The Daily Agenda: Home is a state of mind
The Daily Agenda: Home is a state of mind
At least live in your rented house … Debating the debatable merits of debates … And how did that guy get here?!
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After Republican Sen. Vince Leach got knocked out of his Senate seat by farther-right-than-him candidate Justine Wadsack in the August primary, Leach went to court saying Wadsack doesn't live in the district and therefore isn’t eligible to win an election there.
He’s probably right. It almost certainly won’t matter.
That’s because, despite pretty well-defined laws about what constitutes residency, Arizona courts have essentially declared residency a state of mind. Home is not necessarily where you hang your hat, but where you say you hang your hat.
Unlike congressional candidates, legislative and local candidates ostensibly must live in their district. It’s not only a matter of state law and the Arizona Constitution, but a practical issue: How can your elected representative effectively advocate on local issues like crime, infrastructure and business development if they don’t sleep in your neighborhood, drive your streets and shop at your local stores?
Every election year, there are a handful of legal challenges over candidate residency. It’s usually obvious that the candidates are not really living in the district. They almost always win in court anyway.
Here’s a quick sample of some of our favorite residency cases in recent history:
In 2012, Darin Mitchell, a Republican candidate for state House, beat incumbent Russ Jones while running from an empty house with nothing but a bare mattress on the floor. Neighbors said the house had been empty for at least a year, and a contractor working on the home confirmed nobody lived there. Mitchell’s real house, complete with furniture and his future wife, was a couple miles down the road in a heavily Democratic district. A superior court judge actually kicked him off the ballot, but the court of appeals reinstated him on a technicality.
In 2013, Democrat Carlyle Begay was appointed to the state Senate from a heavily Democratic Navajo Nation-based district, despite having lived for seven years in Gilbert, volunteering on the city’s industrial authority (which requires members to be residents), and registering to vote in Gilbert. He admitted to living far from the district but argued his “roots and heritage is and will ever remain back at my home on the Navajo Nation.”
In 2018, former State Sen. Don Shooter fended off a legal challenge to his residency from his Yuma-based district despite having registered to vote at the home he owns in the Biltmore area of Phoenix. His rented Yuma condo had the power turned off and had a mail forwarding order. (This was after his colleagues expelled him from the state Senate over a series of sexual harassment allegations.) The allegations that Shooter didn’t really live in Yuma, had dogged him for years before the lawsuit. At one point the lawmaker told the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl “It’s none of your damn business” how much time he spent in Yuma.
To find a legislative candidate who was actually kicked off the ballot for lying about where they live, you have to go all the way back to 2010. Republican House candidate Augustus Shaw was knocked off the 2010 primary election ballot for his Tempe-based district after his own father-in-law testified that the candidate didn’t really live in his in-laws’ house as he had claimed. The case also included damning evidence from a private investigator hired by his political opponents.
This year, there are at least two local candidates who almost certainly don’t permanently live where they claim.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Monday allowed Phoenix City Council candidate Kevin Robinson to stay on the ballot after his opponent, Moses Sanchez, filed a lawsuit saying Robinson didn’t really live in a rented apartment in the city council district as he claimed, but rather lived at the house he owns with his wife in Scottsdale.
You may remember us laughing at the box of Cheerios Robinson provided as proof that he lived there. His landlord testified in court that he had only seen movement on the home security camera about six times in July, though Robinson countered that he avoided the front door to throw off his political opponent. Still, Robinson won at every level, including the Arizona Supreme Court on Monday, which declared that the “family rule” in state law that declares residency is where your family resides excludes cases where a family is living somewhere temporarily, as Axios’ Jeremy Duda reports.
Separately, it seems clear from Elias Weiss’ reporting in the Phoenix New Times’ that Phoenix City Council candidate Denise Ceballos-Viner lives at her very nice $800,000 house in Anthem, not the rented house near Baseline Road with bars on the window that she claimed in order to run in a South Phoenix district. However, it doesn’t appear anybody filed a legal challenge in that case, as the Republican doesn’t stand much of a chance in the heavily Democratic part of town.
There’s no government agency in charge of verifying candidates live where they say they live. Instead, it falls to citizens or political opponents to prove a candidate doesn’t live where they say. Besides the high burden of “clear and convincing evidence” required in such cases, residency cases are difficult to win because courts hear election cases on a tight timeline. And courts are very wary of tossing a candidate off the ballot.
Our toothless residency laws need laws need updating. In the unlikely event they take up such a task, policymakers should be careful to not make residency requirements so strict that it bars newcomers or the poor and transient from running for office or voting. And some level of political carpetbagging is to be expected.
But if you want to represent our our districts, our cities and our neighborhoods, you gotta actually live here.
So much irony: Republican attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh boasted online of committing felony voter fraud as a 17-year-old in 2008 by filling out his mom’s ballot for President Barack Obama, the Phoenix New Times’ Elias Weiss reports. He also spewed sexist and anti-semitic hate and declared that only college-educated people who can pass an intelligence test should be allowed to vote. His campaign didn’t outright deny he wrote the posts. Instead, a spokesperson explained how young people’s minds aren’t fully developed and said as the youngest statewide candidate in Arizona, he actually has a digital footprint of his adolescence.
