You may remember opening your 2024 ballot, then flipping the page over to hit a dense block of text asking you to weigh in on a series of complicated policy questions.
That experience is coming back this November.
Ballot referrals are one of Republican lawmakers’ most valuable workarounds: They’re the only path for the majority to bypass Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto of partisan priorities, and send them directly to voters to decide instead.
While voters have the final say, some measures already have powerful conservative groups lining up behind them, which was a key ingredient for success in the previous election cycle.
Maricopa County’s 2024 ballot should have come with a magnifying glass.
Republicans already passed three measures last year that are headed to the 2026 ballot. This week, they advanced another 15 potential ballot referrals on pressing matters such as policing pronouns in schools, banning DEI in state government and creating tax breaks for cryptocurrency.
About 40 referrals were still alive heading into crossover week, and they can still resurface for votes later, so Republican leadership will have to whittle the list down to the ones they view as truly ballot-worthy — ideally while keeping the ballot from getting long enough to require spiral binding.
In 2024, Arizona’s voters received 11 legislatively referred questions on their ballot, causing longer processing times and slower results in Maricopa County. Only four of them passed.
Still, lawmakers seem poised to do it again, and possibly, at a larger scale.
Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, who sponsored two ballot referrals that passed the Senate this week, told us that lawmakers will have to “triage” their ballot referrals.
They could send a “couple” more questions than the 11 they sent two years ago, he said.
But “not more than 20.”
“We get input from members and feedback from members,” Kavanagh said. “But some of them — I'm not going to name names — but some of them are obviously not in the running, because they're not super big issues.”
Senate Republicans’ Communication Director Kim Quintero told us voters “have shown they are capable of handling substantive ballots when the issues are of great importance,” but that Republicans are still “mindful of ballot length and voter fatigue.”
As for how Senate leadership is prioritizing referrals, Quintero said they weigh “the policy’s alignment with Republican principles,” along with broader support from GOP lawmakers and voters.
Pollster Paul Bentz describes the strategy that legislative Republicans are employing differently.
“Throw some initiatives against the wall — see if anything sticks,” he said. “It’s a game of numbers and they’re hoping one or two may slip past the goalie.”
More specifically, he said, lawmakers are trying to pick a few that will increase enthusiasm from the base, while loading up the ballot with so many questions that it can overwhelm voters and drown out citizen initiatives that they don’t agree with, like the proposal to rein in school vouchers.
2024’s bloated ballot also offered a lesson on what helps legislative ballot referrals succeed: A coordinated conservative group behind them, and a lot of money.
Check out our tracking list of 2026’s potential ballot referrals on Skywolf, our legislation tracking service.
In 2024, legislative referrals posted significantly higher undervote rates than citizen initiatives in Maricopa and Pima counties, which together account for about 75% of ballots cast.
Amid the deluge of ballot information, voters were more likely to participate in measures they’d actually heard of, mostly because they had seen ads for them.
“Left to their own devices, many of these referrals are doomed to fail unless ‘yes’ campaigns are mounted in support,” Bentz explained. “Voters tend to default to ‘no,’ which is why ‘no’ campaigns are typically much easier to run than ‘yes’ campaigns.”
Or as former House Speaker Ben Toma told KJZZ after 2024’s poor performance on legislative measures: “It requires a lot of resources to convince voters to vote yes on many of these (referrals) that are not self-explanatory.”
Out of the four legislative referrals that passed in the last election, two weren’t super hard sells: Prop 311 created a fund for the families of first responders killed in the line of duty, and Prop 313 increased sentencing for child sex trafficking.
The two other successful referrals were more partisan measures on policing homelessness and the border. Both were boosted by well-connected conservative groups.
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club spent more than $20,000 in support of Prop 314, which made it a state crime for noncitizens to enter Arizona illegally.
But spending on Prop 312, a densely worded measure to let property owners pursue tax refunds from cities over homelessness-related nuisance crimes, is a much better case study on successful referrals. The Arizona Chamber’s PAC reported $270,000 in spending to support Prop. 312, and another conservative policy shop, the Goldwater Institute, spent nearly $400,000.
The group brags that it “drafted, championed, and ultimately enacted” the ballot measure.
This year, Goldwater is preparing to campaign for another ballot measure: House Speaker Steve Montenegro’s HCR2044. It would prohibit state government and public schools from funding or operating DEI programs or considering race in hiring, admissions or contracting.
The anti-DEI measure also has the Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s support — it’s on a list of “key legislation” for the group’s conservative followers. AFEC is also backing a referral lawmakers passed last year to ban taxes based on vehicle miles traveled.
And while the Center for Arizona Policy, an evangelical lobbying group, didn’t spend to support any referrals in 2024 (it instead spent to oppose the constitutional right to abortion), the group has signed on in support of Kavanagh’s SCR1006, which polices pronoun and bathroom use at public schools.
