Soros-backed attempt fails to undo AZ voter integrity laws

FPI / August 31, 2022

A ballot initiative fueled by funding from George Soros that would undo Arizona's new election integrity laws failed when the state Supreme Court on Friday ruled there were not enough valid signatures to get the initiative on the November ballot.

The ballot initiative, Proposition 210, sought the repeal of election laws recently passed by the Republican-led state legislature. The initiative proposed changes to same-day voter registration, repeal of the state’s ballot harvesting ban, and to restore voter registration with minimal identification.

The initiative also sought to repeal the law which disqualifies electors who don’t choose the presidential candidate selected by Arizona voters; sought to eliminate the 30-day residency requirement in order to vote; and to repeal the law which makes it easier to cancel voter registrations of inactive voters.

Had it succeeded, the Soros-backed initiative would have repealed Arizona’s election integrity laws in time for the 2024 presidential election.

“This victory proves that the American people are more powerful than militant liberal activists like Soros, who is trying to fundamentally transform America,” Ken Blackwell, chairman of the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), told Breitbart News. “The United States is a center-right nation, and while hundreds of millions of dark money dollars may distort democracy by astroturfing issues and gaslighting voters, the American people have enough sense and principle that such efforts can be defeated.”

Proposition 210 was largely funded by Soros's Open Society Foundations, as well an activist group called Way to Win — which claims credit for Democrat victories in 2020. The well-financed activists submitted over 475,000 signatures.

Conservatives challenged the validity of the signatures. The Arizona Supreme Court sent the matter back to a Maricopa County judge for a final assessment. The trial judge held last week that the organizers had met the necessary 239,926 signatures.

But on appeal again to the Arizona Supreme Court, the justices held on Thursday that they were “unable to verify the validity rate used by the trial court” and ordered the trial judge to explain his calculation by midday Friday. When the trial judge failed to justify his calculations, the Arizona Supreme Court concluded that the ballot initiative did not have enough legal signatures to be included on November’s ballot.

“The irony is rich, because signature verification is a standard election integrity requirement,” Blackwell told Breitbart News. “To have a ballot measure regarding elections not approved for the ballot because not enough legal voters supported it is precisely the sort of the thing that the Left aims to disallow. The fact that the ballot measure in question was designed to eradicate such election safeguards highlights the importance of those safeguards.”

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