KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
Marcus Dell’Artino of First Strategic and Dawn Penich of Agave Strategy sat down with The Show to talk about a proposal to change the way elections are run in Arizona, a new poll looking at the governor’s race and more.
Conversation highlights
MARK BRODIE: Marcus, we heard from state Rep. Alexander Kolodin in the montage just now saying that Arizonans are tired of chaos in our elections, which is one of the reasons he is putting forward the Arizona Secure Elections Act.
Do you think Arizonans are tired of chaos in our elections?
DELL’ARTINO: I wish we would rephrase that a little bit. I don’t think there is chaos in our elections. I think what people are trying to say is we would like to have a result quicker, faster.
Right now it might take weeks to count those ballots that people are dropping off at the polls. I don’t want to be the person who gives everybody bad news, but 90% of the time, the people that are complaining are the people that are causing the problem.
Those are the people that walk into the polling place and drop their ballots in the bin. And we went through this last session, there was a number of proposals to sort of tackle this issue. I think that we are closer to a solution now. It sounds like Tom Galvin from the county has got some energy behind some of these solutions.
I am a little bit more cautious just because I think ... it’s going to take a lot of voter training to convince people that you cannot drop your ballot off on election day in a bin. And there will be some, a lot of angst, I think, on that first try that we do that.
BRODIE: Well, when you say that we’re getting closer to a solution, do you think this is it?
DELL’ARTINO: I think parts of it are, I think that, largely based around that ability to count ballots faster than election night is certainly ... election night, and you should have the answer by whatever, 1 in the morning. But certainly in the morning you wake up and you’ll have sort of finality to the election.
I think that that is probably where we’re headed. I think there are some provisions in here that are probably a little bit more controversial.
BRODIE: So Dawn, one of the items, or I guess one of the sections that’s been fairly controversial — to Marcus’ point — is what to do with early voting. And this would say that all early ballots have to be cast by 7 p.m. on the Friday before Election Day. If you’re on the active early voting list, they’ll basically do away with that because every two years you’d have to reaffirm the address that you want your ballot sent to.
Is this a solution to trying to get results faster?
DAWN PENICH: I mean, these are ideas. But what my main concern is is that we’re starting to use this notion of election security and improvement as just a code word for what, in effect, is actually disenfranchising people who many of these proposers want to see voting less, want to see kind of cut out of the system — like younger voters, like people who work two jobs just to make it, you know, just to make rent and don’t have the kind of flexibility that these kinds of changes would necessitate.
Not only have I not ever thought of Arizona’s election system as chaotic, I have and many people have had the opposite reaction from folks in other states of, “You guys get to vote by mail? You get to drop off your ballots? You have all these options to make sure that people get to vote the way they want to? That’s amazing!”
Other states hate the limited options that they have. And look, have often over decades looked to Arizona to actually expand access to voting and the many wonderful programs that we have here. So would it be nice to know a little earlier? Sure, lots of people say that. But I don’t think that that has a higher premium for most Arizona voters than the convenience that we have all gotten very used to — including dropping your ballot off on Election Day.
BRODIE: So Dawn, this is a proposal that Gov. [Katie] Hobbs would not interact with. This would go directly to the voters if the Legislature passes it. Is there reason to think the Legislature won’t pass this?
PENICH: Oh well, once they get into that game of those direct referrals to the ballot and the calculus around who’s going to come out for which ones, and importantly, whether there’s going to be any money or desire to publicize what they’ve now put on the ballot. That’s when things start to fall apart.
We’ve seen many times in the past the Legislature will put all kinds of stuff on the ballot, and then somehow they just kind of fade away because no one wanted to then do the homework of explaining this to voters, putting money into a campaign. So at the end of the day, that’s how we see a lot of these ideas that we hear about in December, January, February eventually just kind of fade into nothing.
Election integrity probably isn’t one of those. This is the drumbeat at municipal, statewide and federal levels. But what kinds of changes it undergoes, I think this is not the version that we’ll ultimately see.
