were collected as a part of a lot of ballots, they were all going to be counted anyway. There was never any danger to voters," said Matt Roberts, spokesman for Secretary of State Michele Reagan.

But state Republican Party Chairman Robert Graham said the Democratic groups should return the ballots to voters. The party has trained poll watchers to observe people who return multiple ballots and to report them to election officials.

"Now it's up to the voter to bring it into the polling place," Graham said.

He also criticized Democrats for rushing to collect ballots knowing that the Supreme Court was poised to act immediately.

"I think their over-ambition is going to possibly hurt some people, and that is a sad thing to see that these progressives were willing to take that risk," Graham said.

Democratic state Rep. Martin Quezada, who represents a district in western Phoenix and the suburb of Glendale that's heavily populated by members of minority groups, said there should be no legal liability for collecting during the window when the law was blocked. Backers of his campaign collected some ballots after the 9th Circuit ruling.

"We made a concerted effort to ensure that we documented the time when we collected these ballots, so there's proof that we collected them during that time," Quezada said. "Now we just have to go turn them in first thing Monday morning, and we don't expect there to be any problems with that."

The Arizona attorney general's office said it would review all elections-based complaints on a case-by-case basis and declined further comment.

Collecting early ballots is especially effective in minority-group communities, and Democrats said the law hurts those communities' ability to vote. The last week before an election is the most critical time for their get-out-the-vote efforts because it is too late to mail back an early ballot. They must be dropped off at an election office if they are to be counted.

Arizona has more than 3.5 million registered voters, and about 2.3 million of them have signed up to get a mail-in ballot. As of Friday, the secretary of state said, 1.56 million ballots had already been returned. It's the remaining early ballots that parties target in the final week before an election.

The decision comes just days ahead of a presidential election that has Arizona Democrats hoping Hillary Clinton will win the traditionally Republican state.

Arizona's majority Republican lawmakers approved the law earlier this year over the objection of Democrats. Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, called it a common-sense effort to protect the integrity of elections and eliminate voter fraud.

A split 9th U.S. Circuit panel had said that by blocking the law, it was preserving the status quo for Tuesday's election, which could come down to the wire in Arizona as Democrats spend heavily to get out the vote from Hispanics and others.

Both parties have used ballot collection to boost turnout during elections by going door to door and asking voters whether they have completed their mail-in ballots. Voters who have not are urged to do so, and the volunteers offer to take the ballots to election offices. Democrats, however, use the strategy more effectively.

A Section on 11/06/2016

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