The Daily Agenda: Be careful what you vote for
Direct democracy may come in handy ... An infamous Pita Jungle reference ... And that neckwear is for locals only.
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After ping-ponging through the courts for the last several weeks, the Arizonans for Free and Fair Elections initiative received its final smack-down Friday when the Arizona Supreme Court officially ruled it fell about 1,500 valid signatures short of qualifying for the ballot.
But the 2022 general election ballot will still carry several hugely influential election questions — it’s just that they’re almost all coming from Republican lawmakers. (The one important exception is Terry Goddard’s initiative to fight dark money in politics, dubbed the Voters’ Right to Know Act.)
Instead of attempting to make it easier to vote and harder for politicians to steal an election, the questions legislative Republicans referred to the ballot are all attempting to abolish our right to direct democracy and embolden those who still believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Proposition 309, a legislative referral born from SCR1012, isn’t the worst referendum lawmakers could have dreamed up. It would require identification to drop off your early ballot at an early voting site or Election Day polling place, and require more proof that you are who you say if you mail back your early ballot.
Still, the referendum piggybacks on the doubt lawmakers have sown over mail-in ballots, claiming that voter ID on mail-in ballots is a critical election integrity problem despite there being absolutely no evidence that mail-in ballots have ever been used in a mass fraud situation in Arizona.
Far more concerning are the referenda lawmakers sent to the ballot asking voters to kneecap their own right to pass laws by citizen initiative and further enable lawmakers to simply ignore the will of voters.
Prop 132 would require a supermajority of voters to increase taxes at the ballot. We’ve already seen how this works at the legislative level: Lawmakers need a two-thirds majority vote to pass any increases on taxes, or even to roll back tax credits and exemptions. That supermajority requirement has hindered lawmakers’ ability to pass even common-sense tax increases or kill off corporate tax giveaways, even ones Republicans don’t like. Prop 132 would apply that same restriction to Arizona voters.
Prop 129 would limit initiatives to a single subject. That would eliminate initiative backers’ ability to combine forces for good-governance initiatives that touch on several aspects of the law, as the Free and Fair Elections Act would have and the Clean Elections Act1 did.
Prop 128 would effectively neuter the Voter Protection Act2. It doesn’t attempt to repeal the act, as many Republican lawmakers want, but instead allows lawmakers to repeal voter-approved measures if any part of the law is declared unconstitutional. Initiatives and laws are declared partially unconstitutional all the time — for example, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 declared the matching funds provision of the Clean Elections Act unconstitutional, but the broader law is still valid. Under Prop 128, that would be enough for lawmakers to scrap the whole Clean Elections Act with a simple majority vote.
Taken together, the measures would demolish Arizona voters’ rights to organize and craft their own policies when lawmakers ignore the will of the people. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, qualifying for the initiative is already getting near-impossible thanks to a host of anti-initiative laws Republican legislatures have put on the books in recent years, not to mention Gov. Doug Ducey’s stacking of the Arizona Supreme Court with justices who are hostile to the concept of initiatives.
But Republican voters and politicians would be wise to respect Arizona’s tradition of direct democracy. There may come a day in the not-too-distant future when Republicans are no longer in control of Arizona’s political offices.
And when conservatives can’t access the ballot to run an initiative to bypass a liberal governor or Legislature, they’ll have nobody but themselves to blame.
Just keep trying, guys: A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit from GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem taht asked the courts to throw out all the ballot tabulation machines in favor of a hand count, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. The court found Finchem and Lake didn’t even have standing, considering the “harm” they would face is highly hypothetical, but the judge said he would have thrown it out for a host of other reasons even if the duo had standing.
“Not only do Plaintiffs fail to produce any evidence that a full hand count would be more accurate, but a hand count would also require Maricopa County to hire 25,000 temporary staff and find two million square feet of space. Further, there is no question that the results of the election would be delayed,” U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi wrote.
An avoidable tragedy?: After a Pima County constable serving an eviction notice and two others were shot and killed Thursday by a man who later killed himself, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller calls for eliminating the position of constable altogether, or at least seriously reforming the elected gig. He notes the litany of bad behavior by constables and argues they don’t have the training or backup to do the job safely.
