KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
To talk about the upcoming retirement of a longtime Arizona congressman Raul Grijalva, the Arizona connections to Jack Smith’s new court filing in the case against former President Donald Trump and more, The Show sat down with former state school superintendent, Jaime Molera, with the firm Molera Alvarez; and former congressional staffer Roy Herrera.
Conversation highlights
MARK BRODIE: Roy, let me start with you. Around 120,000 more voters now found to not have provided proof of citizenship when registering to vote due to a computer glitch with the Motor Vehicle Division. We thought that there was, just sort of the first round about 98,000, but now there’s a lot more.
What are the implications of this, do you think both practically and sort of — I don’t want to say philosophically, but sort of in the perception of people?
ROY HERRERA: It would have been better, obviously, if the entire population had been announced at once. That would have been cleaner. But from my understanding is that this new population is exactly situated as the prior population — the prior approximately 90,000 people. So these are individuals who have not shown proof of citizenship due to that MVD glitch. But are full-ballot voters, meaning they can vote for federal, state and local candidates.
And of course, when this issue was discovered originally, I think the governor and the secretary of state and the attorney general did the right thing in that they went to court, they went to the state Supreme Court to get some judicial and some legal certainty about this. And then the court found that these folks should remain on the ballot as full-ballot voters.
So this new tranche of people, while it’s unfortunate it came out later, are the same type of people, and they are going to be allowed to have the same voting rights, the same ability to vote full-ballot. Obviously there will be some conspiracy theorists that will probably use this to their own ends.
But I think what is important to point out is in that litigation, the litigation before the state Supreme Court, you had Republicans and Republican-leaning groups argue to the court that these folks, these individuals, who have not provided proof of citizenship at all, should remain as full-ballot voters. So, I repeat, Republicans and Republican-leaning groups argue that these folks who have not provided proof of citizenship should be remaining on the voter rolls.
So it’ll be interesting. You know, one might say there is a little bit of hypocrisy there, because it’s probably because of the fact that this population leans Republican, but that is the position that the Republicans took. And that’s something that should be remembered.
BRODIE: Jaime, do you anticipate that the state GOP will take the same or have the same kind of feeling about this group? I mean, they’ve called for Secretary Fontes to resign over this.
JAIME MOLERA: So I’m, I’m a little bit surprised that Roy is shocked that there’s politics going on in a presidential election year. No, I think of course they’re going to continue to do that. And of course they’re going to continue to make this a political issue.
But one of the things, as Roy pointed out, there were more Republicans in this list than there were Democrats. And so, of course they want to allow them to vote, but they’re also going to use the political leverage of saying, “See, they’re allowing possibly all these people that are non-citizens the ability to vote.”
The only the only trouble I have with how this rolled out is, I think that the governor and the secretary of state in particular should have been more aggressive in making this a public and putting this out there, getting, for instance, the speaker of the House and president of the Senate and including them in these discussions about what is happening and how we’re trying to fix this thing.
But there wasn’t a lot of that kind of communications. It’s been very insular. And it’s been, of course, through the court process. But I think the problem with this is that it surprised a lot of people. A lot of folks were like, “Wwait a minute, what’s going on here?” And so that’s why that kind of outreach to the public is so critical, but we just didn’t see that.
BRODIE: Do you think that this will, as Roy alluded to, lead to more conspiracy theories and maybe diminish people’s faith in what the results of the election actually are?
MOLERA: Well, of course, in certain sectors. Absolutely it will. Let’s just be honest about that. But if there’s a game plan on how to roll this out, how to fix this going forward, then I think that starts to minimize it. And I think the conspiracy theories will always be in those little corners of the state, where regardless of what happens or what people say or what the data says, they’re always going to be talking about conspiracies.
But if it’s managed in a way that’s public, that has the confidence of business organizations, political organizations saying, “Yeah, this makes a lot of sense,” then I think you can mitigate that. Quite a bit. And the other thing is that the star cards, now that people need to have …
BRODIE: The travel ID.
MOLERA: Exactly. As that is being mandated now that you have to have it by next year, I think that starts to mitigate it, too, because a lot of folks, you’re going to need to show your passport or something that says you’re a citizen in order to get that.
So all of those things combined, I think, will start to lessen this issue.
