On Sunday, the Arizona Supreme Court denied a voter rights groups’ emergency petition to extend the deadline to fix mail-in ballot issues for the 2024 US general election. The last day for voters to correct inconsistent signatures was on Sunday.

The voters rights groups claimed that administrative issues prevented 350,000 voters from having time to correct signature inconsistencies by the deadline.

Arizona law requires the county recorders’ offices to compare the mail-in ballot signatures with the voter’s signatures from official election documents, such as the voter’s registration record. If signatures are found to be inconsistent, recorders must make reasonable efforts to inform the voter of the inconsistency as soon as practicable through mail, phone, text message, and/or email if a voter’s contact information is reasonably available to recorders.

The court denied the petition because they did not find that the petitioners presented evidence to support their assertion that the voters would be prevented from correcting signature inconsistencies by the deadline. The court noted that “the responding counties assert[ed] they have notified all voters with inconsistent signatures ‘by at least one telephone call along with other messages by emails, text messages or mail,’ and have given [them] reasonable time to ‘cure’ any deficiencies in their ballots.”

Votebeat Arizona reported that some counties had problems with long two-page ballots because it is “taking longer to remove mail ballots from their envelopes and unfold and inspect them”. It also reported that some other counties had problems with its tabulators either because of mechanical issues causing slow counting or because of “unclear voter marks that had to be sorted out before results from the polling place could be reported”.

The petition raises issues concerning voters’ rights during a highly contentious election for the presidency that Republican candidate Donald Trump is projected to win. Trump made a victory speech on Wednesday after AP News called his win.