Small world: After Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate Tom Horne showed off a photo of him campaigning with David Stringer, a former lawmaker who was forced to resign after court documents surfaced showing he pleaded guilty to sex crimes against children in the 80s, Horne went on AZFamily to double down on his support for Stringer. Horne’s wife, Carmen Chenal, was Stringer’s lawyer when he was kicked out of the Legislature. And for a wild throwback: When Horne was attorney general and the FBI was following him around for unrelated campaign finance crimes, they spotted Horne do a no-note hit and run after having an extramarital lunchtime tryst with Chenal at her apartment near the Roosevelt Row Pita Jungle. The two later married after Horne’s first wife passed away.
The debate drama continues: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs’ campaign manager sent an email to the Clean Elections Commission on Friday, the deadline to RSVP, saying the candidate is “eager” to find a debate format that is not a debate. Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly liked the sound of that and sent his own request to meet with the commission about a new format, 12News’ Brahm Resnik reports. Expect to see the Clean Elections Commission meet to discuss whether to host some kind of candidate forum that doesn’t put Republican and Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates on a stage together.
Remember him?: Eight years after Paris Dennard was fired from ASU for sexual harassment, and four years after the Washington Post unearthed the firing, the Republican National Committee fired him, too, Politico reports. The RNC didn’t say why, but he was the organization’s national spokesman and director of Black media affairs.
Safe and comfortable: Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop convicted of murdering George Floyd, was moved to a medium-security federal prison in Tucson, where officials say he’ll be safer and where the Associated Press reports he may be held under less restrictive conditions.
Lake is bragging: Gov. Doug Ducey’s move to put shipping containers on the border where there isn’t a wall is validating Lake’s proposal to “declare an invasion, use Arizona’s constitutional right to defend our territory, and finish constructing the actual wall on federal land,” her campaign told the Capitol Times’ Nick Phillips.
Scrubbing up for the voters: As he prepared for the General Election, Republican U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters scrubbed his website of his hardline positions on abortion, NBC News notes. Meanwhile, as he prepared for re-election, Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly removed the entire issues page from his website earlier this year, Masters retorted.
It’s good to have friends: Friends of Republican state Sen. Vince Leach are heading to court today at 1:30 this afternoon to argue Justine Wadsack doesn’t live in his district and therefore Leach was actually the winner of the primary election that he lost to Wadsack. And Rep. John Fillmore’s lawsuit asking him to be put on the general election ballot despite losing the election because of ballot issues in Pinal County failed.
Hank and Rachel are above average: As President Joe Biden attempts to cancel as much as $20,000 in student loan debt for Pell Grant recipients, roughly 887,000 Arizonans have student loan debt, owing on average of more than $35,000, Axios’ Jeremy Duda writes, citing U.S. Department of Education data.
New face, same office: A federal judge is preparing to hold Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone in contempt of court for not following through on a series of court-ordered reforms, the Republic’s Rafael Carranza reports. The reforms are aimed at rooting out out the vestiges of racism in the office and are part of the more than decade-old lawsuit about the office’s practices of racial discrimination under Joe Arpaio.
Behind the scenes: The Daily Star’s Patty Machelor profiles the speech therapist who helped former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords regain her words after suffering aphasia following her shooting.
Hire someone: Santa Cruz County doesn’t have anyone certified to enroll people, including domestic violence survivors, in Arizona’s address confidentiality system. The Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi details one local woman’s quest to force the region to promote the program and hire someone to administer it locally.
No setup necessary. The tweet speaks for itself.
Full disclosure: Clean Elections pays us to moderate some of its legislative debates.
Voters approved the Voter Protection Act after lawmakers blocked the implementation of medical marijuana the first time voters approved it. It bars lawmakers from overturning voter-approved laws or tinkering with them unless they can muster a three-fourth vote and the changes further the intent of the voter-approved law.
"...the questions legislative Republicans referred to the ballot are all attempting to abolish our right to direct democracy and embolden those who still believe the 2020 election was stolen."
That's a little much.
Thanks for the great work. I read something in the Arizona Republic the other day about a commercial from Freedom’s Future Fund critical of Kari Lake being found to have likely violated election laws. Was it because she wasn’t an official candidate when the commercial ran? Something else?
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2022/08/25/arizona-clean-elections-board-finds-anti-kari-lake-ad-likely-violated-law/7896883001/