Republican lawmaker introduces bill to change how candidates are ordered on Arizona ballots

A Republican lawmaker out of Scottsdale is proposing a bill that would change the order in which politicians’ names appear on ballots.

Currently, that’s determined by the winner of the last governor’s race.

Since Gov. Katie Hobbs is a Democrat, candidates of that party appeared above Republican candidates in counties where she got the most votes.

Rep. Alexander Kolodin says that can be unfair.

"It provides a statistical advantage to the group of candidates listed first," Kolodin said.

His HB 2045 would require that the order of candidates for each race on the general election ballot be rotated among voting precincts in each county so that each party gets an equal chance of being in that first position.

The current system -- the one based on who won the last governor's race -- meant that in the 2022 election Republicans were listed ahead of Democrats in all races in 11 of the state's 15 counties where Doug Ducey outpolled Democrat David Garcia. That included Maricopa which has more voters than the other 14 counties combined.

The Democratic National Committee and its allies thought that system is so unfair that they filed suit in 2019 asking a federal judge to rule the system illegal.

Howard Fischer/Capitol Media Services

To back their arguments, they cited research from a political science professor who estimated that first-listed candidates get an average advantage of 2.2 percentage points. And the margin, according to Jonathan Rodden, can reach 5.6 percentage points.

All that, argued attorney Sarah Gonski, explains why Arizona law requires rotation of names on primary election ballots. And she urged U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa to extend that rotation to general elections.

The judge refused. And the Democrats had no better luck going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, however, Kolodin says they have a point.

"It provides statistical advantage to the group of candidates listed first,'' he said -- exactly what the Democrats were arguing in court.

So what's changed?

One thing is that Hobbs beat Republican Kari Lake in the 2022 gubernatorial race. And that meant Democrats got top billing in the just-completed election in five counties, including Maricopa and Pima, where three out of every four registered voters reside.

That would be repealed if the Republican-controlled Legislature approves his plan and the governor signs it, replaced by the system of random rotation.

But Kolodin also conceded there is some politics behind his move to have the Legislature revamp the law versus having it decided by a federal judge.

"The Democrats were suing to try to change the law to suit their purposes,'' he said. But Kolodin said Humetewa was right in concluding it was not the role of the courts to make such decisions.

Instead, he said, that's the role of the Legislature which then -- and now -- has been controlled by Republicans.