Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita had spent the past month heading off more than a dozen bills sponsored by her vice chair, and she was so close to succeeding.

Days before the deadline to hear bills in committee or let them die of neglect, the Scottsdale Republican and chair of the Senate Government Committee scheduled a single bill from Sen. Kelly Townsend, a simple two-sentence measure that would require that election equipment be made in America and all election data stay here.

Instead, she got all Townsend’s bills, in the form of a sweeping 13-page amendment that would ban felt markers at polling places, create new rules for Maricopa and Pima counties and give lawmakers carte blanche to demand that hundreds of thousands of ballots be recounted by hand.

Ugenti-Rita and the committee’s three Democrats killed the amendment. Townsend used her microphone in the committee room – and later her figurative microphone on social media sites — to complain about a fellow Republican blocking her bills and vow that the bills will be resurrected at some point. 

The showdown illustrated a point of contention among Republicans this year. Ugenti-Rita has for years led her caucus on election policy, pushing bills that earned the ire of voting rights advocates but that still pale in comparison to legislation introduced this year by others.

Ugenti-Rita and her House counterpart, Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, have reintroduced legislation from past years to remove some voters from the Permanent Early Voting List, add warning clauses to voter initiatives and limit future initiatives to a single subject.

Other Republicans have gone much further, with bills that would effectively end mail voting and permit lawmakers to toss out election results a legislative majority doesn’t like. The record 125 election-related bills introduced this year posed an unprecedented challenge for voting rights advocates who are used to battling against a familiar set of foes on a familiar set of election issues. 

“It feels like this session they are consciously trying a strategy of just throwing bills at the wall to see what sticks,” said Emily Kirkland, executive director of Progress Arizona. 

‘Wrong way’

There are always more bills addressing elections in odd years, as lawmakers and election officials seek to fine-tune legislation and prevent whatever issues – real or perceived – in the latest election from arising in future years. But this year, as a sizable chunk of the Republican majority in both legislative chambers refuses to publicly admit, if not believe, that President Joe Biden won Arizona, there are more bills than ever and some of them go further than anyone could have imagined.

“It’s a full-scale assault on democratic norms and institutions,” Kirkland said. “It’s a really urgent situation that feels like a five-alarm fire.”

Rep. Shawanna Bolick, R-Phoenix, made national news in late January when she introduced a bill that would allow the Legislature to revoke the secretary of state’s certification of election results at any time before the presidential inauguration, by a simple majority vote of the Legislature.

Republican lawmakers looked in vain for ways to replace Biden electors with President Donald Trump electors, only to be shot down by their own attorneys. Townsend even filed a resolution that would have the Legislature — which first met nearly a week after Congress certified Electoral College results and just over a week before Biden’s inauguration — belatedly appoint Trump’s electors. That resolution was never assigned to a committee.

While Townsend’s measure would have retroactively addressed one election, Bolick’s was a far-reaching plan to allow the Legislature to override voters at any point, for any reason. It also would have required jury trials in all election challenges, and would have barred county supervisors and county recorders from being eligible for office for 10 years if there is any disruption in a live video feed of ballot tabulation. 

In a statement after her proposal was widely panned, Bolick blamed media coverage for her bill’s poor reception. 

“The mainstream media is using this elections bill as click bait to generate misleading headlines,” Bolick said. “This bill would give the Arizona Legislature back the power it delegated to certify the electors.  It is a good, democratic check and balance.”

House Speaker Rusty Bowers declined to assign Bolick’s bill to a committee. Without a hearing by the end of the week, it’s theoretically dead – but parts of it could still come back as amendments to other bills.

Also dead without a hearing is a bill from Reps. Kevin Payne, R-Peoria, and Walt Blackman, R-Snowflake, that would have repealed the 2007 law that created the Permanent Early Voting List. About 80% of Arizona voters are on the list and regularly vote by mail.

Payne acknowledged hours after he filed the bill that it wouldn’t pass and he didn’t want to waste his time with it. Ugenti-Rita, who again introduced legislation to remove some — but not all — voters from the PEVL, called the bill out as bad policy on her Twitter page. (She did not return multiple calls for comment on this story.) 

“Sharpiegate + legislative power grab + eliminating voting options = bad news for Arizona voters,” Ugenti-Rita tweeted over a picture of Blackman, Bolick and Alex Kolodin, her primary opponent turned GOP election attorney. “Each of these issues represent the wrong way to address election integrity, particularly voter confidence in our election system.”

Most bills dead

The high-profile nature of some election legislation this year drew more eyes to all bills. In 2019, the last time Ugenti-Rita ran her bill to kick roughly 200,000 voters who have skipped two consecutive election cycles off the PEVL, several hundred Arizonans registered their distaste of the bill in the Legislature’s Request to Speak system and the measure passed the Senate 16-14.

This year, well over 1,000 voters signed in against it, and it failed 15-15 in the Senate.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said she expects to see her office, Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Gov. Doug Ducey work together to try to prevent many election bills from even reaching the governor’s desk. So far, many of the bills appear dead — though so-called zombie bills that re-emerge are common late in the session. 

“Some of the things are really far-fetched and I imagine that legislators have introduced them to make a statement about something, but they won’t necessarily get a hearing,” Hobbs said.

Nationally, current and former secretaries of state described seeing an increase in election laws, some introduced by lawmakers who have never been involved in elections before. Trey Grayson, the former Republican Secretary of State of Kentucky, said this year’s bills, in Arizona and across the country, reflect an escalation of an existing theme of lawmakers trying to interject in election law. 

“In general, one of the things we do see in election administration is legislators, who aren’t necessarily on the relevant committees, often introduce election bills,” he said. “They all run for office, and so they have opinions that they think are fairly well informed — and sometimes they are from their own experience. It is an area where we often see outsider bills introduced.”