Somebody Writes the Rulebook for Your Election. How Do They Have to Write It?

When you drop off a ballot, hand over your ID, or watch someone feed a stack of envelopes into a machine, the people doing that work are following a book. It runs a couple hundred pages and covers early voting, how ballots get produced, collected, counted, and stored. Violating it is a crime.

So it matters who writes it — and how.

In Arizona, the Secretary of State prepares that manual every two years in consultation with county election officials, then sends it to the Governor and the Attorney General for approval. Separately, Arizona has a general law — the Administrative Procedure Act — that tells state agencies how to make rules, including a formal public notice-and-comment period.

The question in this case was whether the election manual has to go through both.

A short comment window, then a lawsuit

In July 2023, the Secretary published a draft of that year's manual and opened it for public comment for fifteen days. Republican organizations submitted a comment objecting that fifteen days was too short to review the manual meaningfully and was shorter than the general rulemaking law requires.

The Secretary later noted that soliciting comment had been entirely voluntary — a practice carried over from the prior administration — and that suggestions had been incorporated where appropriate. The Governor and Attorney General approved the revised manual, and the Secretary issued it at the end of December.

The organizations sued. Their main request was to invalidate the whole manual for failure to follow the general rulemaking law. In the alternative, they challenged eight specific provisions as conflicting with state or federal law.

The trial court dismissed the case. The court of appeals reversed, holding the general law applied and had not been substantially complied with. The Supreme Court granted review, announced its result by order in October 2025, and issued this opinion to explain its reasoning.

The Secretary lost the conflict argument

This is the part of the case worth slowing down on, because the Secretary lost this argument and still won the case.

The general rulemaking law says it applies to every agency unless expressly exempted. The Secretary conceded the manual is a set of rules and that his office is an agency. He argued that the two schemes conflict so sharply that the conflict itself amounts to an express exemption.

The Court went through the asserted conflicts one by one and rejected every one.

On deadlines: the election statute sets fixed dates for submission and issuance, but nothing stops the Secretary from completing the general rulemaking process before those dates. On consultation with counties: those consultations do not trigger notice-and-comment, which begins only when a notice of proposed rulemaking issues — so the Secretary could simply finish consulting first. On publication: the statute says when the manual must be issued, not where, so publishing it in the administrative code is not impossible. On dual approval: the general law already contemplates Attorney General review for agencies headed by an elected official, and adding gubernatorial approval is an extra step rather than an incompatible one. On late changes forced by litigation: emergency rulemaking exists — though the Court noted that last-minute changes to election rules are strongly disfavored.

The Court was candid about the limits of that analysis. Its conclusion rests on comparing statutes on paper, and real-world practicalities might well make the two schemes irreconcilable. But no one has ever tried to issue the manual under the general law, so there was no evidence it cannot be done.

The Court also gave a structural reason for rejecting the argument: if courts could infer an "express" exemption whenever a statute prescribed an arguably conflicting procedure, much of the actual exemption language the legislature wrote elsewhere would be pointless.

The provision that decided the case

The Secretary won on a different provision, and one that does different work.

The general law says a rule that does not comply with it is invalid — "unless otherwise provided by law." That phrase was added in 1992, and the Court had to decide what it means.

Reading "otherwise" as it would have been understood then — differently, in another manner — the Court held the clause does what it says: when the legislature prescribes one method for doing something and elsewhere provides a different, specific method for accomplishing the same task, the second one is a manner "otherwise provided by law."

And the election statute is not a gap or a silence. It is a detailed, self-contained process: consultation with the election officer of every county, submission to two statewide officials by a fixed date, approval by both, and issuance by December 31 of each odd-numbered year. That, the Court held, is a rulemaking process otherwise provided by law — so the manual is not invalid for failing to follow the general one.

The Court addressed the obvious objection: doesn't this let agencies escape the general law by pointing to any other procedure? No, because the two provisions operate at different stages. One determines when the general law applies and requires any exemption to be express. The other addresses whether a rule can be valid despite noncompliance. Both keep their work.

It also distinguished two earlier cases the challengers relied on. In both, a statute was silent — it told an agency to do something without saying how, and the agency improvised an unpublished methodology. That is not this. The legislature did not stay silent about how the election manual gets made; it wrote out the process in detail.

The Court pointed to the broader picture too. The general law is built for the ongoing administration of programs. The election statute is built for a recurring, deadline-driven task tied to a fixed election calendar, with consultation directed to a defined group of officials rather than the general public. And since 1992 the legislature has amended the election statute five times and the general rulemaking statute seven times — never once altering the "otherwise provided by law" clause itself — without ever suggesting the two were connected.

What this does and does not mean for public input

Under the election statute as the Court read it, there is no legally required public notice-and-comment period for the manual. The comment window offered in 2023 was voluntary.

The Court noted this does not foreclose public participation: members of the public remain free to communicate with their county election officials, who may pass that input along during the consultation the statute requires. But there is no statutory requirement of a formal comment period.

What the Court did not decide

This ruling is about how the manual was adopted, not about what is in it.

The Court vacated the court of appeals' opinion and reinstated the relevant portion of the trial court's decision. It then sent the eight substantive challenges — the claims that particular provisions conflict with state or federal law — back to the court of appeals to address.

For completeness: the opinion reports in a footnote that on remand, the court of appeals concluded the challengers lacked standing to seek a declaratory judgment about those provisions and affirmed the dismissal of the complaint. That was a ruling about whether these plaintiffs could bring those claims — not a decision that the provisions are lawful.

What does this decision teach us?

• A general rule can yield to a specific one. Where the legislature has written out a complete, distinct process for a particular task, rules made under that process are not invalid merely for skipping the general framework.
• Silence and specificity are different. The Court distinguished cases where a statute said nothing about procedure from this one, where the legislature spelled the procedure out.
• The Secretary lost the exemption argument. The Court rejected every claimed conflict between the two schemes and warned that treating conflicts as implied exemptions would gut the legislature's actual exemption language.
• A voluntary comment period is not a legal requirement. The Court found no statutory notice-and-comment obligation for this manual, while noting the public can still route input through county election officials.
• How a rule is adopted is a separate question from whether it is lawful. A valid process does not establish that every provision complies with other law — and a dismissal for lack of standing does not resolve that either.