Fire up the fraud machine

It must be an election year ... Release the files ... And just one wife.

We try not to read too deeply into the order in which bills are introduced at the state Capitol.

But it’s hard not to notice that the first two bills pre-filed for the 2026 legislative session seek to change the state Constitution to make it harder for people to vote.

We’re heading into a midterm election year where Republicans are expected to lose some of their power.

And you can almost feel the election fraud bullshit machine kicking back into gear.

Enter Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin’s HCR2001. It’s a proposal to amend the state constitution, so if the Republican-controlled Legislature passes it, it’ll go straight to the voters in 2026. Gov. Katie Hobbs can’t veto it.

Kolodin is an election conspiracist who once told us that he believes most elections are rigged, including George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential election. He’s also running to become Arizona’s elections chief in 2026.

“Arizonans are tired of excuses and chaos on Election Day,” Kolodin wrote in a press release announcing his bill.

Republican Sen. Shawnna Bolick introduced the same bill in the state Senate, SCR1001, which the duo has dubbed “The Secure Arizona Elections Act.”

And to be fair, the mirror constitutional amendments reflected in HCR2001 and SCR1001 are not the worst idea we’ve ever seen one of these lawmakers float. That award would go to Bolick’s 2021 bill to let lawmakers reject Arizona voters’ choice for president if they don’t like it. (Like Kolodin, she also wanted to oversee Arizona’s elections — she ran an unsuccessful campaign for secretary of state in 2022.)

In fact, some of what’s in the bill is actually harmless.

The bill contains several provisions that reiterate what’s already in federal law and the state Constitution — like that noncitizens can’t vote — that seem designed to gin up support among those who don’t think too deeply about it.

“I have the actual text, and it’s one page, and if I can read and understand it, then I think a lot of people can,” as deep-thinking radio talk show host Garrett Lewis put it. “I’m looking at it, section 19(a): ‘Only citizens of the United States shall be eligible to register and vote.’ … Why would people be against something saying only citizens can vote here in Arizona?”

Well, Garrett, there’s 20 years of complex litigation on this very nuanced topic that we could explain to you. But it’s kind of beside the point. Noncitizens can’t and don’t vote. So other than potentially making our state constitution unconstitutional, it doesn’t really matter.

And if you read past the first line, the bill claims to solve a seemingly worthy problem: Arizona’s notoriously “slow” election results.

But let’s take a moment to note that Arizona’s election results are not actually that slow compared to many other states. And it takes the same amount of time that it has always taken.

The only thing that has changed is that Arizona has become more purple, so our races are getting closer. And it sometimes takes election forecasters like the Associated Press longer to “call” our races. Counting every single ballot is the same 10-12-day process it always has been.

Here’s an example of the New York Post conflating counting all the ballots with calling the race.

But, sure, it could be faster.

The vote count

So how would the constitutional amendment speed things up?

By eliminating your ability to vote at (almost) the last minute.

The vast majority of Arizonans vote by mail. And right now, you can drop off your ballot on the weekend and days leading up to the election, or show up to vote early in person that weekend. Somewhere around a half-million people do that.

But that would be illegal under the Secure Arizona Elections Act, which would ban early voting after the Friday before the election.

The idea is to eliminate those “late early” ballots that people drop off during the weekend before the election or on Election Day. They’re a source of constant consternation among election officials, who still have to go through the time-consuming process of verifying the voters’ signatures before tabulating those ballots.

That’s mostly what causes our “slow” election results.

But simply cutting off that method of voting is a terrible solution to the problem that will have cascading effects, per Alex Gulotta, an election lawyer and director of All Voting is Local’s Arizona chapter.

“What they want to do is want to make it harder for people to vote — they want to end drop-offs on Friday, or make people stand in line (on Election Day),” he said. “We have 500,000 people who drop off their ballots. You’re not going to change their behavior. They’re going to still think they can do what they’ve always done and they’re going to show up and they’re going to stand in line. And now all the people who are trying to vote (in person) are going to have all those people who are trying to drop off ballots all waiting in line to get access to the system that isn’t designed and isn’t funded to be able to deal with that volume of people.”

If the backers of the bill actually wanted to solve the problem, there’s a simple solution that doesn’t disenfranchise anyone, Gulotta said. It’s to fund elections better so counties can hire more people to process ballots faster.

It’s also worth noting that those late-early ballots and Election Day drop-offs have historically favored Democrats at a slightly higher rate.

The left procrastinates.

The early ballots

But the most important part of the bill, per Kolodin, isn’t about speeding up the count.

It’s the provision that would destroy the “active early voter list.”

A bit of history: The active early voting list used to be called the permanent early voting list. Then lawmakers said if you don’t cast your ballot often enough, you get kicked off the list. So it’s no longer permanent.

Kolodin’s legislation would do away with the list altogether, forcing people to reaffirm every election that they still want to receive a mail-in ballot, and to reaffirm their address.

Kolodin didn’t return our call or text yesterday, but he did chat with Lewis, the radio show host, about it.

“Behind the scenes, this is the part that (the RINO Republicans) are trying to kill the hardest,” he told Lewis, accusing fellow Republicans of taking “sneaky shots” to undermine him because “they’re terrified that if we only have ballots going to legitimate owners, things would look different in this state.”

Yes, ballots sometimes land in the wrong mailboxes. But as far as we know, there’s never been a single documented incident of someone forging a random person’s signature to cast a mail-in ballot that wrongly arrived at their house.

That’s why we do signature verification on ballots.

