Grand Canyon Times

In the 2020 general election, Maricopa County election officials flouted the spirit of a voting law that restricts emergency voting to those with “unforeseen circumstances” that prevent them from getting to the polls, according to a former county official who preferred to remain anonymous. 

The county set aside 79 emergency voting centers on the Friday, 89 centers on the Saturday, 21 on the Sunday, and 149 on the Monday before the Nov. 3, 2020 elections, and 51,000 voted at the centers, Megan Gilbertson, a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Elections Department, told the Grand Canyon Times.

In an email, Gilbertson said that the county followed the law requiring the voter to sign a statement that they had experienced “an emergency after 5 p.m. on the Friday immediately preceding the election and before 5 p.m. on the Monday immediately preceding the election that will prevent me from voting at the polling place.”

But in 2019, the Arizona Legislature tightened the state’s emergency voting rules after a fraction of the emergency votes cast in 2020 were cast two years before – 1,700 votes were cast at five emergency enters in the November 2018 elections. Then-chairman of the board of supervisors Steve Chucri, a Republican, slammed then-County Recorder Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, and now a candidate for secretary of state, for selecting the locations without detailing or enforcing what an emergency is, the Washington Free Beacon reported in 2018. Emergency voting was not intended for those “who felt like voting Saturday or Monday,” Chucri said.

In an email to Fontes, Chucri cited the Arizona revised statutes and the secretary of state's election procedure manual, and asked him to set aside the ballots “until your legal authority to open emergency sites has been clarified,” the Washington Free Beacon reported in 2018.

“If you look at the elections pamphlet in parallel to statute, it is very clear as to what you can do and not do with emergency voting centers,” he wrote.

Chucri said he never received a response.

The 2019 law addressed his concerns. The law, among other reforms, required that voters prove they had a genuine emergency that will keep them from the polls on Election Day.

The law also left the decision of where the emergency centers would be located up to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which Gilbertson said was done prior to the 2020 elections through resolutions at two public board meetings, one in September and one in October.

Some of the locations were simply flipped from early voting to emergency centers at 5 p.m. Friday, according to an October 2020 report by Phoenix New Times.

The report also said: “You [the voter] get to decide the nature of the emergency, and no one will ever question you on it, according to Maricopa County elections and state law.”

In 2018, former County Recorder Helen Purcell, Fontes' Republican predecessor, told the Arizona Mirror that she disagreed with Fontes selection of five locations for emergency voting. When she was recorder, Purcell required anyone with a genuine emergency to vote at the recorder’s office. She said that in one year she even turned away a congressman who couldn’t prove he had a real emergency.

“What do you consider an emergency?,” she was quoted as saying. “Just because I don’t want to go to the polls on Election Day? I don’t think that’s an emergency.”

Other Republicans, the Mirror reported, questioned the locations of the centers in 2018.

“Specifically, they’re leery of Fontes’ decision to open a fifth emergency voting center in the predominantly Democratic city of Tolleson, just miles from another center in Avondale, while large swaths of the Valley, including predominantly Republican areas in the northern and western parts of the Phoenix metro area, had none,” the article said.

In 2018, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeated Republican Martha McSally in a closely contested U.S. Senate race.

No other counties used emergency voting centers in the November 2020 general election.

Fontes was defeated in November by Republican Stephen Richer.

Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes, the Associated Press reported. He was the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996.