KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
Barrett Marson of Marson Media and Mike Haener of Lumen Strategies joined The Show to talk about continuing squabble over election responsibilities in Maricopa County, a legislative resignation and more.
Conversation highlights
MARK BRODIE: So, Barrett, some changes could be coming to Arizona elections. We don't quite know which ones yet. The House and Senate are advancing slightly different proposals that would have to go to voters to see if they want to make changes.
One of the biggest ones though, potentially gives the Legislature the option in the future of ending mail-in voting, which is something that the vast majority of Arizona voters use.
BARRETT MARSON: Yeah, it would be great to end voting for 85% of the people who vote by mail and vote early. Great option there. Look, if you wanna vote at the polls, if you wanna stand in line and fill out a two-page or three-page ballot, more power to you. You can do that.
But if you wanna — for a generation, I mean, Mark, I don't even think you could vote when Arizona instituted —
BRODIE: I appreciate that, Barrett, thank you.
MARSON: When Arizona instituted vote by mail. It has been wildly successful and wildly safe and accurate. And nobody — well, no sane, reasonable person — could say anything other than vote by mail is a success and people love it. Give the people what they want. And they clearly want; 85% vote by mail.
BRODIE: Well, yeah, and Mike, I mean, as Barrett said, like so many people use this. If this were to go to the ballot, like could this potentially be a drag on other things? Like it seems like the campaign against the possibility of ending mail in voting would kind of write itself.
MIKE HAENER: Oh, definitely. As Barrett said, 85% or more people vote by mail. If you're going to take that option away from them, they're likely going to not be happy and actually vote against it and potentially vote against all the other things that the Legislature puts on the ballot. Because, well, if they're gonna put that on, I don't understand these other things. And they've gotta be bad too because this one's bad.
MARSON: One thing I will note is there's no cost to putting something on the ballot from the Legislature. If you remember ... two years ago, the Legislature put on eight things. One or two of them passed. Most of them failed. There's no cost.
They could put 30 things on the ballot. There was no electoral cost, financial cost, anything to the Legislature for putting something on the ballot. So they may put it on the ballot and it may lose and you just go, "Oh, well."
HAENER: But there is a cost to the counties who have to print those ballots and all the poll workers who have to sit there for an extra time while people are filling out ballots. There is a cost to it.
MARSON: Hopefully my wife isn't listening, but counties shmounties.
BRODIE: Wow. Hopefully she isn't listening. I mean, Barrett, do you think, are these issues big enough where there could potentially be electoral costs if these are on the ballot and voters decide we don't like this?
MARSON: I don't think so, because there's going to be so much other important things on the ballot, whether it's governor, Congress. Obviously, for the first time in a decade, we don't have a Senate race. But we have the governor. We have, obviously, the members of Congress.
BRODIE: All the statewide offices.
MARSON: Every statewide office and the Legislature.
Those, and we'll have maybe some initiatives that will bring out people. There may be even a repeal of the marijuana statutes, the recreational marijuana. So there will be other things to bring out people.
And again, back to the mail-in. If I've got to sit at my kitchen table and fill out a couple of extra bubbles, whatever, that's not a problem.
And I don't think voters are so discerning that they'll go, "I can't believe the Legislature put this on the ballot." I don't think voters understand whether citizens put it on the ballot or the Legislature put it on the ballot. It's just on the ballot. So I don't think there will be any cost to Republicans for that other than it just overloads the ballot.
HAENER: And remember, we've now moved the primary election to the end of July.
BRODIE: Yeah, it's a little earlier.
HAENER: So I don't know, do you get to stand out in 112-degree weather waiting for your turn at the polling place?
MARSON: Well, look, what's the difference between late July and early August? It's still just north of hell in Arizona.
HAENER: Late July with no early voting and early August with early voting. There's a giant difference.
MARSON: And remember, your listeners will like to know that there is a real possibility that the primary gets moved to May going forward. Not this year — starting in 2028, the primary would be in May.
