The early days of early voting
It didn't start the way you might think.
Voting by mail is wildly popular in Arizona.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Arizona was an early adopter of “no-excuse absentee ballots” or what we now call your early mail-in ballot.
And it all came out of a politician getting upset about his ballot.
You see, in 1990, Arizona Senate President Pete Rios, a Democrat,1 had his absentee ballot thrown out after his opponent challenged his residency. He said he’d propose a bill the next legislative session to allow voters to appeal challenges, and at the very least notify a voter when their ballot was challenged.
Instead, through amendments to the bill, he ended up creating Arizona’s vote-by-mail system, permanently altering how Arizonans vote and how politicians campaign.
The change kicked off Arizona’s love of mail-in voting and set the stage for years of controversy and conspiracy.
But it didn’t start off as a bill to create early voting.
No excuses
The idea of allowing anyone to vote early by mail, like members of the military overseas can, wasn’t entirely novel in the early 1990s.
Pima County Recorder Mike Boyd was an early supporter of the idea of letting every Arizonan vote from the comfort of their home, arguing in the Arizona Daily Star’s opinion pages in November 1990 that voting with an absentee ballot should be “painless.”
“While it’s easy to come up with (an excuse to request an absentee ballot)… why should you have to?” he asked.
At the time, it was mostly people like National Guard members called up to active duty for the Persian Gulf crisis who used “absentee” or early mail-in ballots.
Then in December 1990, county officials were worried snow would block the roads on Indian reservations during the gubernatorial runoff election in February. So they mailed absentee ballots to every registered voter on the Navajo reservation, rather than make each voter ask for one.
That set the stage for the next year, when Rios, hot off of having his own vote thrown out, proposed a bill to require county officials to warn voters if their absentee ballot was being challenged, as his had been challenged.
But that bill morphed into one of the most consequential pieces of election legislation in Arizona’s history when, with little debate, lawmakers struck out the list of reasons a voter could request a mail-in ballot, allowing anyone to request one for any reason.
Only six lawmakers ultimately voted against the bill.2
On different pages
As lawmakers debated the idea in 1991, the Arizona Daily Star editorial board stuck up for voting by mail, noting that absentee ballots would make it easier to participate in democracy. County officials in Arizona said they hoped it would eliminate excuses and increase participation.
“It’s so easy it seems downright un-American,” columnist Tom Beal wrote in the Star.
The Republic, however, wasn’t keen on the idea. In June 1992, the editorial board of the state’s largest paper argued that the Legislature had “thoughtlessly retooled” election laws, compromising the integrity of elections, and that voting by mail would lead to “election-rigging.”
The Republic argued Arizona should eliminate voting by mail and go back to the old rules.
“However eager state legislators may be to make life easier for their constituents, the integrity of the election process is far more important than painless voting. Abuse of absentee ballots has always been a favored means for election-rigging, and the old protections ought to be restored,” the Republic editorial board wrote.
But voters loved it.
The new state law led to a huge increase in absentee ballots.
A few days before the November 1992 election, state officials said they had received 163,000 requests for absentee ballots, compared with 62,000 for the 1988 presidential election year.
New campaign tactics
That increase “sparked candidates from both parties to launch aggressive absentee-ballot drives, based on the theory that any absentee ballot generated by a partisan campaign is virtually guaranteed to be a vote in their favor,” the Star reported in September 1992.
Campaigns started buying lists (for $20) of voters who requested ballots and then sending mailers to those voters right around the time the ballots arrive in their mailboxes.
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And campaigns sent out requests for absentee ballots to voters, “that way you feel as if the campaign has already done you a favor by making it easier to vote,” Star columnist Beal wrote.
The new law even changed mud-slinging tactics. Political campaigns had to switch strategies and get their attacks on their opponents out earlier.
“What happens if you vote for somebody and then hear he’s a slime-sucking pig? You can’t get your ballot back,” Boyd, the Pima County Recorder, told Beal.
But the controversy over mail-in ballots was just beginning.
In the weeks after the November 1992 election, Pima County’s election chief Larry Bahill3 said the Legislature needed to “rethink the idea of early voting,” particularly the deadlines for when elections officials are allowed to send out ballots, and when they can start counting them.
Does this sound familiar?
“A huge increase in absentee balloting delayed final vote-counting, which could change the outcome of some Pima County school board races,” the Star reported November 5, 1992.
These days, roughly 80% of voters use early ballots.
Already this year, more than 2.2 million Arizonans have voted early, returning mail-in ballots or showing up to vote in person (including 360,000 in Pima County). That’s more than half of all registered voters, and counting.
If you want to learn more about the early days of early voting in Arizona, check out this report from the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. The researcher found a lot of the same stuff we did in the archives of local newspapers, and a whole lot more!
Democrats controlled the state Senate at the time.
Including future Arizona secretary of state and governor Jan Brewer and future Congressman Matt Salmon.
Bahill was on suspension after an elections employee booted out Green Party voters for wearing green clothes to the polls