Money in Politics

A double dose of campaign finances! ... Border busted ... And from atheism to Satanism.

Nearly a decade ago, Republican Secretary of State Michele Reagan won office on a platform of unmasking dark money and ushering in a new era of transparency in political spending and began building a new campaign finance transparency website that would “blow away all others.” 

It didn’t. 

Five years ago, then Secretary of State Katie Hobbs declared that the multimillion campaign finance reporting app her predecessor had built “didn’t work” and that Hobbs would fix it. 

She didn’t.

Now, Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is wading into that graveyard of code, attempting to revamp the state’s campaign finance website, See the Money (which Hobbs rebranded as “Spotlight”), ahead of the 2026 election. Yesterday, his office invited a handful of reporters in for a focus group on what they’re working on so far. 

We think the art intern, ChatGPT, got a little hung up on the words “graveyard of code” but we’ll just roll with it.

We wish the team luck. Campaign finance reports are the most important tool citizens have to keep tabs on who is trying to influence voters, how and why. 

But we’ve been in this long enough to know to temper our hopes. Arizona’s campaign finance system is based on a patchwork of competing laws that make accurate, reliable, understandable reporting incredibly difficult. Attempting to organize and present the data in a way that makes sense for political geeks — let alone average voters — is a huge undertaking. 

Arizona has a unique opportunity to finally shine a light on big spenders anonymously influencing your vote as Prop 211, the Voters’ Right to Know Act, goes into effect before the 2024 election.

But strong disclosure laws mean nothing if the average voter can’t find or make sense of those disclosures. 

Fixing the state’s campaign finance reporting system is not going to be quick, cheap or easy. It will require a long-term commitment to going beyond the minimum to present the information in a meaningful way that not only enables voters and political geeks to find what they’re looking for, but explains to them what they should be looking for and why. 

But at this point, we’d settle for a website that just works.

Our sister ‘sletter, the Tucson Agenda, also spent the day digging into campaign finance stuff. We liked what they had to say on the topic so much that we wanted to share it with you.

But we cut out all the Tucson-centric candidate details. For more local Southern Arizona news and to know who’s funding all the local candidates in Tucson and Pima County, go check them out.

They’re doing great work south of the Gila!

When we report on campaign finance, it’s about so much more than money.

Ideally, a reporter would root out candidates who get money from gangsters or from people who would create an obvious conflict of interest. But it’s rarely that dramatic, at least in local elections. Instead, campaign finance reports show how serious a candidate is, where their support comes from, and what voters can expect from them.

At this early stage of the campaigns, one of the things we’re looking for is which candidates already raised significant amounts of money. That indicates they’re organized and serious about running, unlike candidates who have the gumption to say they’re running, but don’t put in the work. 

The finance reports also show how widespread a candidate’s support is. Do they have a lot of people making small contributions, or are they backed by one or two people with deep pockets? We also watch for well-known elected officials or community members giving their support. This is all valuable information you can glean from the reports. 

Now let’s take a look at what you can’t learn from them. 

In Pima County, campaign finance reports are just PDF files housed on a massive database. You can search for candidates, but if they didn’t use their name in the title of their campaign committee, then you have to look through every entry in the database.

For example, if you wanted to see Pima County Supervisor Rex Scott’s campaign finance reports and searched for “Scott,” you’d come away thinking he hadn’t filed anything. But he did. It’s just filed under the name “Re-elect Rex.”

The City of Tucson, on the other hand, organizes its reports by election year. Each candidate is clearly labeled. If you don’t see a candidate’s reports, then they didn’t file them. The city’s system has its problems, but at least you can be sure of what you’re looking at. 

Want to know whether a local rich guy has their thumb on the scale? Instead of being able to search for “Jim Click” or whoever, you’d have to spend hours going through every report from every candidate, and you could easily miss something. That’s true for both the city and the county. 

But that’s where we are. Until local officials invest in upgrading their campaign finance systems, this is the information the public has to work with. 

Dead ends: U.S. Senate Republicans blocked the $118 billion bipartisan border reform bill that would also give aid to Ukraine. Before the vote, KJZZ’s Ben Giles and Lauren Gilger talked to Kari Lake and U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, who are both vying to be Arizona’s next U.S. Senator, about their opposing opinions of the bill. Gallego said the bill is the “closest answer” to the problems he’s heard directly from those dealing with the border crisis while acknowledging it’s not perfect but an “adequate compromise.” Lake thinks it’s a “bloated plan” that wouldn’t secure the border, and that the country should go back to Trump-era border policies but shouldn't send aid for foreign wars. 

