The Daily Agenda: An actual sham election

It's not very fair … The chairman has some problems ... And we loved “Gleaming the Cube.”

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and the majority of the all-Democrat Tucson City Council are up for re-election this year, and, in contrast to some recent years, the Republicans in town have demonstrated the organization and motivation required to field candidates.

Qualifying candidates for the ballot is a pretty big step forward for the party, which has struggled to even field sacrificial lambs in recent years. Still, the Republicans largely espouse far-right MAGA ideology and stand little chance of flipping seats in liberal Tucson. 

But Tucson’s bizarre “hybrid” election system — with its ward-only primaries and citywide general elections — ensures that even a moderate Republican has almost no chance of winning a seat, even in the most conservative city council districts. While Republicans are at least within striking distance in two of the six council districts, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two-to-one citywide, making them longshots for any office in the city. 

Twitter embeds still aren’t working properly so we’re gonna try some creative solutions until this gets sorted out. Here’s “an oil painting of a Republican candidate winning a Tucson City Council race as hell freezes over” from AI digital image generator Dall-E.

The hybrid system is unfair. Defenders say it ensures that city council members look out for the entire city rather than just their neighborhoods, but in reality, it largely ensures that Republicans have no voice in city government¹, despite making up more than 20% of the electorate (independents are the second-largest bloc).  

The council and mayoral races are crowded but don’t appear especially competitive. Romero faces four opponents in her bid to remain mayor: a Republican, a Libertarian and two independents. With a five-way split and no Democratic challenger, she can basically declare victory right now. 

Lane Santa Cruz and Paul Cunningham, the council members representing Wards 1 and 2, respectively, face primary challenges from fellow Democrats. 

• Santa Cruz, the council’s most hard-charging liberal, is facing a challenge from conservative Democrat Miguel Ortega in the primary for her Latino-dominated west side district. Ortega, who worked for former City Council Member Karin Ulich before she endorsed Santa Cruz to replace her in 2019, has run for a variety of local offices over the years and placed third in a primary against Santa Cruz in 2019. The winner will face Republican Victoria Lem in the November general election.

• Cunningham will face a primary challenge from Democrat Lisa Nutt, a Realtor who is tacking to the left of one of the council’s most moderate members in the northwest district. The winner will face Republican Ernie Shack, and Libertarian M. Pendleton Spicer in November.

In Tucson’s Ward 4, incumbent Nikki Lee faces Republican challenger Ross Kaplowitch. Democrats and Republicans are about evenly split in her southeast Tucson district, where independents are the largest bloc. But that doesn’t really matter here, because Tucson’s election system means that Lee’s Republican opponent would have to win citywide to win the seat. 

And while the council doesn’t appear headed for a shakeup, the way Tucson elects its city council may finally change. 

A bipartisan group of local politicos is attempting to place a resolution on the city’s 2023 ballot that would do away with the citywide general election and create a ward-only system like every other city in the state uses. It’s a difficult task. The group needs to collect almost 15,000 valid signatures from registered city voters before July 6 to qualify for the ballot. 

Luis Gonzales, a former Democratic state senator, is leading the effort. Even though he knows it’ll ultimately benefit Republicans, it’s the right thing to do, he said. Besides, only two of the seats are competitive, so it’s not likely Democrats would lose their majority on the council. 

But the hybrid system isn’t just unfair to Republicans, he said. Citywide general elections mean that Latino voters on the west side of Tucson, for example, aren’t the final authority on who they elect. Citywide voters, including east-side Republicans, get an equal vote on deciding who represents west Tucson. It’s an absurd system that would never fly at the legislative or congressional level, he notes, and the only people who really love it are those in power. 

“It’s a voting rights issue for me,” he said. 

The proposed “Tucson Elections Equality Act” is not the first attempt to do away with the hybrid system, nor is it the only active attempt. As Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller noted last month, the issue of whether the hybrid system is constitutional has been litigated to death, and voters most recently rejected the idea in 1993. Several efforts to put the question on the ballot since then have failed. 

A new crop of lawmakers have also taken note. Pointing to Tucson’s hybrid election system, Republican Sen. Justine Wadsack is attempting to do away with Tucson’s ability to operate as a charter city (essentially a city with its own constitution that gives it more local control on all sorts of issues, including to decide how to run its elections). The bill was initially drafted to do away with all charter cities, but Wadsack settled for just Tucson and Phoenix. The legislation, if approved, wouldn’t need the governor’s approval, but would require voter approval at a statewide election. 