BRODIE: Interesting.
HAENER: Let's not go there yet. There's a long process before that.
MARSON: If you can have me on in 2028, that would be great.
BRODIE: We'll book that when we're done today.
MARSON: May of 2028.
Mike, there is this giant kerfuffle going on in Maricopa County where the Board of Supervisors, which is controlled by Republicans, and the county recorder, who is also a Republican, can't seem to agree on, well, a lot of things when it comes to elections.
Who should be doing what, who is proposing what, what is okay, what is not OK. There was a hearing this week where the recorder was sort of compelled to testify. He sort of acknowledge that something that one of his staff members had said was not entirely accurate.
This seems like — I mean, I don't, I don't want to characterize it, but I guess how do you characterize it?
HAENER: Insanity.
BRODIE: OK.
HAENER: There again, it's a 4-to-1 Republican to Democrat board. This is a Republican county recorder who replaced a Republican county recorder. You would think again that they would be aligned in how they're going to do this. You know, the split happened, I think, when there was a Democratic recorder and the county Board of Supervisors took over certain functions.
But let's just get together and stop wasting taxpayer money and get on the same page. Voting in Arizona is secure. As Barrett already talked about, early voting is secure. There is no fraud. There is nothing that people should be worried about in elections and counting ballots. And Maricopa County needs to figure out how they're going to move forward.
MARSON: You know, Mark, a couple of Recorder Justin Heap's employees under oath said that there had been some disenfranchisement. The board asked, "OK, tell us what that disenfranchisement is. We want to know so that there isn't going forward. Tell us what that is."
And he could not really explain that. And essentially he sent the entire bus fleet of Valley Metro over his staffers in that meeting and really didn't defend them or didn't back up their claims under oath.
And so I think we got into the problem with a lot of some of these election deniers is they make wild claims. They have zero evidence.
BRODIE: So what does this mean? There are jurisdictional elections going on this spring. There's obviously, as we talked about, the primaries coming up over the summer. What does it mean that the state's most populous county at this point can't seem to get its act together on elections?
MARSON: Well, first of all, I do disagree with that. The board passed a resolution dividing the duties. And there is an ongoing court case of which the judge is like, "Hey, you guys really need to figure this out."
The county Board of Supervisors has given Heap so much of what he has asked for, including IT positions, with which I don't think your listeners care who's doing the IT stuff. That's not really important, but something very important to Justin Heap. They've given him half of the IT staff.
HAENER: Wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't want the Cyber Ninjas involved in IT at the county, half under contract.
MARSON: Under the contract, half of the ninjas will be there. There will be some ninjas.
BRODIE: I don't think that's actually true. That part is not true.
MARSON: I might be mistaken.
BRODIE: Is it concerning though, Mike, that as Barrett said, the board did propose a new what's called a shared services agreement to figure out who's doing what for elections, but it's not fully agreed to yet. Like, does it matter going into this summer's primary that in February, there's still this acrimony between these parties over elections?
HAENER: Yeah, it's concerning. But at the end of the day, it's gonna get resolved. The election is going to happen. It's going to be run professionally and well and again, there will be no fraud. The election results will be valid.
MARSON: And we've seen a couple of elections — on a small scale, of course, the Congressional District 7 race to replace Raúl Grijalva. All these elections pretty much went off without a hitch or certainly significant problems. So this election will happen. And the board clearly is, you know, committed, and it's got a lot of experience doing elections.
And so I'm not worried about will, but it is just this fighting from the Recorder's Office, and it's unclear really what his goal is. Because as we heard in the meeting, they won't even put in writing what they want, what the Recorder wants. He will not put in writing what he wants, other than Supervisor [Debbie] Lesko put out a tweet.
That's what we want. We want that 30-word tweet. That's their, give us the tweet.
BRODIE: Interesting.
MARSON: Just put that in a order and boom, we're done. And it's like, mmm, it's got to be a little bit more.
