RPAZ Daily Update 12-8-21

It's time for a special update from the Republican Party of Arizona. I'm your chairwoman Dr. Kelly Ward. A three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, just handed the Democrats a defeat in court and gave all of us who care about election integrity a resounding victory right here in our great state. The issue at hand was mail-in ballots that lacked a signature on the envelope that they are mailed back to the county recorder in. Under Arizona law, voters are required to sign the envelope their mail-in ballots are returned in. The signature is essentially what turns that envelope into a signed affidavit. It is the only form of voter ID required on mail-in ballots at this time. A ballot with an envelope lacking such a signature is incomplete and cannot be counted. Now voters who forget to sign their envelope are able to correct or cure such a ballot by submitting a signed replacement ballot, but they must do so before election day, before election day. Now on the other hand, if a ballot signature is on the envelope but it's not able to be verified or it can't be matched, voters in Arizona under our state law have five days after election day to correct that issue. Of course, the Arizona Democrat Party and the Democrat National Committee sued to get rid of this important part of our voting process, the part requiring voters to sign their ballot envelope before election day. They claimed that the election day deadline for missing signatures violated the first and the 14th amendments and it denied procedural due process. At first, they found a lower court district court judge to rule in their favor and to require the state to give the same five-day after election day deadline to ballots with missing signatures that ballots with mismatched signatures have right now. The three-judge appellate court panel overruled the district court and upheld the election day deadline for missing signatures. They found that the requirement to sign the affidavit and correct a missing signature by election day to be a minimal burden and protected this important safeguard as a result. Now this is great news for election integrity here in Arizona. The Arizona Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, and Arizona election officials won. We won this important battle to protect every legal vote. We will continue to take on any attempt by the Democrats to weaken our election laws. They failed this time and that is reason to celebrate. Here at the Republican Party, it is always election integrity and America first. I'll see you soon.