The Daily Agenda: Have we learned nothing?
The Daily Agenda: Have we learned nothing?
The Cochise hand count is back again ... The drop box watchers are undeterred ... and SNL roasts Kari.
In case you missed it, we’re putting up a paywall. That means if you like reading this email every day — and we know a lot of you do — you’re gonna have to start paying for it.
We have big plans for 2023 that we’re excited to get started. But to keep doing this kind of important reporting, we really need your help.
Subscribe now and get a 30% discount — you’ll pay just $84 for a whole year of reporting that holds politicians accountable.
Or better yet, consider getting your whole organization, office or business a group subscription so they’re all in the know.
Just click the founding member option on that button above for up to five subscriptions. Or if you’ve got a larger group, reply to this email and we’ll send you our group subscription rates and get you set up.
In yet another absurd turn, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors now says it will hand count all ballots — a reversal from its second reversal.
The two Republican supervisors first said they intended to conduct a full hand count of all ballots, then said they would follow state law to do a limited hand count of day-of ballots for a few races, and now they’ll count all ballots for four races, they said in a Friday meeting.
The board decided to forge ahead after Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued an opinion saying the county could conduct a 100% hand count of both early and day-of ballots for up to five races. The opinion came at the request of Republican Arizona Sen. David Gowan, who represents the area.
And the supervisors intend to move forward despite legal warnings from their county attorney, the threat of a lawsuit from the secretary of state, and the county insurer’s message that it wouldn’t be covered if the county loses a lawsuit. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, after the supervisors last said they’d limit the audit to comply with state law, backed off a lawsuit. Now, the idea of a lawsuit may be back on the table.
"With early voting well under way and less than two weeks from election day, these antics are doing nothing more than creating chaos and confusion around the election and tabulation of ballots, which is wildly irresponsible," Hobbs’ office said in a statement.
County elections officials already conduct a limited hand count after elections. That process, which entails hand-counting at least 2% of precincts to make sure the machine tabulation is accurate, will still continue in Cochise County. The expanded hand count would start the week after Election Day, the supervisors said.
It would be conducted by volunteers. It’s not clear how many will be needed, nor where the actual count would happen. If the counts don’t match, nobody knows what will happen next. It would happen under the direction of County Recorder David Stevens, a Republican, instead of the county’s election director, Lisa Marra, who will still oversee the legally-approved regular hand count.
But there’s one way it could all be derailed (excluding a legal intervention): Democrats could refuse to participate. All parties agree that the count cannot be legally conducted if it’s just Republicans — there cannot be more than 75% of hand counters from one party. Supervisor Ann English, the lone Democrat and opposition to the hand count on the board, said she’s going to do all she can to tell Democrats not to participate.
“If I can’t stop our conversations about it, I’m hoping that I can stop it with the Democratic Party,” she said at the meeting.
If you’re having trouble keeping track of the county’s last-minute decisions, imagine being an average local voter. With less than two weeks before the election ends1, the county has now repeatedly changed its procedures, spurred by two supervisors intent to indulge fantasies about elections.
And it’s not just Cochise County — Pinal County’s supervisors are also weighing an expanded hand count, the Associated Press reports. That county’s primary election was beset with multiple serious problems that affected voters directly.
We have a recent example of how a hand count audit went: the Arizona Senate’s 2021 review of Maricopa County’s election in 2020. The counts did not match. The process was far from professional. And the results did nothing to affirm anyone’s faith in elections.
We don’t understand how anyone could look at how the 2021 audit circus went and want to try something similar.
Who will watch the watchers?: Federal Judge Mike Liburdi ruled on Friday that he couldn’t stop the drop box watching occurring in Arizona because it would be against the First Amendment. The Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino immediately appealed the ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. (A separate lawsuit from the League of Women Voters of Arizona against the drop box watchers hasn’t received a ruling yet.) For more insight into how the drop box watching and “tailgate parties” took off, check out this NBC News story that goes into how right-wing social media like Truth Social spread the word.
Ask Kari anything except a real question: On Kari Lake’s campaign trail, “misinformation and in some cases outright deception” are routine, from election lies to abortion inaccuracies to mischaracterizations of Democrat Katie Hobbs’ record, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. Lake continues to refuse to respond to the Republic except to bash it.
“What we find is that when a politician embraces such a large-scale lie as the 2020 election conspiracy, it's not uncommon for them to just basically spin out and begin embracing a lot of other dis- and misinformation and making lies a hallmark of that campaign,” Samuel Woolley, program director for the propaganda research team at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, told the Republic.
Thanks, Obama: Former President Barack Obama is coming to Phoenix Wednesday evening to host a campaign rally for U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly and gubernatorial contender Katie Hobbs. The RSVP to the event still says location TBD.
Scrape harder: CBS’ “60 Minutes” set its sights on Arizona’s election deniers, meticulously dissecting secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem’s well-worn lies about the 2020 election and debunking a few of his newest conspiracies, including that the FBI ran fingerprints on 25,000 Yuma County ballots and found the same prints on all of them. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich called guys like Finchem “clowns” and quoted Simon and Garfunkel.
“Horseshit, that’s what it is,” Brnovich said of fraud claims. “Most of it is horseshit. And I’ve been trying to scrape it off my shoes for a year.”
