KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
Barrett Marson of Marson Media and Democratic strategist Tony Cani joined The Show to talk about President Donald Trump’s executive order to end mail-in voting, the repeal of Cesar Chavez Day in Arizona and more.
Conversation highlights
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let’s start with voting — voting by mail in particular here. There’s a lot kind of happening on this front this week. We had an executive order come down from the president, a sweeping one that would kind of federalize mail-in voting nationwide.
It would create a national list of eligible voters. It would restrict who gets mail-in ballots. This was immediately challenged by Democratic groups. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says she’ll sue about it.
Barrett, as we know, the vast majority of voters in our state vote by mail. I think it’s more than 80%. Why do Republicans target mail-in voting this way?
BARRETT MARSON: Well, first let me say I’m a Republican that’s old enough to remember when Republicans really were against some sort of national ID, so that there would be some national database that we would be in. Seems ridiculous to me that that should not be Republican orthodoxy. So that’s number one.
Number two, as one of your voices earlier said, more than 80% of people vote by mail here in Arizona, vote early. We love voting early. Republicans are the ones who instituted this. And it was one best sort of election reforms that we have done in Arizona’s history.
GILGER: We were a trailblazer in that.
MARSON: Absolutely. We’ve been doing it for over a generation. It is safe and secure. And I don’t care what they do in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or wherever else, but in Arizona it is a safe and secure form of voting.
And I say hands off our ballots.
GILGER: So, Tony, we’ve been seeing these attacks on mail-in voting from Republicans for many years now. Every time this happens and hits the headlines or we have an executive order like we did this week, what are Democrats thinking?
TONY CANI: Well, one thing I always think about is the fact that for years, Democrats would struggle with vote by mail. Vote by mail was something that helped Republicans win elections in our state until conspiracy theorists started to convince Republican voters that vote by mail was something that shouldn’t be happening.
And that’s really what this is about, is that now these people have convinced, MAGA types have convinced large chunks of a small group of Republicans that there’s some fraud that can come out of this that doesn’t happen, and they want to restrict voting and make it harder to vote.
And we don’t need to do a poll. We don’t need to speculate. We know that a vast, vast majority of Arizonans of both political parties vote by mail.
And I think part of the reason why this happens so much is that there is an economy that’s built around this type of election denialism, where there are groups that make money from donors saying that they’re going to stop this type of fraud. They’re going to find out what happened in the 2020 election and all this kind of stuff.
And so it’s just a beast that feeds itself. But from the president’s perspective, it seems much more nefarious than that. It seems like this is absolutely 100% an attempt — an illegal attempt — to try to influence who gets to vote in elections.
MARSON: Yeah, Tony, I’ll disagree with you in one place: It’s not an economy that’s built around this. It’s a grift that is built around this.
CANI: Yeah, it’s a grift.
MARSON: People are making money sowing doubt about many things in the election world, but especially mail-in voting. And there is in Arizona — and I’m not vouching for Pennsylvania or any other state — but in Arizona it is safe and secure, and that’s just the way it is.
And again, you know, 80-plus percent of people use it because it’s so convenient to sit at your kitchen table and fill out a ballot.
CANI: Especially when you have long ballots like we have in Arizona with all these ballot initiatives that the Republican legislators are dumping on —
MARSON: It’s not that, it’s the judges. There’s 40 judges on the ballot.
GILGER: Well, we’ll see this time around. It might be both. But I wonder this, too, because there’s also this debate about the late earlies, right? The people dropping off those early ballots on Election Day, which I will totally cop to having done before.
MARSON: Oh, absolutely. I used to be part of the problem, there’s no doubt about that.
GILGER: And it slows down election results and makes it harder for that process to happen quickly. And there’s a lot of efforts locally to try to speed that up.
What do you both make of those? Because in general, elections officials will say it’s not any slower than it used to be. We’re just having closer elections.
MARSON: Right. And honestly, I don’t even have a problem with your ballot has to be in by the Friday before the election, wherever some of the deadlines are. I don’t have a problem with that. Or if you want to drop off your ballot at a poll that you have to show your ID or the signature. Those kinds of things actually I don’t have a problem with.
Because we live in a society, right or wrong, where we want answers immediately. And so when the polls close at 7 and that first release is at 8, why is it that we’re counting four days later?
