Hi there, it’s Jen Fifield.

In southern Arizona’s Cochise County, Recorder David Stevens is trying to get organized to hand off his job to someone new — and he has some ideas before he leaves.

In case you missed it, Stevens announced just 10 days after the start of his third term as recorder that he will retire at the end of this month. (He talked to me about why here.) The county supervisors have sought out candidates to fill his role and will appoint someone soon. 

Stevens, a Republican, has run voter registration and early voting in the county since 2017. He isn’t convinced voting by mail is secure, and his last term was fairly controversial as he took on projects he believed would instill more confidence in elections. 

That included pushing supervisors to hand count the results of the county’s 2022 midterm election and trying to take on a state pilot program for security features on ballot paper, launched by his friend Mark Finchem, who was then a state representative, now a state senator. 

I spoke with Stevens on the phone last week. He had mentioned he gave state lawmakers some ideas for bills to try to pass this year that he believes would improve elections for voters and the officials who run them. 

Most of the ideas aren’t too controversial, although at least a few of them would see pushback from Democrats and voting rights groups. Before Stevens was recorder, he was a state representative, and his background doing both the state and county jobs gives him a unique perspective.

Here are some ideas from Stevens I found interesting: 

1. Make it more clear in state law that counties shouldn’t be mailing ballots to inactive voters in all-mail elections. Cochise County is currently tangled up in a lawsuit about this, alleging that Stevens should have sent mail ballots to inactive voters for a local election. 

Inactive voters are those that were taken off of the active voter rolls because officials flagged something was wrong with their address. Stevens said he believes they shouldn’t be sent ballots under state law and that it doesn’t make sense to mail a ballot to them anyway, since the ballot would probably go to the wrong place. 

2. Change when early ballots are mailed from 27 days before an election to 21 days. This idea would surely get pushback, as it removes some early voting access. Stevens said he isn’t looking to limit access, he just wants to make the election timeline more feasible. 

Currently, the voter registration deadline is 29 days before the election. Recorders get thousands to hundreds of thousands of paper voter registration forms on the deadline, which they are still processing two days later — and sometimes weeks later — when they have to send out mail ballots. Pushing that date back a week would give them more time to finish voter registration duties before mail ballots go out, Stevens said.

3. Require county recorders to check a random sample of about 5% of all candidates’ nomination signatures. Right now, signatures aren’t checked unless someone sues. Stevens said that’s not fair. The random sample of all candidates’ signatures would help ensure that no candidate gets on the ballot with bad signatures, he said.

4. Require counties to run school board elections, instead of giving school superintendents the choice of whether they or the county runs them. Doing so would subject candidates to the same rules as state and county candidates, such as requiring they file financial disclosures, Stevens said.

Some of these ideas are currently circulating in the Legislature under bills, but some aren’t. What do you think of them? And if you have any more yourself, send them my way at [email protected].