Ultimately, it’s too early to know which ballot referrals will make it to November’s ballots.
But if Republican lawmakers plan to stuff the ballot again, they’ll need some deep-pocketed help.
Bamboo ballots are back: Five years after Arizona election conspiracists searched for Chinese bamboo fibers in ballots, activists allied with President Donald Trump have drafted an executive order stating China interfered with the 2020 election, the Washington Post reports. Their hope is that Trump would then declare a national emergency, which would give him the pretext to take control of elections from states. The new dumbassery could be what Trump was referring to on social media two weeks ago when he said he’d “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated.”
Arizona’s MAGA future: The Arizona governor’s race will be a test of the “MAGA future” of the Republican Party, per the Associated Press’ Sejal Govindarao. The main question is whether the GOP can nominate a hard-right candidate and still win in November, a tactic which has so far backfired and put Democrats in three of the most powerful offices in the state, including governor.
“The folks that have bemoaned the takeover of the party, the people who wish to go back to the more traditional Republican ways, aren’t the folks that show up at the precinct committee meetings, aren’t the folks that go knock on doors and aren’t folks that have showed up at rallies,” consultant Paul Bentz said.
Arizona’s MAGA present: Republican state Rep. John Gillette, who has called Muslims “savages” and said they should leave the country, pushed through a resolution that would ask the federal government to designate CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy group in the country, a terrorist organization, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports.
“The community in general is feeling targeted, because if they're willing to go after one organization first, like CAIR, who are they going to go after next?” former lawmaker Martin Quezada, who’s now the attorney for the Arizona chapter of CAIR, told the State Press.
Sounds like a fun class: Newly obtained records from the Arizona Department of Education show parents used $10 million in school voucher money to pay themselves and buy sexually explicit items like condoms and lubricants, as well as dirt bikes, luxury hotel stays and other purchases that supposedly are banned by state officials, 12News’ Craig Harris reports. The new documents add some color to Harris’ previous reporting on 84,000 banned purchases from December 2024 to October 2025.
Why not spend some of that voucher money on the Agenda? It’s a lot more educational than condoms.
Cost of doing (shady) business: One of the rental companies Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued over an alleged “price-fixing” scheme agreed to pay $1 million to settle those accusations, her office announced in a news release. Weidner Property Management will donate the money to Wildfire, a nonprofit that helps people pay their rent. The company also ended its contracts with RealPage, a data analytics company that Mayes said was at the center of the scheme.
In other, other news
Arizona House Republicans tweaked a bill aimed at drag shows to make it a felony to take your kids to an “adult oriented performance” of a sexual nature, which is already illegal (Bob Christie / Capitol Media Services) … Republican Mohave County Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter is pushing back on book bans at county libraries, saying parents can decide which books they want their children to read (Kingman Daily Miner) … With elections coming up fast, Navajo County officials are trying to replace former Recorder Tim Jordan, who claimed elections were rigged and resigned after a road rage incident (Sasha Hupka / Votebeat) … The tradition of walking across the border and being greeted by taxi drivers is at risk in San Luis, where city officials say the line of taxi drivers is impeding construction at the port of entry (Alexandra Rangel / KAWC) … When Democratic and Republican elected officials met for an Arizona Corporation Commission workshop, they found one thing they all agree on: Arizona needs more nuclear power (Reagan Priest / Capitol Times).
Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap has only held office for 14 months, but he’s already made a lifetime of dumb errors and bad headlines — prompting rumors that the Board of Supervisors was looking to fire him two weeks ago.
They didn’t, but Heap is already digging himself deeper into his political grave.
He claimed that by using a Department of Homeland Security database system, he had found that 137 registered Maricopa County voters were not citizens — which ABC15 reporter Garrett Archer pointed out would be just 0.005% of voters statewide. That’s not exactly the mass voter fraud the right has warned about since 2020.
But even that figure might be overblown. The system he used has been known to be unreliable and has given incorrect results to five states, Sasha Hupka of Votebeat reports.
More recently, Hupka found through a records request that Heap hasn’t even sent out notices to the alleged noncitizen voters.
Basically, Heap is feeling the heat from every direction.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes wrote him a letter on Tuesday requesting more information on the claims, which he called a “very serious accusation.”
And just last night, Heap harshly criticized the Board of Supervisors’ plan for early in-person voting, saying it would make voting “inconvenient and inaccessible” for lots of people.
But the spreadsheet that detailed the plan contained three tabs, and based on Heap’s response, it’s clear that he didn’t consider the second tab in his response.
Board Chair Brophy McGee and Vice Chair Debbie Lesko wrote in a statement that they “offered to help him because he’s never done it before, and time is of the essence.”
It’s just L after L for the bumbling MAGA blowhard.