Maricopa County recorder says he’ll adopt new policy on early ballot signatures

Maricopa County elections officials will give voters a chance to confirm their identities before it rejects their early ballots due to mismatched signatures, granting a request by a coalition of civil and voting rights groups that hopes to see such policies enacted statewide for the 2018 election.

County Recorder Adrian Fontes said his office’s top priority is to ensure that voters’ needs are met. And as long as his office has the ability to contact voters to find out whether they were the ones who signed their early ballot envelopes, he said it should do so. 

Just 24 hours earlier, Fontes told The Mirror that he liked the idea, but that his office lacked statutory authority to implement the policy. However, he emphasized that no statute prohibits him from doing so, either. Attorney Danielle Lang of the Campaign Legal Center, who was one of the signers of the letter to Reagan, said her group hasn’t heard from Fontes and looks forward to discussing the new policy with him. “Obviously, if he’s going to make a change, that would be welcome news and certainly the goal of our letter,” Lang said.

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