Nonwhite Voters at Higher Risk of Being Dropped from Arizona's Mail Ballot List

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The past year has been char­ac­ter­ized by wide­spread assaults on voting rights across the coun­try. This has been espe­cially true in swing states where the 2020 pres­id­en­tial elec­tion saw narrow margins. As our colleague Will Wilder explains, even among these states, Arizona stands out as a focal point for the fight over voting rights.

Here, we look at one provi­sion of Arizon­a’s Senate Bill 1485, which was passed into law in May 2021 but won’t be in effect for the midterms. The bill turns Arizon­a’s extremely popu­lar “Perman­ent Early Voting List” into an “Active Early Voting List.” Voters on the list are auto­mat­ic­ally mailed a ballot before every elec­tion. Under the new rules, Arizon­ans will be removed from the list if they go four years without cast­ing a ballot by mail. Even if a voter parti­cip­ates but only does so in person, they will fall off the list.

Like in much of the West­ern United States, Arizon­ans have a robust history of cast­ing their votes by mail. Since 2010, an aver­age of two-thirds of the elect­or­ate has voted by mail. Like four other states, Arizona has allowed voters to sign up to receive a ballot in the mail for all elec­tions, obvi­at­ing the need to fill out a new absentee ballot request form for each and every contest. Accord­ing to voter file data from L2 Polit­ical, some 3 million Arizon­ans (roughly 75 percent of the elect­or­ate) were on the list in April of 2021, shortly before S.B. 1485 was passed.

To analyze the expec­ted effects of the law, we looked at voter file data from L2 Polit­ical, which records whether and how each voter parti­cip­ated in an elec­tion. Although voters won’t be removed from the list for a few years, we wanted to know who would be impacted based on the list as it was when the legis­lature was consid­er­ing this change. To do so, we looked at which voters on the list cast a mail ballot in any elec­tion in 2017, 2018, 2019, or 2020. If they voted by mail in any of these elec­tions, they are considered “not at risk” of being dropped; they are considered “at risk” if they did not cast a mail ballot.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/nonwhite-voters-higher-risk-being-dropped-arizonas-mail-ballot-list