KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
To talk about the home stretch of the 2024 election, the state being ordered to release a list of voters affected by a computer glitch and more, The Show sat down with Lorna Romero Ferguson, owner of Elevate Strategies, and Roy Herrera, former Congressional staffer.
Conversation highlights
MARK BRODIE: Roy, let me start with you about a court this week ordering Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to release the list of names of people who are affected by this MVD voter glitch, 200-something thousand voters. But the judge said the group that you’re releasing it to basically can’t make it public and can’t contact these voters until after Election Day.
We heard from Secretary Fontes basically saying he’s nervous about these voters being harassed before Election Day. I’m curious, as the lawyer in the room, what you make of this ruling?
ROY HERRERA: Well, first of all, it is election eve here, and I can tell you that I'm waking up in a cold sweat basically every night because of this election. But to your question, I’ve litigated a lot of public records lawsuits in Arizona. The law is pretty favorable and encourages public records to be released. It’s hard to keep that from happening.
So I’m not surprised by the judge’s ruling. But that being said, I share Secretary Fontes’ concerns about the idea that this information could get out there — information about voters could get out there — and folks could use that as a way to harass those particular voters. The idea, again, being that some partisan group — like the plaintiffs in this case, who are affiliated with Trump, affiliated with Stephen Miller — would go through the list, cherry pick who’s on this list that they think wouldn’t be a Trump voter and harass them. I think it is a very real concern.
Obviously, the judge has put some limitations on this pre-election. That’s a good thing. But of course, we all know that things don’t always end just on Election Day and that we are not gonna have results probably for at least a few days. There’s probably gonna be post-election litigation. So I think there’s still a very much a concern that I have that this list may be used in a way that could be bad.
BRODIE: Lorna, do you share those concerns?
LORNA ROMERO FERGUSON: Oh, 100%. I think if we were talking pre-2020 election cycle, I probably wouldn’t be as concerned with that list becoming public or being disseminated. But we’re in a completely different climate right now. Tensions are high, and we’re quickly approaching a very controversial election. And we’ve just seen a number of insane things happen this election cycle.
And so, yeah, that’s a legitimate concern about releasing that list of voters and what somebody with ill intentions may do. Yes, does that information need to become public, and does this need to be remedied, this issue that’s happened? Of course. But there’s a question of what people might do with this information and if they’re going to look into individual people and come up with false allegations that they never should have been a registered voter to begin with, etc.
And so, it really depends on what is going to happen on Tuesday or the days after Tuesday, how people are going to frame the people on these lists and use it to whatever political gain that they’re trying to get.
BRODIE: Well Roy, to the point that you were making … we’ll have some results on Election Day, but not final results. The county has been pretty clear about that, and that has been the case for many years, that we have not had final results on election night. What specifically concerns you about, let’s say, Nov. 6, when this group can start contacting the voters? What makes you nervous about what they might be doing?
HERRERA: Lorna hit on a really good point here, which is that this this issue, this MVD glitch issue is sort of wrapped up in a larger conversation, a larger issue about proof of citizenship and this idea of noncitizen voting that I think Republicans, or at least the Trump campaign has put forth across the country as an argument for why we shouldn’t trust the outcome and the results of an election.
So what I’m worried about, I think, is if the election results don’t go the way that I think the Trump campaign wants it to go, that they’ll use this list — and again this overall idea that there are noncitizens that are voting — to throw doubt into the results. That, I think, is my biggest concern.
BRODIE: They’ll say “Oh, look. This person should not have been voting. This person should not have been voting,” even though we don’t really know for whom they voted.
HERRERA: That’s right. Again, the personal information that these voters will be out there. They’ll probably investigate these voters. They’ll probably try to come up with ideas or sort of allegations that they shouldn’t have been eligible. And I imagine they’re probably gonna do that for voters that they don’t think voted their way. And there’s various ways they can probably guess who those voters would be.
So that’s my biggest concern, that it’s going to sort of get wrapped up into the larger conspiracy theories that some groups have put forth nationally about this idea that there are noncitizens voting, which studies have shown — I mean, we’ve just seen recently, other states have shown that that happens in such a rare occurrence that this idea that it is widespread or something like that is completely false.
BRODIE: Lorna, let me ask you about the people who have voted already, because voting has obviously been open for a while now, and more than 1 people across the state have already cast their ballots. And we’re not going to do a deep dive into who’s voting because we don’t know what’s on the ballots, of course. We know what parties and some of that stuff. But anything that you take away from what you’re seeing in terms of who has voted and from where they’re voting and that kind of thing?