Water showdowns: After the states that rely on the Colorado River failed to come up with a compromise to save their water supplies, the federal government is now working on a plan that will cut water, the Republic’s Brandon Loomis reports. Separately, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly wants to compel California to give up some of its water from the river by getting the feds to stall funding on a dust pollution reduction project for that state’s Salton Sea, 12News’ Hunter Bassler reports.
Yes, that’s his name: A filing from U.S. House attorney Douglas Letter, who represents the Jan. 6 committee, calls on the U.S. Supreme Court to reject AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward’s request to halt the subpoena of her phone records because, Letter writes, “Dr. Ward aided a coup attempt.” The Jan. 6 committee has sought Ward’s phone records as part of its investigation into the insurrection.
The awoken giant: The New Republic argues that Arizona Democrats will keep Latinos in their corner because of the longtime grassroots activism and organizing we’ve seen here, stemming from SB1070 and other anti-Latino policies. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Legislative District 9, Eva Burch, said she takes a Spanish-language translator-interpreter with her when canvassing to make sure she can talk to voters in the way they best understand her.
Not impressed: Local tribal leaders grilled Republican candidates Kari Lake, Blake Masters and Abe Hamadeh about border issues, voting rights and abortion, with some leaders saying afterward that they felt they didn’t fit into the candidates’ visions for the state, the Republic’s Debra Utacia Krol reports. Krol also reports that it’s difficult to find information from candidates on their plans for tribes or tribal issues.
The legal trail: Justine Wadsack, the Republican candidate for Senate in Legislative District 17, has been either the plaintiff or defendant in 10 lawsuits in less than a decade (seven of which were unrelated to elections), has been sued (and then counter-sued) over unpaid legal bills by her former attorney and sometimes represents herself in cases, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller reports.
Your tax dollars at work: Settlements in Maricopa County jail lawsuits have cost taxpayers nearly $22 million in the past 10 years, not including legal fees, with the most costly settlements coming from “preventable jailhouse attacks between inmates,” ABC15’s Dave Biscobing reports.
Someone should make this whole process better: When elected officials update their financial disclosures, the secretary of state’s office fixes the form online right away, but the same is not true for candidates, resulting in incomplete public information during campaigns, the Republic’s Robert Anglen reports.
What’s this have to do with utilities?: The Secretary of State’s Office filed an ethics complaint against Arizona Corporation Commissioner Jim O’Connor for using his position to spread his views on elections, undermining the process and violating the commission’s ethics rules. O’Connor used official commission letterhead to send mail to county elections officials urging them not to use “electronic voting machines.”
Pot not as potent as it says: The Republic paid for lab tests of marijuana products to see if potency labels matched up with their tests, finding that one lab “routinely inflated” potency which then allowed places to charge more, an indication that state regulations don’t adequately protect customers, reporter Ryan Randazzo writes.
They’re trying again: Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, wants to increase its rates by an average of $18 per month to bring in an additional $460 million, Randazzo reports. The request for a rate increase comes after the Arizona Corporation Commission voted last year to decrease the company’s profitability, which then led to a lawsuit from APS.
Election denier says what?: Fox10, Lake’s former employer, accidentally placed a test graphic showing Hobbs as the vote leader on screen during a broadcast last week, which the station said happened in error. The error led to conspiracies, because of course it did. And Republican Rep. Jake Hoffman, a fake elector who is banned from Twitter, said he intends to file a bill next legislative session in response to the issue, to “hold news outlets accountable should they interfere with Arizona’s election and/or disenfranchise Arizona voters like this in the future.”
It’s your own people: Yuma County investigated 17 people for double-voting in the 2020 general election, though only three of them were registered Democrats, poking holes in the rampant claims of fraud that such illegal voting favored Democrats, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. Most were part-time Arizona residents.
No vacation yet: States Newsroom’s Kira Lerner talks with Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer as the general election wears on. Richer says elections staff are working nonstop to both run an election and respond to additional work like increased public records requests, and they’re preparing for perhaps multiple recounts after the initial canvass, which could have them working through the holidays.
The new Arizona: U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar wrote to the presidents of Ukraine and Russia, telling them they should come to Phoenix for some peace talks. And Lake tweeted at new Twitter owner Elon Musk, telling him they should move company headquarters to Arizona.
Step it up: Marijuana expungements allowed under legalization have been slow in Santa Cruz County, where just eight people have sought to clear their records in the county’s superior count, four of which were denied, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi reports.
Kari Lake, as played by Cecily Strong, made her “Saturday Night Live” debut in a cold open setup of a “PBS Newshour” broadcast, which the fake Lake called a “sweet little show of lies.” The show roasted Lake’s election denialism and her glowy video camera.
“I’m just a regular hometown gal, constantly in soft focus and lit like a ’90s Cinemax soft-core,” Strong-as-Lake said. “And frankly, I’ve just clicked with many of the wonderful, terrified elderly people here in Arizona, the Florida of the West. Also, I’m a fighter. In my life, I’ve sent back over 2,000 salads and I’m not afraid to do the same thing with democracy.”
The courts generally disapprove of changing election laws and procedures this close to an election. The “Purcell principle,” named after a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case involving former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, lays out the concept, though the principle itself is not without controversy in how it’s been applied since.
Loved Hank on Sunday Square Off. Clear and concise. Thanks.
The transition from talking about Hoffman wanting to hold news outlets accountable for election interference to the fake newspaper is *chef's kiss*