The Daily Agenda: The art of the impossible

The best and brightest could use some sunshine ... Redactions are hard ... And that's the proper way to get to Congress.

The “best and brightest minds” in Arizona election law and administration have been working for months to propose real, meaningful solutions for the actual problems plaguing Arizona’s elections. 

But the results of the Governor’s Bipartisan Elections Task Force probably don’t merit much more attention than Gov. Katie Hobbs gave them — she bailed on the task force’s big meeting yesterday after some brief opening remarks and instead sent her office lawyer and “proxy vote” Bo Dul, who Zoomed in as the rest of the task force members showed up in-person. 

It’s not that the task force’s recommendations are bad — basically every line is sensible public policy. 

It’s that many of the recommendations are so vague and minor that they can barely be called proposals. And those ideas that do stretch beyond small-ball thinking mostly fall into the category of politically impossible in today’s divided government. 

The task force’s attempt to thread the needle between meaningful and possible highlights the narrow range of options available to elections officials attempting to address problems in the system through legislative action.

“We tried to come up with a list that we thought would gain bipartisan support at the Legislature,” Helen Purcell, the task force co-chair and former Maricopa County Recorder, said.

But despite their best efforts, most of the ideas the task force proposed are unlikely to be implemented by the 2024 election. 

And after all that work, policymakers appear no closer to addressing the biggest potential crisis facing Arizona elections: the incredibly tight deadlines and liberal recount laws that could threaten the state’s ability to meet federal deadlines for certifying the presidential election.

Beyond that, the secretive, closed-door meetings through which Hobbs’ hand-picked election experts developed their recommendations don’t inspire confidence and instead feed the narrative that the election elitists don’t want us to know what they’re doing. Yesterday’s final meeting was the only time the press or public was allowed to watch the deliberations.¹ 

Some of the highlights of the proposals include: 

• Eliminate the requirement that voters sign an affidavit that they’re having an emergency in order to vote on the weekend before an election, which is currently reserved for “emergency voting.”

• Pass a law to explicitly prohibit harassing voters who are delivering their ballots, by treating ballot drop boxes as an extension of a polling place. 

• Create incentives to recruit poll workers, like child care and paid time off for government employees.

• Stop requiring people to re-register to vote when they move across counties within Arizona. 

Unfortunately, all the ideas listed above — and most of the ideas the task force came up with — require legislation, money and the support of Republican lawmakers and leadership. And if you think the Legislature won’t like those ideas, check out the handful of “bolder” proposals the task force offered. 

• Automatically restore voting rights to people as soon as they are no longer incarcerated. Current law allows automatic rights restoration for first-time felony offenders after additional conditions are met, but the process for restoring the right to vote is far more difficult after a second felony. 

• Repeal the law that Republicans just passed last year dramatically decreasing the threshold to trigger an automatic recount of an election.

The recount law, in particular, is part of a critical discussion about Arizona’s election timeline, which officials fear could put the state at risk of blowing federal election certification deadlines. 

“When we lowered that (recount threshold) to half a percent, we did it based on falsehoods and conspiracy theories and lies about our election systems. They were running just fine before we lowered that standard,” task force member and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told reporters yesterday. 

Task force co-chair and lawmaker Ken Bennett, who voted for the law to decrease the recount threshold and for the task force’s proposal to repeal it, didn’t think his fellow Republican lawmakers would take kindly to the idea of repealing the new law (nor will they likely appreciate Fontes’ assessment of why it should go). 

At this point, even the most MAGA lawmakers acknowledge the deadlines are a problem. The task force laid out a host of potential changes that might speed up Arizona’s election timeline. But finding solutions that can garner actual bipartisan support at the Capitol is going to be difficult. 

Time is ticking. If Arizona is going to avoid that potential disaster scenario of missing federal certification deadlines, it’ll require a special session of the Legislature to ensure the changes take effect in time. 

But none of the task force members knew if Hobbs was willing to call a special session. And Hobbs, of course, didn’t stick around to answer questions about it. 

This was originally today’s laugh: The tech wizards at Cyber Ninjas incorrectly redacted about 1,400 records they turned over to the Republic as part of its lawsuit, meaning all you have to do is highlight the words that are redacted and copy/paste them into another document to read them.² Actual elections experts discovered the error recently, and the redacted records show semi-embarrassing texts between Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and Stefanie Lambert, who was indicted in Michigan earlier this year on multiple conspiracy charges, per the Republic’s Robert Anglen and Ryan Randazzo. 