ROMERO FERGUSON: Yeah, definitely.You’re seeing that Republican turnout and returning their early ballots is significantly higher than the past two election cycles. And that’s obviously because now there’s a larger effort from the Trump campaign and the AZ GOP to actually promote early voting and not try to actively stop it. And you can see that just in the data from 2020 and 2022, just the percentage amount. And it’s interesting to me to see, OK, now you have all of these Republicans that have returned to early voting — something that Republicans did traditionally before the 2020 election and before the pandemic and before, this anti-early voting rhetoric.
And it’s going to be a question to see how many of those voters remain Republicans on Election Day. Because usually the past two election cycles, you’ve seen such a huge delta between Republican and Democrat turnout Election Day. So it’s just a question of how many voters still remain for Republicans. But yeah, right now there is an advantage.
But we don’t know how many of those are swing Republicans that we’ve seen since the 2018 election, that are not afraid to vote for a Democrat top of the ballot. And how many of them are new Trump voters that they were able to register and get re-energized for this election cycle? So it’s going to be really interesting to see how those numbers break. But right now, Republican advantage in early voting, which just goes along with the Republican advantage in voter registration in general.
BRODIE: Roy, Republicans, as Lorna said, had kind of perfected early voting right up until former President Trump told them to stop doing it. Do you make anything of what we’re seeing so far in terms of the ballots returned?
HERRERA: I don’t for a lot of the reasons I think Lorna stated, which is to say that I think what’s happening is we’re going back to the norm pre-2020, where Republicans were returning their early ballots — as you said, sort of perfected that process before 2020. And then Democrats will probably do much better on Election Day.
I think that is my presumption on what this is showing so far. I think it’s difficult to sort of read anything more into that. I mean, if you can’t really use registration as sort of a proxy for how anyone’s doing, because again, to Lorna’s point, we don’t know. And I think the Harris campaign and myself believe that a lot of the independents are going to break towards Harris, and there’s going to be a sizable chunk of Republicans that will vote for Harris.
And we don’t know that for sure by just looking at the registration numbers. And so if you believe that is the case, then obviously you’re thinking that these early returns are actually much better for the Democrats than just looking at the registration numbers.
BRODIE: I’m curious about what you said about how Democrats you think will show up more on Election Day, because as we’ve seen over the last couple of cycles — and Lorna referenced this — Republicans have dominated Election Day in Arizona and other states as well. What’s leading you to to think that there will be more Democrats showing up on Election Day this time than maybe what we’ve seen in the last few cycles?
HERRERA: I think two things. One is kind of going back to what I said before, is a revert to the norm, right? So again, pre-2020 that was always sort of the way the Democrats kind of voted in some sense. But the other reason that gives me a lot of optimism is that I do think that ultimately operations and, and having a like a campaign infrastructure matters at some level.
BRODIE: The ground game.
HERRERA: The ground game. Right. And I do believe that the Democrats’ ground game, the (get out the vote) apparatus that has been assembled, is much better than the Republican one. Or I should say at least the Trump campaign's apparatus. And I say that because there’s hundreds, thousands of Democratic, operatives, volunteers, etc. that are going out there knocking on doors, getting the vote out. And I think that is going to lead to, you know, there being a significant increase in turnout on Election Day for Democrats.
And again, I think we all will probably agree that this is going to be a very tight race. I mean, the polling shows that. And in a tight race like that, I do think that that kind of infrastructure really matters. A GOTV really matters.
ROMERO FERGUSON: You know, it’s always a gamble, though, when you’re relying on people to turnout on Election Day. And that’s what has been so frustrating for me, watching the Republican Party the past two election cycles being so anti-early voting. It’s like, why not have the 30-plus of early voting and chase down those ballots and build out that infrastructure to contact those voters and make sure they turn in their ballots on time versus relying on somebody to be able to show up to a polling location or voting location on Election Day?
And who knows what could potentially happen?
BRODIE: You’ve got to get the votes in the bank.
ROMERO FERGUSON: Get them in the bank early versus hoping and praying that somebody is actually able to turn out and vote on Election Day. And so I understand Democrats have a ground game. Republicans do too. I mean, I’m actually quite impressed by the Trump campaign and their advocates of what they’ve done in terms of chasing down ballots.
Again, it's an about-face from the last two election cycles, but they’ve put in the infrastructure and the time and energy to chase down Republican ballots. And it’s working from them now because I think they’ve learned that relying on Election Day is just not feasible.
And so I just think that’s a big gamble for Democrats to just kind of cross your fingers and be like, “OK, let’s just hope everyone turns out on Tuesday and it doesn’t rain or something that might prevent people from coming out and voting.”
