The Daily Agenda: Winning hearts and minds

A lovely tour that convinced nobody ... The subpoenas never stop ... And it's the camel's nose under the tent for a United Nations takeover.

Back in May, we tagged along on a tour of the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center hosted by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. 

The press tour was something of a trial run for the main event: bringing in local Republican leaders to see and scrutinize the process in order to win them over and prove, once and for all, that there was no election fraud in 2020 or 2022. Building that trust now is crucial ahead of the 2024 elections, which brings the very real possibility of Donald Trump and Kari Lake on the same ballot. 

At the time, Richer said the county wanted to work with “trusted messengers” within the Republican ranks and noted that he had recently scheduled a tour for a group of West Valley Republicans. 

Since then, we’ve been wondering: Did the tour change hearts and minds? 

So we tracked down someone who went on the tour. Jan Shank is a higher-up in her local Republican club who attended and helped organize the tour. She worked on the Arizona Senate’s audit of the 2020 presidential election and said she saw upwards of 400 ballots in a row that voted for Joe Biden, which she called “statistically impossible.” That was enough to convince her that something shady was afoot.

Still, the self-described moderate Republican maintains she’s not an election conspiracy theorist. She’s willing to accept that the election was free and fair and that Republican candidates simply lost, she said — but only if elections officials could prove that there was no funny business in the signature verification process and offer up an answer she could believe about why ballot printers failed on Election Day 2022. 

The tour was nice, she said, but it didn’t change her mind. She quoted a friend on the tour who summed it up as, “It makes you think, but it doesn’t make you feel any better.”

“We went through the whole thing we saw where they verified signatures and we saw tabulators, and we got all these wonderful, logical answers to things that I knew didn't really happen,” she said. “The explanations that they were able to give me sort of didn't ring true. It was like an idealistic idea of what they wanted. And they just brushed over what did happen.”

Part of the reason Shank wasn’t fully convinced is she doesn’t exactly count Richer as a “trusted messenger.” Richer’s quick declaration that there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election made Shank suspicious, she said, because he hadn’t been in office long enough to know if there was election fraud. Since then, he’s been friendly with Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and he frequently derides Republicans he disagrees with as “MAGA Republicans, like it’s a bad word or something.”

We asked Shank if there is anything that elections officials could do to convince her the elections weren’t stolen. It doesn’t sound like she’ll ever be fully satisfied that the past elections were free and fair. But she wants to believe the 2024 election will be. 

Her friend Sally Pihl, who also took Richer’s tour, is less willing to be convinced. Pihl is a longtime poll worker who was embarrassed to be part of the 2022 election, with its long lines and downed printers. She’s absolutely convinced the mistakes were deliberate, and she’s concerned Republicans will never win another election because they’re all rigged.

“I have absolutely no faith, and I’m to the point where I’ve been doing this since 2003, I don’t know that I’ll do another one,” she said.  

But Shank is taking the opposite approach. She plans to sign up to be a poll worker. She wants to get trained to do signature verification for the county in 2024, saying if she saw firsthand that there were sufficient safeguards and the processes were being followed, she’d accept the election results, even if Republicans lost. 

But would she really, we asked? There’s no possible way to oversee the entire elections process or even the entire signature verification process. Wouldn’t she wonder if everyone was as diligent a worker as she was? Wouldn’t she just move the goalpost, as so many fraud fanatics have when their theories about how the election was stolen didn’t pan out?

No, she told us. She is willing to change her opinion about election fraud and accept the outcome of the 2024 election if she has evidence it’s free and fair. But at this point, she’s going to have to collect the evidence firsthand. 

“I’ve seen too much of the evidence on the other side to be able to swallow (the official explanation),” she said. 

Slow burn: As part of its ongoing probe into Jan. 6, the U.S. Department of Justice recently subpoenaed Secretary of State Adrian Fontes seeking information related to lawsuits from Donald Trump's campaign and from former Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. Investigator Jack Smith also talked to GOP lawmakers in the spring, Pitzl notes. But Smith didn’t talk to Doug Ducey, the former governor told the Washington Post recently. Andrew Weissman, a former FBI general counsel and former senior member of the Mueller Probe, told MSNBC that he was surprised to hear Ducey wasn’t contacted “if it’s true.”