If voters don’t reform the system, the alternative will almost certainly be worse.

We’re still talking about printers: Maricopa County released the results of an independent investigation saying the 2022 election’s printer problems were caused by using thicker paper (to head off more #Sharpiegate conspiracies) and longer paper to accommodate the longer ballots, which screwed up the printers’ ability to print hot enough to fuse toner to the ballots, forcing printers to “perform at the extreme edge of their capability,” Axios Phoenix’s Jessica Boehm reports. None of that is really news, however, as Votebeat’s Jen Fifield writes, since we pretty much knew that months ago. 

That’s a lot of issues: After three-time Congressional candidate Brandon Martin got elected to chair of the Cochise County Republican Party, he allegedly slammed a door into the former local party chairman’s  ankle and broke it, stalked a precinct committeewoman, had an order of protection filed against him by his ex-wife who said he endangered their child, and locked PCs out of their monthly meeting. Local Republicans are now trying to recall him from his post, Lyda Longa reports in the Herald-Review.

Because they’re Democrats: The Republicans in charge at the Capitol ensure Democratic bills almost never get heard in the House or Senate, the Republic’s Ray Stern writes, even though Democrats hold just shy of half the seats in the Legislature. So far, only 24 Democrat-sponsored bills have received a vote from the full House or Senate, while more than 300 Republican-sponsored bills have received a vote, Stern found.

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More like the Brno hangover: Attorney General Kris Mayes didn’t expect to have to spend so much of her time during her first 100 days cleaning up after her predecessor, the Republic’s Tara Kavaler and Stacey Barchenger write, including clearing out his backlog of public records requests, releasing buried reports about the state’s lack of election fraud, stopping contracts she thought were shady and releasing previously secret reports. 

“I'll call it the overhang of the Brnovich administration,” Mayes said. 

This land is my land…: The City of Yuma wants to annex a bunch of land abutting the town of San Luis, and the mayor of San Luis is not happy, saying he’s looking into legal options, the Yuma Sun’s Cesar Neyoy reports. Meanwhile, Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls is very busy juggling his job as mayor with his job as the president of the League of Arizona Cities and Towns, the Sun’s Mara Knaub writes. 

The landscape is always shifting: A federal judge in Texas on Friday suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, an abortion drug that accounts for half of all abortions in the U.S. But at the same time, a federal judge in Washington ruled the FDA can’t revoke the drug’s status in a handful of states, including Arizona. Nobody knows what will happen with the conflicting rulings, but the Supreme Court is expected to weigh in at some point. 

Everyone has an opinion: Columnist Laurie Roberts calls on Gov. Katie Hobbs to support Republican Rep. Matt Gress’ plan to increase teacher pay by $10,000, writing in the Republic that “now would be a very good time for her to show some leadership.” Elsewhere in the Republic opinion pages, columnist Joanna Allhands reports on a new deal brewing in the West Valley: A bunch of farm and landowners have a novel and complicated plan to pump water all the way to Queen Creek. 

“It would be our first foray into a brave new world of transporting water from one aquifer for cities to use in another,” Allhands writes. 

So cool: Officials in Nogales unveiled the first cold storage facility at a port on the Arizona-Mexico border, which will be used to keep produce cold as border officials inspect it, KJZZ’s Kendal Blust reports. California, New Mexico and Texas already have cold storage facilities at their ports.  

Meanwhile, in northern Arizona: The North Rim of the Grand Canyon will open late this year after it got too much snow, roughly 250 inches, making it the second snowiest year since 1925, the Associated Press reports. The levee at Lake Mary near Flagstaff is leaking and could break, though officials say there’s no danger to property, 12News reports. And an invasive mudsnail shut down a fish hatchery in northeastern Arizona, causing the Arizona Department of Game and Fish to “enact biosecurity protocols” to prevent the asexual snail from reproducing and spreading, KJZZ reports.  

The New York Times recently wrote a deep-dive into the rise of pet telemedicine, appropriately headlined “The Virtual Vet Will See You Meow” that mentioned Arizona is among the states where lawmakers expanded vet options during the pandemic and are now considering a permanent change.