Arizona is the latest subject of one of this season's top targets of voting rights litigation: laws that disenfranchise people who forget to sign their absentee ballots or have sloppy handwriting.
With mail-in voting sure to surge because of the coronavirus, easing restrictions on the process has become central to the Democratic effort to boost turnout with courthouse crusades in almost every bellwether state.
The freshest such lawsuit, filed Wednesday, maintains Arizona's signature rules are unconstitutional because voters aren't given an opportunity to correct the mistake of returning an unsigned envelope.
It's the second federal suit Democrats have filed over remote voting rules in Arizona, which has become a 2020 presidential battleground and offers the party one of its top Senate pickup opportunities this fall. It's also a state where mail voting has been encouraged for years and is the method by which four of every five ballots are cast.
A federal judge is also considering whether to make the state count absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day.
The new suit maintains that thousands of votes will be discarded unless the rules are changed, if not by the time of the August primary then in November. It asks the federal court to order that voters be given five days after every election to complete the signature line they left blank.
This is known as allowing voters to "cure" problems election officials find with their ballots. Only 16 states had processes in place during the 2018 midterm election for informing people they forgot to sign their ballots, or their signature didn't look enough like what was on file, and allowing them to try again.
Not giving that second chance, the lawsuit says, deprives voters of their free speech and due process rights. Similar claims have produced settlements in several states to relax missing signature and mismatched signature rules. Republicans say such tight laws are needed to ward off fraud, but there's essentially no evidence of efforts to steal elections with unsigned or forged ballots
The Arizona Legislature voted last year to allow voters five days to prove their signature was authentic after election officials decided it was not. That measure was promoted by Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, and a year ago she signaled she'd back a similar grace period for missing autographs as part of a separate voting rights case brought by the Navajo Nation.
Democrats say an average of 3,000 ballots have been rejected for lack of a signature in Phoenix, the state's largest city, in each election in the past decade.
The other lawsuit challenges an Arizona law, similar to what's on the books in about 30 states, invalidating ballots that arrive in the mail after Election Day. It says the state has "no legitimate interest" in enforcing the deadline and should be required to count ballots that arrive five days late, so long as they're postmarked before the polls close.
Recent polling shows Democrat Joe Biden with a solid shot to capture the state's 11 electoral votes, which President Trump won last time by 4 points, and former astronaut Mark Kelly, a Democrat, well-positioned to unseat Republican Sen. Martha McSally. A pair of House seats are also being closely contested.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.