WINDOW ROCK, Navajo Nation (ABC4) – The Navajo Nation is suing Apache County, Ariz. to, accusing election officials of participating in an orchestrated effort to prevent Navajo residents from voting in the 2024 presidential election.
The lawsuit, filed on Nov. 12, seeks an extended recovery period within Apache County, accusing election officials of taking a two-day pause in ballot processing. Because the state’s regular recovery period is only five days, that break gave Navajo residents a shorter time to have their ballots cured.
After an election, states have a certain period to process ballots that have problems with them. These can range from registration, verification of invalid signatures or late arrival by post. This process is called curing, and election officials are required by law to make efforts to contact voters whose ballots showed problems.
The Arizona Supreme Court recently dismissed a lawsuit seeking an extension of the statewide period to process more than 250,000 uncurated ballots.
According to the lawsuit, 182 Navajo voters in Apache County had ballots that needed to be cured. Due to the alleged pause in counting, this gave officials only 48 hours to contact these voters. The lawsuit points out that many voters in the Navajo Nation do not have a mailing address.
“We mobilized phone bankers and people to go door to door… to reach those 182 people that we knew lived on the reservation, and that was quite a task,” Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch told ABC4. com . “And there was about a 2% success rate in making the calls.”
Branch said the situation was made more alarming because it was initially thought only three voters needed healed ballots.
“That was alarming to us because we thought, OK, now there are 179 additional voters that you just heard about in the last 24 hours,” Branch said. “Have these people all been contacted and have they been given sufficient opportunities? Are they given? [a] reasonable and fair opportunity to cure their ballots?”
The lawsuit alleges that Apache County failed to make “reasonable efforts” to contact Navajo residents about the problems with their ballots and that Apache County failed to report that they had received their ballots through the state’s ballot tracking system .
Branch said these types of issues are not new to elections for the Navajo Nation. Because the country includes four states, it is subject to each state’s unique voting laws. Additionally, each province may have different voting systems. Branch said voters in many rural communities within the nation — often with unpaved roads — may have difficulty returning their boxes. “It makes it very difficult to ensure that there is a standard that is acceptable to us.”
“Apache County has been a problem over the last few elections,” Branch claimed. “They’re honestly the worst.”
If the lawsuit is successful in court, it would allow an additional three days to restore the ballots and would require the county to contact “all local media and post sufficient notices” regarding that healing process.
“There are a lot of barriers for Navajo people to vote,” Branch said. “So if people are putting in all their effort and they’re the few who actually received their early ballots, we want to make sure those ballots count. And that is so much more costly in terms of the effort it took to get that ballot and put it in a mailbox.”
ABC4.com has reached out to Apache County for comment and has not yet received a response.
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