BRODIE: Yeah. Marcus, I mean, the referendum is, I think, a page long, so a little bit short on details at the moment. Presumably, to Dawn’s point, will get fleshed out a little bit, assuming that the Legislature passes it. And of course, we’re a little less than a year away from the actual election, so a lot can happen.
But this is, as Dawn said, this is a big issue for a lot of voters, especially a lot of Republican voters.
DELL’ARTINO: Yeah. I mean, there’s no denying that. It has been the drumbeat for eight years. But sometimes I caution my Republican friends, take a breath here for a second and put it in context of the fact that Republicans have dominated early voting since its inception.
We invented it, we mastered it, and we beat the Democrats every single election cycle on early voting. So when you make these changes, keep that in mind that you very well may be causing a bigger problem than a solution. But that being said, I think that there will be some sort of resolution on, on parts of this resolution that Rep. Kolodin’s put forward.
And I expect voters will see something at the ballot. To the end of who’s going to fund (the campaign), I would expect — going out on a limb here, I haven’t talked to anybody about it — but I would expect Turning Point would probably be adamantly against it. But then again, I’ve seen initiatives where they’ve taken a pass, too.
I mean, Arizona’s got a significant tax increase on the special health care district that I thought at some point Turning Point would show up and fight against a tax increase, and they didn’t. So it’s a difficult cycle to predict.
BRODIE: One more quick thing on elections before we move on, Marcus. I want to get your take on the numbers from this most recent election. We heard this week some debate about the number of signatures that were rejected by the county recorder’s office being about three times as high as in recent elections.
We heard just a moment ago Recorder Heap saying, this is great. We heard Supervisor Galvin saying this is not great. Does this portend anything going into next year’s midterms?
DELL’ARTINO: More of the same, I would expect.
BRODIE: More signatures being rejected?
DELL’ARTINO: Right. And I’ll be honest with you. It’s sort of a personal problem for me because I don’t put my phone number down on my ballot when I return it because I don’t really want more government entities having my phone number. So I have no idea whether my vote got counted or not.
I’m gonna go back, obviously, and look and see. But it gives you sort of a point on how this can affect voters. Now Sen. [Ruben] Gallego, I think, popped up and said he does put his phone number on his ballot and.
BRODIE: And said that he had to cure his ballot during this last election.
DELL’ARTINO: He did. But I think that, I do think it’s, when you, when you look back historically on how many have been rejected and you triple that number, it is cause for a concern. You are disenfranchising some voters.
And my question is, let’s go through and analyze, who did we disenfranchise? Was it more Republicans, or was it more Democrats?
BRODIE: Yeah, I wonder if this is a matter of, you could make the argument not enough, we’re being rejected before. Too many votes were being counted that shouldn’t. You could make the argument that votes this time that should have been counted weren’t.
Is there a way to really find out what the right number is, what the sweet spot is?
PENICH: Yeah. If nothing else, then I think that we need to continue to look at this issue. And it looks like the supervisors are very interested in exactly what happened here as a test balloon of what is the process going forward.
Heap says that this was a result of him making improvements to how these signatures are checked. Election workers can see more signatures to compare that ballot to. He put a bipartisan review committee instead of just one person looking at their own kind of judgment two times.
So those might be true improvements. But in the bigger context of this is one county recorder, then we have the bill by Kolodin and others in the Legislature, then we’re hearing the same things from the Trump administration about possibly putting National Guard and intervening in state elections.
When you look at all of that together, everything has to be looked at. And it is up to the press, the public, the supervisors to not let anything go unquestioned ahead of what we all agree is going to be the most controversial, the most high-tension election cycle any of us have ever heard of.
BRODIE: Which I feel is what people have been saying for the last couple of election cycles, right? The most intense, the most sort of highly partisan, controversial tense. This sounds like, you think, it’s just going to be a continuation of what we’ve been seeing the last number of years?
PENICH: Well yeah, and I think that some of the new people — last cycle, when you had Republicans on one side with some of these “election integrity” bills and efforts. But then you had a county recorder like Stephen Richer saying, “Everybody calm down. We’re doing this the right way.”
Well, now those personalities have changed. Now we have an election denier as our county recorder. And so it’s not just more of the same. I think this is cause for even more attention and care and possibly alarm.
