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A left-leaning New York think tank sounded a familiar warning about Arizona’s “voter suppression bills” being “dangerously close to becoming law.”
The Brennan Center for Justice added in a press release that Arizona was “taking center stage in the relentless effort to rein in voter participation in the name of ‘election security.’” Pending bills, the think tank claimed, were “aimed at making voting by mail harder.”
That was in April 2021, before Arizona passed several reform measures that state legislators said they crafted to ensure secure and honest elections.
Little more than a year later, in August 2022, Arizona notched a record for high turnout in a primary election as 1.45 million voters participated, or 35.1% of those registered, surpassing the previous record in a 2000 primary by 7,000 ballots.
Voter turnout in Arizona for 2018, the last primary in a non-presidential election year, was 1.2 million voters, or 33.4%.
In 2021, Democrats and pundits attacked election reform laws enacted in 19 states as attempts at “voter suppression.” The five states that appeared to come under the most attack were Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Iowa—all of which saw boosted voter turnout so far in 2022 compared to the 2018 primaries.
As a rule, non-presidential elections and primary elections attract lower turnout than presidential elections or general elections.
But voter turnout was significantly higher in the 2022 primaries in Georgia, Texas, and Arizona and nominally higher in Florida than in the comparable 2018 primaries.
So new election laws in these states did a lousy job of suppressing the vote, if that’s what Republican lawmakers designed them to do.
