The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission confirmed it will not allow a Green Party U.S. Senate candidate to participate in its October debate.
The commission and its broadcast partner the Arizona Media Association adopted a new rule this year that requires candidates to receive at least 1% of the total ballots cast in all primaries for their office to qualify for general election debates in statewide and federal races.
That amounted to about 12,400 votes in the U.S. Senate race, well above the 282 votes Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana received.
The rules apply to 16 debates co-hosted by the Clean Elections Commission and the Arizona Media Association covering federal races, ballot initiatives and key state and county races, said AMA President and CEO Chris Kline.
Both Quintana and Republican candidate Kari Lake asked Clean Elections and the AMA to allow Quintana to participate anyway, arguing he should be able to debate because his name will appear on the general election ballot alongside Lake and Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego.
“They're actually discriminating against us and censoring the news from the public,” Quintana said.
Clean Elections and the Arizona Media Association denied Quintana’s request late last week.
“We received a request this week to re-evaluate this guideline and have spent the last several days speaking with involved partners and doing an internal review,” Kline said in a statement on Aug. 30. “The results of this review affirm our preexisting guidelines with no additional changes.”
The 1% rule made it virtually impossible for Green Party candidates to qualify for Clean Elections’ debates, because the party — which only regained state recognition in December — only has about 3,300 registered voters statewide.
In Quintana’s case, he would not have met the threshold to qualify for the debate even if every single Green Party voter in the state cast a ballot for him in the primary election.
“There’s a big, big contrast between our point of view and the points of view that are going to be presented,” Quintana said, citing Green Party positions that he says are not shared by Lake or Gallego, including support for a ceasefire in Gaza and opposition to a controversial proposed copper mine in Santa Rita Mountains.
Both Kline and the Clean Elections Commission cited the Arizona Green Party’s relatively small footprint in statements they issued last after denying the requests to exempt Quintana from the new rule, which was not in place in 2022 when Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Marc Victor was allowed to participate in a debate with Republican Blake Masters and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.
“The '1% total ballots cast threshold' for general elections debates was established this election cycle as an editorial policy of the Arizona Media Association and informed by an evaluation of Clean Elections’ debate work group, which met in 2023. The editorial decision is designed to dedicate studio resources in a way that maximizes the limited airtime and for voters to have visibility to the candidates that met the votes threshold,” according to Clean Elections’ statement.
The new rule also blocked Green Party candidates from participating in other debates for Congress and the Arizona Corporation Commission.
The 1% rule does not apply to Clean Elections legislative debates, said a spokesperson for the commission, who confirmed Green Party legislative candidates were invited to participate in those debates.