Who doesn’t like free and fair?: After a series of legal battles, the Arizonans for Free And Fair Elections initiative have enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot as Proposition 210, the Secretary of State’s Office announced yesterday. However, organizers note it still faces one last legal hurdle, as the Arizona Supreme Court is expected to decide its final fate on Thursday.
Saw that coming: As promised, news organizations and the ACLU of Arizona filed a federal lawsuit against the state over a new law preventing citizens from recording police within 8 feet of them, calling the law “unconstitutional on its face” and warning that it will infringe on people’s free speech and equal protection rights. The Legislature’s own attorneys warned a lawsuit was likely and that the bill may not pass constitutional muster.
Faster results are up to you, folks: Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer and Supervisor Bill Gates wrote in the Republic opinion pages a blow-by-blow explaining what happens to your ballot after you cast it. It’s part of their ongoing war against election disinformation, including the narrative that Maricopa County is slow to count its ballots (and that somehow counting ballots by hand would be better or faster). The duo offers a word of advice to those who want faster results: Stop dropping off your mail-in ballot on Election Day.
Debating the debatable value of debates: To win the governorship, Katie Hobbs needs to demonstrate to swing voters that she’s safe and sane, and she doesn’t need to debate Kari Lake to do that, Robert Robb argues in his Substack. In fact, debates these days are “unproductive contributions to the democratic process” since candidates just regurgitate their talking points and moderators fail to keep the discussion on track, he writes. And he notes that even if you bomb a debate, you still can become governor.
“No one could perform more poorly in a debate than (Gov. Jan) Brewer, who actually froze on camera for an extended and highly disconcerting period of time. And she still won handily,” he notes. (We added that link for your enjoyment.)
Whose kids are these?: The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is investigating the Kyrene School District for allowing a Jewish eighth-grade student to be harassed for months so severely that her parents pulled her out of the district, 12News reports. The anti-semitic taunts and harassment from her fellow students included saying she must be good at oral sex “because Jews are so good at gasping for air” or asking “How do you get a Jewish girl’s number?” and then lifting her sleeve.
Rents and evictions are too damn high: Evictions in Pima County are skyrocketing and the county has already served more evictions in the first seven months of 2022 than all of last year, the Arizona Daily Star’s Nicole Ludden and Patty Machelor report. At the same time, the county’s pandemic-related federal assistance is running out, and some apartment complexes are not accepting government funds to cover rent, as landlords want to get tenants who can afford more, the duo writes.
Maybe next time: David Lucier, the Democratic write-in candidate hoping to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar in November, fell short 341 write-in votes short of the 1,660 he needed to qualify for the general election ballot, the Yellow Sheet Report notes. We mentioned he was close in our edition about write-ins recently.
The world looks different from the Big Apple: New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait declares that U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema tanked her own political career by backing the carried-interest loophole in Democrats’ big climate bill and that the real question is no longer whether she can fend off a primary challenge, but “whether she will even try.”
Good luck: The Maricopa County Recorders’ Office recently hired two longtime elections pros to beef up their staff. Former Yavapai County Recorder Leslie Hoffman is the new director of recording (which is not actually on the elections side), while former Secretary of State’s Office spokesman Matthew Roberts is the Elections Department’s new communications manager.
In Congressional District 2, a three-term incumbent Democrat is battling a MAGA Republican veteran to represent this humongous swath of land anchored in northeastern Arizona.
This district, which is the largest of Arizona’s nine congressional districts, is mostly made up of previous CD1, which on paper was always considered competitive, but has been occupied by Democrats, including incumbent Tom O’Halleran.
The district covers a whole lot of Arizona: From Prescott, Williams and Flagstaff to the Navajo Nation, all the way down to Coolidge, Florence, Globe and Eager, all the way in east Arizona.
O’Halleran used to be a Republican state lawmaker representing deep red Prescott in the 2000s. But in 2014, he became an independent and lost a bid for the state Senate. Then he joined the Democrats and won a seat in Congress in the 2016 election. He’s viewed as one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the country given the district’s increased favorability to Republicans. But O’Halleran has shown an uncanny ability to pull off a win, even as his district voted for Trump two times.
Eli Crane scored a decisive victory in his seven-way Republican primary to challenge O’Halleran for the seat. Crane launched his campaign with an ad of him getting a “We the People” tattoo and picked up endorsements from former President Donald Trump and state Sen. Wendy Rogers during the campaign.
Arizona Republican Rep. Joseph Chaplik posted a photo on Twitter of “a man sitting in the shade outside a pool supply store in Scottsdale,” as Republic columnist Laurie Roberts points out, trying to claim this man as a symptom of rampant homelessness in Scottsdale.
All we can gather from the photo is that there is a man sitting in the shade, which is far less suspect than a person sitting in the wide-open sun in the August heat.
The Phoenix area does have a growing number of homeless people. Posting a photo of a person who may or may not be one of them to your followers to score political points does absolutely nothing to help.