Voter roll bill killed by unlikely lawmaker

Well, I didn’t see that one coming. Republican Sen. Kelly Townsend on Thursday may have singlehandedly saved up to 200,000 Arizona voters from being summarily tossed off the state’s early voting rolls.

For now, at least.

Townsend’s “no” vote on Senate Bill 1485 seemed more a fit of pique than any attack of conscience. Sadly, I don’t see her holding the line for long against her party’s quest to make it more difficult for a certain sort of voter to vote.

The bill is a key priority for Republicans who contracted an extreme case of the heebie-jeebies in November when Democrats turned out in record numbers to cast early ballots.

SB 1485 would purge occasional voters — the sort who tend to vote for Democrats — from the list of those who automatically get a ballot in the mail.

The Arizona Democratic Party has estimated more than 126,000 Arizonans who cast early ballots in November likely would have been removed from the Permanent Early Voting List before the election had this bill been in effect last year.

It’s worth noting that Joe Biden won the state by just 10,457 votes and Mark Kelly by 78,806.

The bill was on the fast track to Gov. Doug Ducey, who surely would sign it given his ongoing political quest to burnish his credentials with the base.

Townsend, however, sent the bill on an unscheduled detour off the rails on Thursday afternoon. Her vote was key because Republicans hold only a onevote margin in the Senate and Democrats are unanimously opposed.

“I am not going to be voting for any election integrity bills from this point forward until we have results that come from the (election) audit,” Townsend said, in explaining her vote.

That seems a logical argument — to wait to solve problems that call into question the integrity of the election until you know whether you actually have problems that call into question the integrity of the election.

But for two things:

1. The coming audit isn’t going to tell us whether the state has election problems. Not in any credible way. It was tainted the moment the Senate hired an out-of-state company that has no experience in elections — one whose CEO promoted conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen — to run it.

2. Townsend wasn’t shy about voting for the bill — twice — before Thursday. So what changed?

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, says Town

send’s “no” vote is payback because her own election bills went nowhere this year. Ugenti-Rita chairs the Senate Government Committee and refused to give many of Townsend’s 20 or so election bills a hearing.

“Obviously this bill isn’t going to pass because the senator from District 15, in a show of spite and in a show of rage, has decided to vote against it,” Ugenti-Rita said, on the Senate floor. “It’s disappointing that someone who purports to care about election integrity, who purports to care about voters, is deciding to kill a very important election bill.”

You know what’s also disappointing? That Trump and his supporters screamed so loudly and for so long that it is just an accepted fact in Republican circles that the state’s early voting program, once a national model, is now a national disgrace.

And that elected officials like UgentiRita, who know better, stood silently and let it happen.

Townsend, for her part, rejected the accusation that she’s throwing a temper tantrum ... by extending her temper tantrum to Twitter.

“I was serious when I said I would not vote on any election bills until after the audit. I was not taken seriously,” she tweeted. “Michelle Ugenti-Rita feels that this move is a temper tantrum because she killed all my election reform bills in her committee. She went so far as to say I need to ‘get over my jealousy’.

“I am anything but jealous of Michelle Ugenti-Rita. She has been nothing but scandal ridden from the time I have known her. Having defended her nevertheless throughout her scandal against my better judgment, I am not jealous of her in the slightest.”

Clearly.

Look for Townsend to miraculously change her vote after an all-expenses paid trip to the woodshed.

Until then, credit to Townsend. She’s created some breathing room, giving the state’s business community more time to try to prevail upon Ducey to veto the bill.

Earlier this month, Greater Phoenix Leadership sent a letter to legislative leaders urging them to back off of this and several other election “reforms.”

“These measures seek to disenfranchise voters,” GPL wrote. “They are ‘solutions’ in search of a problem. They are attempts at voter suppression cloaked as reform — plain and simple.”

Ducey should listen to them. Better yet, he should listen to himself.

“Over the course of decades, we’ve established a system that works and can be trusted,” he told President Donald Trump last August.

So what’s changed? Other, that is, than the fact that President Donald

Trump is now ex-President Donald

Trump?