Ending the active early voting list would mean millions of people would have to reaffirm every two years that they want a mail-in ballot. And when they forget to do that, some portion of them will simply not vote.

But inconveniencing and disenfranchising Arizona voters is a small price to pay to ensure that conspiracy theorists can finally have faith in our elections, right?

The bigger issue

Still, the most galling aspect of this legislation isn’t its attack on early voting.

It’s how sloppily drafted the bill is, especially coming from a lawyer who wants to be the state’s top election official.

Take that first line that Lewis read over the radio: “Only citizens of the United States shall be eligible to register and vote once for each available office or ballot measure in any public election in Arizona.”

“So if you vote twice, that’s ok?” as one longtime election attorney told us yesterday.

Of course, the attorney was joking. We know what Kolodin means there, even if the wording is clunky.

But look at this provision: “Concurrent with casting a ballot, all electors shall be required to provide a government-issued identification.”

So does that mean we have to slip our state ID in our mail-in ballot envelope? Will we get that back? Will a photocopy do? Does it need to be a photo ID? Will a government-issued library card work? Will a tribal ID work?

Who knows?!

That’s the case throughout this bill. Another provision reads: “All qualified electors shall have the right to vote in-person on Election Day at conveniently located polling places.”

What’s convenient? Five miles? Fifty miles? Maybe it depends on whether you own a bicycle — but that’ll be up to the courts to decide. And leaving it up to the courts is a terrible way to legislate.

In our experience, there are two ways to read a bill like this.

Either Kolodin doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he wrote a bad bill.

Or he knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s hoping to muddy the waters of election law and continue to sow baseless conspiracies and capitalize on them to further his own political career.

Billboards and backpedaling: The U.S. House and Senate voted to force the release of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files yesterday, and President Donald Trump claims he’ll sign the bill to get it done. While Arizona’s top GOP candidates for governor now say they support releasing the Epstein files, Karrin Taylor Robson has largely parroted Trump’s positions, and neither U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs nor David Schweikert signed the discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the files, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. Meanwhile, an anti-human trafficking nonprofit put up a billboard in Biggs’ district Monday that says: “Release ALL The Epstein Files,” per the Phoenix New Times’ Morgan Fischer.

Don’t California my Arizona: The Water Infrastructure Finance Authority is weighing five proposals to import water into Arizona, and four of them are backed by Canadian utility EPCOR, Capitol Media Services’ Bob Christie reports. A regulatory filing shows one proposal would pump water from the California desert, but California politicians have fought pumping in the area for decades. The WIFA board meets at 9 a.m. today to review the plans, and you can find the meeting details here.

New border toys: Cochise County wants fancier drones to patrol the border, even though border encounters are the lowest they’ve been in decades, the Republic’s David Ulloa Jr reports. The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office and drone developer Draganfly recently demonstrated different types of drones at a ranch near the border, which ranged from 2 to 9 feet in diameter. Draganfly CEO Cameron Chell said he hopes interested buyers realize “we can’t live without this.”

Dutch water is expensive: Members of an Eloy retirement community are fighting a 125% increase to their water bills after the owner of their housing development — Ed Robson, the husband of Republican gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson — sold the community’s water utility, the Capitol Times’ Reagan Priest reports. While the Picacho Water Company didn’t raise rates for 20 years, the new Phoenix-based utility, which is backed by private equity in the Netherlands, plans to nearly double water and sewer rates.

Your subscription helps ensure we don’t get bought out by Dutch investment firms.

Referendum, schmeferendum: Scottsdale established new terms for Axon to build its headquarters in the city, this time with far fewer housing units, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. The city council also undid last year’s zoning decision to allow the development, which prompted a voter referendum in opposition. That part doesn’t matter as much, since the Taser-making company successfully lobbied for a law this year that saved Axon’s development from going to a public vote.

Today’s edition of the Agenda is sponsored by Education Forward Arizona. To sponsor an edition, get in touch.

---

Arizona Literacy Plan 2030: Leadership in Action

Join Education Forward Arizona on Tuesday, December 9, for their next virtual Education Power Hour — an in-depth look at the Arizona Literacy Plan 2030 and how communities around the state are helping kids build stronger reading skills.

The plan outlines key drivers, proven strategies, and actions designed to improve school readiness and third-grade reading outcomes statewide.

Attendees will hear from an expert guest panel of classroom educators, school and county leaders, and statewide literacy experts from the Arizona Department of Education, Read On Arizona, the Arizona State Board of Education, Imagine Schools, and the Yavapai County Education Service Agency. Guest presenters include Terri Clark, Sean Ross, Linda Burrows, Lori Masseur, Steve King, Joy Bruner, and Stephanie Hall-Zurek.

Attendees will walk away with insights on what’s working, what’s ahead, and actionable steps to champion literacy in their schools and communities.

Save your spot here.

After one of Republican U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh’s interns interviewed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. this week, Hamadeh gave the intern a social media shoutout with a video clip of one of the questions.

When asked for one funny experience he’s had with Donald Trump, Kennedy gave a few very unfunny examples before arriving at this:

“I saw President Trump the other day when he was with the Syrian president, and he took some perfume — he has a backroom with all his swag and his towels with his logo — and he has a perfume back there, a Trump perfume. And he brought it out and squirts some on the Syrian president. And he said, ‘Have some of this for your wife. How many wives do you have?’”

Yes, that happened.

And for the record, the President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has one wife, Latifa al-Droubi.¹

1. CORRECTION: We originally wrote that Bashar al-Assad was still the president of Syria. He fled to Russia last year, but he also has only one wife.