Grand Canyon Times

On June 29, Gina Swoboda, executive director of the Voter Reference Foundation (VRF), appeared on the Live Free TV podcast with former Florida U.S. Rep. and former military officer Allen West to discuss election integrity. Referring to situations that occurred across the country in the last presidential election, Swoboda said voters need to educate themselves and hold their local county election officials accountable.

“So we need to verify that compliance exists in your county,” Swoboda said when asked to give advice to voters in the upcoming election season. “And when you don't follow the law that is there for a reason to ensure the quality and the controls ... Then, if there is chaos, there's room for bad things to happen. So people need to know what are the rules that are in place for the election and are they following them and have they followed them? And then, if they haven't, you need to go to your elected officials and have them make these at least county election officials comply with the statutes.”

The Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) is an organization and informational website dedicated to educating and providing access to information about how elections work across the country. “Our goal is to encourage greater voter participation in all fifty states,” VRF says on its website. “We believe the people have an absolute right to a transparent elections system, including elections data and elections procedures.” The website includes resources like absentee ballot trackers, scorecards for each state based on their data transparency and election operations, and state guides to voter registration.

Swoboda has made several public comments about the 2022 presidential election in Maricopa County, citing the chaos and lack of structure in the Maricopa system. She advocated for precinct polling. The county's voting center model requires printed-on-demand ballots, which could not be read by the tabulators and caused a massive slowdown, forcing election workers to duplicate ballots so that they could be read at all, she said.

“We're never going to be able to identify X amount of voters who gave up and walked away,” Swoboda said about that election. “So that was a disaster. And this, in my view, comes down to the ballot-on-demand system. This is not the first time we've had this problem.” She cited previous elections with similar issues and said the solution is to abandon open voting centers, despite the county not wanting to return to precinct voting because the population is so massive in Maricopa.

Swoboda and West also discussed the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Moore v. Harper Case. The verdict came out of a North Carolina State Supreme Court case in which the state court prevented the state legislature from enacting a new jurisdictional map in 2021. She said the U.S. Constitution places authority in the state legislature over federal elections, but, by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that “the federal elections clause does not vest exclusive and independent authority in state legislatures to set the rules regarding federal elections,” and so state courts can make decisions based on their state laws.