It’s because, Lauren, you and I were part of the problem. “Oh, I want to get all the mail. I want to make sure there’s no October surprise. So I’m going to fill out my ballot late in the voting period and then just drop it off on Election Day.”
CANI: Or maybe you’re undecided. Or maybe there was news. Some people hold on to their ballot because they haven’t made up their mind yet, and they know that they have extra time. I’m someone who thinks that the majority of the people who care about getting results on election night are people who sit and talk into microphones about elections and the kind of people who get paid to work in elections.
I think that obviously many people have taken advantage of the amount of time it does take to accurately count these votes to sow doubt. And then they’re saying, "Why is it taking so long? It must be that they’re cheating." And then they go, "Look, all these people think that there’s cheating because it took so long."
GILGER: Does it undermine voter confidence, you think? A little bit?
CANI: I think it’s a vulnerability in the sense that people who want to undermine voter confidence use it to undermine voter confidence.
MARSON: And remember, no matter what the deadline is, people will wait till the deadline. If the deadline is Election Day, they’re going to wait then. If the deadline is Friday before, they will meet the deadline. They’ll do it on Thursday. Or if the deadline is Tuesday, they’ll do it on Monday.
GILGER: So you don’t think moving up that deadline would disenfranchise voters?
MARSON: No, I don’t think so at all.
GILGER: What do you think, Tony?
CANI: I think it probably would. I think that at least in the period immediately when they change it, it will. And so again, it just comes down to sort of like what it is that we’re, we’re prioritizing.
GILGER: All right, I want to talk about another big story this week. Arizona lawmakers voted almost unanimously to repeal Cesar Chavez Day. And our Gov. Katie Hobbs signed that legislation this week.
And I say almost unanimously because there was a Democratic effort on the floor to not just repeal, but rename it Farmworkers Day.
Some really emotional testimony from some lawmakers that we heard at the beginning of The Show. And I wonder, Barrett, what do you make of that argument for a Farmworkers Day and the Republican response to it, which we also heard, which was sort of like, “We don’t honor every other profession”?
MARSON: Well, yeah, I agree. I mean we don’t have Cooks Day or National Transportation Workers Day. You know, we don’t do those kinds of things.
And I think Cesar Chavez, now we look at him a little differently. Up until just a couple of weeks ago, he was looked at as sort of a national hero and someone who led the civil rights fight.
Now of course we do look at him a little differently, and it’s wise to take him off of the name of schools and streets and state holidays and things like that. Cities have started taking away that holiday, and I think that’s the right thing to do. I don’t think we need to rename Farmworkers Day because again, I don’t think we should give this one group of people more honor than a lot of other hardworking people.
Plumbers. We don’t have Plumbers Day.
GILGER: What do you think about that, Tony? And this argument that you can erase Cesar Chavez’s name in light of these allegations and what’s come forth in the last couple of weeks here, but we should still honor the movement that he founded, started and other people were involved in?
CANI: I think for a lot of people that is what Cesar Chavez Day represented, especially in Arizona where so much of that history took place. It is about these farmworkers and just the total abuse of civil rights that was taking place before the movement. So I definitely understand it, and I think that there’s a difference where the cities, they’re saying “OK, well we need to, then, we’re going to name it Farmworkers Day.”
The state, the Republicans are never going to get behind that. But I think it was a courageous effort by those who wanted to make the argument that we should be honoring this civil rights legacy. ...
But I think that when it comes down to it though, almost everybody voted and they said, “Hey, this is a person that we should not be honoring that our history, you know, we put names on buildings, and we put government statues and these things to honor people.”
Sometimes you get new information and you need to just be like, “Hey, this isn’t the kind of person we want to honor anymore.” And I do think that how quickly that worked and how quickly Democrats sort of jumped on that to say like "Hey, this is a hero in my history, but we need to do something about it.” I think that I wish we would do that a little more with some of these Civil War-type figures, but that’s a whole other matter.
MARSON: The good work that he did does live on, right? And the work, the civil rights work that happened in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s in that movement does live on. And farmworkers now have rights that they didn’t have back in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s.
So the legacy, if you will, of that work still lives on. Obviously, we don’t need to lionize him anymore.
