A coalition of Arizona Democrats have an uphill battle as they work to enshrine voting rights, including the right to no-excuse vote-by-mail, into the state constitution.

During a Wednesday evening livestream, U.S. Representative Yassamin Ansari announced the launch of the Committee to Protect the Vote Arizona, a campaign to collect 500,000 voter signatures to put the “Free, Fair and Secure Elections Act” on the November ballot.

“We are going to, first of all, defeat far-right extremist attempts to go after our voting rights in the state of Arizona,” she said. “Second, we are going to enshrine vote by mail in our state constitution, and third, this is part of a broader national effort. We are building a national coalition to protect our free and fair elections across the United States.”

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Volunteers for the citizen initiative have already collected 50,000 of the 383,923 voter signatures needed to make it on the ballot, but there’s a tight timeline to collect the rest before the July 2 deadline. Initiative campaigns typically aim to collect at least 25% more signatures than needed to account for signatures that are invalidated.

Ansari was joined on the two-hour livestream by numerous prominent Arizona Democrats like Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Attorney General Kris Mayes and U.S. Representatives Adelita Grijalva and Greg Stanton. There were also nationally prominent Democrats, including U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez.

They described Protect the Vote Arizona as part of the Democratic response to attempts by President Donald Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress to federalize elections and disenfranchise voters.

Trump is pushing the U.S. Senate to pass the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act,” or the SAVE America Act, which would require citizens to provide a passport or birth certificate in most cases to register to vote. It already passed the U.S. House of Representatives in February, but has stalled in the Senate.

Republicans claimed the SAVE Act would prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections, even though noncitizen voting is already illegal and rare. Democrats and voting rights activists argued that it would prevent people who are legally qualified from registering to vote because they don’t possess the correct documents.

Multiple studies have found that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare and poses no meaningful threat to election integrity. When the Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed data compiled by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that drafted Project 2025, it “found only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023” and concluded that “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

The recent decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a portion of the Voting Rights Act, Trump’s promise to do away with vote-by-mail and attempts by Arizona’s legislative Republicans to restrict voting access were also motivating factors for the campaign.

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“We are seeing a massive attack on our voting rights in the state,” Ansari said. “Republicans are trying to refer measures to the ballot that would restrict vote-by-mail, which has been trusted and verified, and so popular in Arizona and used by Arizonans for decades.”

Roughly three-quarters of Arizona voters in any given election cast their ballots by mail, and no-excuse early voting has been in place for more than three decades.

For more than a year, Arizona Representative Alexander Kolodin, R-Scottsdale, has been pushing to make the state’s elections

 more like Florida’s, claiming that an “overwhelming” majority of voters are willing to trade convenience — specifically by making it more difficult for them to cast their own ballots by mail — for faster results.

But where the evidence supporting that claim came from remains a mystery, since Kolodin has repeatedly refused to share not just the poll he’s citing, but even what entity commissioned the poll and who conducted it.

Kolodin’s House Concurrent Resolution 2001 would amend the Arizona Constitution to end what election officials call “late earlies” — mail-in ballots dropped off at polling locations on Election Day and the weekend prior.

Kolodin’s “Arizona Secure Elections Act” would also eliminate the program that automatically sends ballots to millions of voters. Instead, they would have to request a mail-in ballot for each election and his proposal would require all voters to provide a government-issued ID concurrently with casting their ballot, including when voting by mail. The resolution gives no guidance on how voters should provide ID along with their mail-in ballot.

Several years ago, Texas implemented a law requiring voters to provide ID when casting mail-in ballots, and it led to a 1,300% increase in rejected ballots.

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The resolution passed the Arizona House of Representative on a party-line vote in February, and if the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate approves it, it will bypass a veto from Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs to be sent directly to the ballot in November.

Kolodin did not respond to a request for comment.

Many of the provisions in the “Free, Fair and Secure Elections Act” citizens initiative directly counter portions of Kolodin’s resolution.

If voters support it, the initiative would enshrine in the Arizona Constitution the right to vote early, in person or by mail. It would also protect the right for Arizona voters to cast their ballots at voting centers, where anyone in the county can vote, instead of being restricted to their precinct location. The citizens initiative would also protect voters’ ability to cast a ballot early, through 7 p.m. the day before the election, and would make no-excuse early voting a constitutional right.

Democrats urged their supporters watching the livestream Wednesday evening to sign the petition, volunteer for the campaign and to donate to the Committee to Protect the Vote Arizona.

As of March 31, Protect the Vote Arizona, a political action committee, had not received any donations, according to campaign finance reports.

Stacy Pearson, spokeswoman for the campaign, told the Arizona Mirror that she wouldn’t share any information about the initiative’s donors before the next required campaign finance report that is due in July out of fear they would become targets for harassment from Trump supporters.

The initiative will likely need millions of dollars to fund the kind of signature-gathering efforts required to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures in 56 days and to deal with inevitable legal challenges to the signatures it collects.

But supporters are confident that, if the initiative makes it to the ballot, voters will favor it.

Republicans introduced Arizona to voting by mail in 1991, and it’s now the most popular way to vote, with about 75% of voters casting ballots that way in each election.

Several of the Arizona officials on the livestream emphasized the swing state’s importance in the national political landscape, with major statewide offices held by Democrats, a Republican-controlled legislature and a record of backing Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 and 2024.

“I think that if, in Arizona, we can show broadly on the national stage that we support voting rights, voting access, protection of our right to vote by mail, I think that will tell a very important story and have reverberating effects across the entire country,” Ansari said.

Grijalva told livestream viewers that Republican efforts to change voting laws are a sign they are worried about the outcome of the midterm election in November.

“If we keep to the same rules that have been established, Republicans know that they’re going to lose,” she said. “That’s why they keep changing the rules. That’s the only reason why we’re in this situation right here.”

Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the influence that Latinos — who make up about one-third of the state’s population — have in Arizona politics.

“The role that Latinos play in elections is getting bigger and more decisive, and it is only going to become more decisive as time goes on,” she said. “And so we have a responsibility to protect our role in this democracy, to protect the roles and rights of others in our democracy.”

Ansari reminded everyone watching the livestream that the campaign has a difficult task ahead.

“We have to lead in this fight, and we have to show that when people come together and organize from the ground up, we can win,” she said.