“The previously redacted messages are the digital equivalent of using a dark marker to black out text on a sheet of paper, which is still readable if the paper is held up to a light,” the duo writes. 

Both sides agree: Three-quarters of Americans think the future of democracy is at risk in the next presidential election, and a quarter of them think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country," per polling. That’s up from about 15% two years ago, NPR reports. About a third of Republicans and 13% of Democrats support political violence. 

Lawyers agree: The Georgia plea deal that "fake electors" scheme architect Kenneth Chesebro took, which requires him to turn over documents, should provide more evidence and a roadmap for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, should she try to prosecute Arizona’s fake electors, 12News’ Brahm Resnik writes. Mayes won’t say where that investigation stands, but she announced yesterday that she’s joining a bunch of states suing Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta for the “youth mental health crisis.” She says the company knew its products were harmful to kids but marketed and monetized its addictive features to them anyway, which she says is a violation of the Consumer Protection Act, per the Phoenix New Times’ TJ L'Heureux. 

"I think this is a question in some ways, is there a will, is there sort of an impetus" to bring charges, Andrew Weissmann, lead prosecutor in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office and a former general counsel for the FBI, said about the pending Arizona investigation during a conference call with reporters Monday, per Resnik.

The normal process works: Gov. Katie Hobbs nominated utility regulator and former lawmaker and Tolleson Mayor Anna Tovar to the State Board of Education. Like director nominations, Tovar will need confirmation from the full Senate, where she served from 2013-2014. But unlike the directors, Hobbs still plans to send Tovar up for confirmation, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. Senate President Warren Petersen said Tovar will go through the Senate Education Committee, rather than Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman’s new committee for haranguing Hobbs’ nominees. 

And a $12,000 raise: The University of Arizona Police Department promoted officer Colin Keating from sergeant to lieutenant a year after he led the investigation into threats from the student who later killed professor Tom Meixner, the Arizona Daily Star’s Ellie Wolfe reports. Keating did turn in a report to prosecutors, who declined to bring charges about two weeks before the shooting, but he argued that “there is no indication at this time that (the alleged shooter) intends to return to campus." The faculty is not happy.

"With the new interim police chief, I want to believe that things will get better, that there will be more transparency," Kathy Varin, the senior business manager in the hydrology and atmospheric science department, told Wolfe. "Then you hear that the guy who didn't help your department got promoted. It made me less trustful of the police department."

Not O.K.: The Tombstone Marshal’s Office is again threatening to arrest members of the O.K. Corral reenactment show for doing “walkdowns” on the city streets to drum up business right before their shows. A Superior Court judge threw out a lawsuit from the company arguing that the marshall’s use of the city’s anti-commercial solicitation ordinance was impermissible, the Herald-Review’s Terri Jo Neff reports. 

Go read a real sports writer: The local baseball team won its tournament, and will now head to a new, bigger tournament, according to Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda, a former small-town sports reporter. 

State Sen. Anthony Kern is “seriously considering” running for Congress in U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko’s district, he tells talk show host Seth Leibsohn. 

You may remember Kern from the last time he was at the U.S. Capitol. 

Kern’s accomplishments include that he’s been through “knock-down drag-out fights with the media” and other Republicans, he said. He also actually lives in the district, unlike the Kari Lake endorsed candidate in the race, Abe Hamadeh. Not to mention he has served twice in the Legislature despite not being too smart.

“I looked and I’m like, well, you gotta be smart to run for the Legislature. And then I realized I guess you don’t have to be too smart. So I decided to throw my hat in the ring,” he said.  

It was a pretty weird interview.

“Rich Dad, Poor Dad” author Robert Kiyosaki, who is apparently a big Kern supporter, endorsed his candidacy on the show. Kiyosaki noted that he likes Kern’s fights with the universities, which the author has beefed with since he got back from Vietnam and got “hit with eggs and spit on by all those hippies from Woodstock.”

Kiyosaki also claimed ASU President Michael Crow and President Joe Biden “must work for Hamas.”

1. However, Republic reporter Mary Jo Pitzl just waltzed into one meeting a few months back and nobody objected — nothing they said was terribly fascinating, salacious or sensitive anyway.

2. Former Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman made the same mistake once with school voucher records, including personally identifiable information about students with disabilities, and boy did that create a stir.