Arizona Republicans Advance Voter Purge Bill
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Arizona House has approved a new bill that would purge over 100,000 voters from the state’s Permanent Early Voting List (PEVL). Senate Bill 1485 would revise Arizona’s wildly popular PEVL, removing voters who don’t vote in two consecutive primary and general elections from the list. The point of a permanent early voting list, of course, is that voters remain on it permanently and can be confident they will receive an early voting ballot in the mail for each election. This new bill would change that and require voters to be active in order to remain on the list.
Republicans claim the move is an attempt to ensure that dead or moved voters are taken off the rolls. However, the PEVL already has practices in place to remove ineligible voters from the list. The bill is clearly a partisan power grab aimed at making it more difficult for Arizonans to make their voice heard after the state elected Joe Biden in 2020. The Republican Legislature has proposed this legislation previously — in 2019, after Arizona elected the first Democrat to its Senate delegation in over three decades.
The bill had previously passed the state Senate and now returns to the body for approval of the state House’s amendments before heading to the governor for his signature.