Arizona Democratic Party v. Hobbs

This lawsuit challenged the “cure period” in Arizona’s Elections Procedures Manual that gave absentee voters with signature discrepancies on their mail-in ballots a 3-5 day window to cure or verify their signature. Plaintiffs assert in their complaint that the insufficiency of this cure period would result in the disenfranchisement of a large number of Arizona voters in the 2020 Election by mass rejection of legally cast but formally deficient ballots. The Arizona District Court held that the cure period “impose[d] minimal but unjustifiable burdens on the right to vote,” and granted Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary and permanent injunction extending the deadline for voters to cure their ballots. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit granted the defendant-appellants’ Emergency Motions for a Stay Pending Appeal, favoring the existing “minimal” Arizona election procedures over “sending the State scrambling to implement and to administer a new procedure for curing unsigned ballots at the eleventh hour.”