Mansplaining the money: Faculty Senate Chair Leila Hudson accused University of Arizona President Robert Robbins of “tone-deaf mansplaining” at shared governance meetings, the Star’s Ellie Wolfe reports. The comments were in response to interim CFO John Arnold’s plan to deal with the university’s $177 million budget deficit disaster by slashing funding for academic units that produce revenue through tuition dollars instead of cutting from dozens of vice presidents’ substantial salaries. The UA also hired Huron Consulting to help clean up the mess, a firm with a messy history of pushing for layoffs and program closures. 

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A heartfelt goodbye: An attorney running defense for Phoenix in its attempts to avoid federal oversight of its police department wrote a letter to the Justice Department claiming Roger Smith, the resigning head of the police department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency, tried to operate beyond his authority, per the Republic’s Taylor Seely. The power of the office diminished after a state law changed its purview from investigating police misconduct to merely monitoring it, and Smith called the letter an attempt to discredit him. His resignation letter said he’s leaving because the office doesn’t have the "independence required to effectively perform its responsibilities."

A familiar face: The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors re-appointed Sarah Liguori to take the spot of former Rep. Jennifer Longdon for LD 5. Liguori, a senior director at the Arizona Community Foundation, was previously appointed in 2021 to replace Rep. Aaron Lieberman, but lost the seat in the 2022 primary. 

Sheriff showdown: Maricopa County supervisors are set to announce the new sheriff at their 11 a.m. meeting, which will be live-streamed on YouTube. Three finalists are up for the gig to complete former Sheriff Paul Penzone’s term until November. Chief Deputy Russ Skinner is currently filling in the position, and he’s up for the official nomination. Commander Jeffrey Kirkham of the Apache Junction Police Department and Police Sector Lieutenant Patrick Valenzuela from the the Glendale Police Department are also in the running, per KJZZ’s Nate Engle. 

Damn commies: Republicans on the Senate’s governing committee gave the go-ahead to a bill that would cement a legal basis for Arizona residents to sue any level of government they think is "furthering Marxist ideologies.” Sen. Anthony Kern's bill would also prohibit spending taxpayer dollars on promoting things like reducing greenhouse gas emissions or meat and dairy consumption, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer writes. Meanwhile, Sen. Sine Kerr is sponsoring legislation to codify a definition of biological sex into state law, which would eliminate the legal recognition of transgender people. She’s calling it the “The Arizona Women’s Bill of Rights,” the Arizona Mirror’s Gloria Gomez reports. 

Surging prices: Gilbert residents will pay about 50% more for their water use starting in April after the town council approved the change due to water shortages and aging infrastructure, 12News’ Chase Golightly reports. The town is also taking on $80 million in debt to implement a cash bond for water projects, while Mesa and Phoenix residents are also seeing water rate hikes. 

Do it for the children: A third-grade class at a Scottsdale elementary school was given an assignment to write letters to Mayor David Ortega posing questions they’d ask him if they got the chance to. With no examples or prompts to work from, many of them asked what Ortega is doing to help homeless people and their pets, the Scottsdale Progress’ Tom Scanlon writes. 

“I don’t want pets to be homeless. So can you do that? If not, that’s OK. But please try your best,” one student wrote.

After 11 years of being shut down while trying to give an atheist prayer at the Capitol, atheist lawmaker Sen. Juan Mendez instead introduced some Satanists from the Senate floor yesterday.

The Satanists showed up to defend their religious freedoms from Sen. Jake Hoffman’s Senate Bill 1279, which would prohibit displays “honoring Satan” on public property. Hoffman calls the bill the Respect Act, which stands for “Reject Escalating Satanism by Preserving Essential Core Traditions.”

Outlawying Satanists from putting up a monument to Satan¹ beside the 10 Commandments monument on the Capitol lawn, for example, wouldn’t infringe their First Amendment rights because Satanism isn’t a religion becaue Satan “is universally known to be explicitly the enemy of God … that’s not a point that’s debatable,” Hoffman told them.

Oliver Spires, a minister of the Satanic Temple, explained that the group is recognized as a church by the IRS, and noted the U.S. and Arizona’s constitutions permit free religious expression. A member of the Reason Riders Atheist Motorcycle Association also joined the meeting.

“This bill is nothing but theater and virtue signaling and a waste of your and our time. Hail Satan,” he said. 

The whole committee hearing is fun, but it took 45 minutes! So we bookmarked the best parts at the end for you.

1. The Satanists have, in fact, put up statues in other states as statements about the separation of church and state. In Arizona, they were pretty active trying to deliver Satanic invocations at the beginning of city council meetings for a while, sparking at least one lawsuit and forcing Phoenix to (briefly) end religious prayers at public meetings.