Aren’t we all: Trump is souring on Kari Lake, the Daily Beast reports, citing operatives and aides in Trumpworld who say the president thinks Lake is a “publicity hound” who is stealing his spotlight as she attempts to become his vice presidential pick. 

“She’s a shameless, ruthless demagogue who wants power and will do whatever she has to do to get it,” a Trump adviser told The Daily Beast.

Stephen versus Steven: Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer has drawn his first opponent in his 2024 reelection bid, AZFamily’s Dennis Welch notes. Steven Hines, who has a background in IT, is running on a platform of election integrity. He will need about 6,200 valid signatures from registered Republicans in the county to qualify for the ballot. 

Hot as hell: It’s so hot that people are getting serious burns from just touching pavement, which can reach nearly 200 degrees, Cronkite News’ Erin Murphy reports. It’s not just Arizona — the whole planet is experiencing an incredibly hot summer, and it’s freaking scientists out, the Washington Post reports. And you can’t even go to a public pool in Phoenix to cool down because the city once again can’t find enough lifeguards to open them all, despite paying a $3,000 bonus, Cronkite’s Sydney Carruth reports. 

Find us poolside this summer, where we’ll be lifeguarding for that $3,000 bonus. Or if enough of you subscribe, we can just build our own pools.

Executive Order fallout: Lawmakers and prosecutors are not happy with Gov. Katie Hobbs’ recent executive orders. All but three of the state’s 15 county attorneys signed on to a letter asking her to rescind an executive order barring them from prosecuting abortion-related crimes and handing sole authority on those cases to Attorney General Kris Mayes, the Associated Press reports. (Even Republic columnist Laurie Roberts agreed with the prosecutors, urging Hobbs to rescind the order.) Meanwhile, House Speaker Ben Toma fired off his own letter alleging her executive order banning the state from backing “conversion therapy” is unconstitutional, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. And legislative Republicans incorrectly added several extra zeros in their assessment of how much it would cost to extend gender-affirming care coverage to state health care plans, as Hobbs did in yet another executive order. It would cost $788,000, not $788 million, Fischer reports. 

Jim Click means business: Republican megadonor and Tucson car magnate Jim Click has sworn off funding the Arizona Republican Party, he told Reuters in a story that highlights the AZGOP’s flailing financial status under Chairman Jeff DeWit. 

Let us pray: The Republican Party has a “glaring Mormon problem” according to Washington Post data columnist David Byler. Part of the problem is the Mormon church isn’t growing as fast as it used to, and the other part is that younger Mormons are leaving the GOP over Trump’s general style and the party’s staunch positions on abortion. 

The grass is always greener: Former House Democratic Leader Andres Cano officially resigned from the Legislature, making him the second Dem leader to bail on state lawmaking this year for a better gig. He’s going to Harvard, while former Senate Democratic Leader Raquel Terán resigned to run for Congress.  

The federal government is here to help: Officials from the Biden administration visited Arizona yesterday. Transportation officials announced new spending on new shuttle buses at the Grand Canyon, and Vice President Kamala Harris was at the Gila River Indian Community talking about tribal and environmental issues. 

You might think that the hottest item on last month’s town council agenda in Quartzsite — the town that has made its entire identity¹ off a failed experiment to introduce camels into the Sonoran Desert back in the 1850s — would be the reconsideration of a zoning change that allowed people to receive a temporary permit to house camels in town limits. 

But you’d be wrong. 

It was a decision about whether to install an eight-foot-tall “peace pole” on town property as part of a United Nations program that really got the local residents riled up as they debated whether it was a symbol of peace or the camel's nose under the tent for a United Nations takeover after several years of COVID. 

“I do want peace. We all want peace. But not at the expense of our freedoms,” one resident said. 

“The peace pole is a passive and subliminal way of promoting the United Nations as something good, but it is not. … It is an evil and nasty organization that wants to destroy the sovereignty of this country,” another said. 

“The UN peace agenda and the so-called peace pole are antithetical to and subvert our unalienable rights and are a violation of the U.S. Constitution,” another said. 

“It’s more than a peace pole. It’s planting a seed, and we do not want that tree to grow,” a fourth said.

1. Members of the city council even have little camels next to their nameplates.