BRODIE: Roy, I’m curious what you make of the lawsuit filed by Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, Republican-aligned group, trying to get the names of these 200-some-odd-thousand voters. The secretary of State’s office is saying, “We can’t give it to you. We don’t have it quite yet, and we won’t have it before the election.” The secretary of state’s office also says they’re concerned that this will lead to harassment and intimidation of voters.
HERRERA: Well, it’s that latter point that’s pretty concerning to me, that the Secretary is pointing out, is what is the purpose for this list? Why do you want it? And we obviously have concerns giving out this list of third parties who may try to contact these voters. And in some instances may try to harass these voters. And so I think that’s a rightful concern that the Secretary of State has.
Now about whether they have the list already or need time to produce it or whatever, I don’t know the answer to that. But I think that it should be a question here in this litigation: Who is this group, and why exactly does this group want that list?
BRODIE: Jaime, I want to ask you about the court filing unsealed this week from special counsel Jack Smith in the 2020 election case against former President Trump. You talked about Roy being shocked before. We should all be shocked, right, that there’s an Arizona connection to this, right? There’s never an Arizona connection to any of these national election-related stories.
MOLERA: No, of course not. Well, it’s pretty damning, let’s be honest. And I think President Trump now realizes that he probably has to win in order to avoid a lot of the consequences that might fall out from this special counsel’s report. So it’s interesting that in Arizona, we were at the heart of that, right? We were in the eye of the storm. Gov. (Doug) Ducey was getting calls by President Trump.
BRODIE: Some very publicly, yeah.
MOLERA: That’s right. His ringtone had “Hail to the Chief,” and it was playing while he was giving a press conference. So yes, I think it will have implications. But I think as far as how it’s going to impact the election, I’m not so sure it is.
Because the folks that really believe that President Trump’s a criminal, they believe that already. Those that believe that it’s fake news and this is yet another liberal attempt to get at President Trump, they’re going to believe that already. It's going to be interesting to see that very small percentage of Americans or Arizonans, if this is going to make an impact on them.
BRODIE: Well Roy, it’s interesting. And there’s been — this is not something that I’m coming up with — a lot of folks have said that one of the interesting differences between Kamala Harris’ campaign and President Biden’s is that Harris is spending less time sort of talking about former President Trump as an existential threat to democracy, spending a little less time talking about things like Jan. 6 and attempts to overturn the election.
To Jaime’s point, there’s sort of that middle group of people who are undecided, persuadable, whatever word you want to use. Especially in a place like Arizona, is something like this usable by the Democrats, by the Harris campaign to try to convince voters who are maybe on the fence that they shouldn’t vote for Trump and should vote for her?
HERRERA: Well, starting with the Jack Smith filing, the ties to Arizona were specifically stated in there. And this is something that also is not particularly shocking, is that in the instances that Arizona is referenced, with Ducey and others, it had to do with allegations that Trump was making and then a response for a request for evidence. Like, what’s the evidence for this particular fraud that you’re saying?
The passage about Doug Ducey was interesting to me because he asked for the evidence and they never got back to him. And so what’s not shocking to me is that the Trump campaign in 2020 couldn’t find any evidence of any kind of fraud in Arizona or anywhere else.
And so going into this election cycle, this presidential election, I am reminded of the moment in the vice presidential debate between Walz and Vance, when Walz asked him whether Trump had won or not in 2020, and Vance couldn’t answer the question. And of course, that was immediately cut into an ad by the Harris campaign. A very effective ad, I think.
So I still think that it is an issue to many voters, in Arizona and elsewhere, because you have a candidate on the other side in Trump that still refuses to acknowledge that he lost in 2020 and continues to put out these, these conspiracy theories, these allegations without evidence related to election fraud.
BRODIE: Is there any chance you think we’re going to see Doug Ducey testifying, assuming this goes to court? Do either of you think there’s a chance that someone like Doug Ducey would testify?
MOLERA: I think he’ll try and avoid it like the plague if he ever wants to get back into politics. And I’m sure that at some point he probably will. So I think he’d want to stay away from this as much as possible.
BRODIE: Roy, what do you think?
HERRERA: I think he would totally want to stay away from it as much as possible, whether it happens or not. This is going to be so complicated by the immunity decision with the U.S. Supreme Court and sort of how things proceed. But I’m sure he will try to avoid it as much as possible, have a previous engagement that day or something like that.
