The election for the board of the Salt River Project is normally very quiet. It's an off-cycle election in the middle of April with an archaic voting model that allows only some property owners to even vote.
But it certainly wasn’t quiet this time around.
On Tuesday, lines of hundreds of people stretched down the block at the SRP voting center in Tempe. The utility said early voting had been three times what it was in 2024.
And a lot of that has to do with the involvement of Turning Point USA. The Charlie Kirk-founded conservative action organization made a point to get involved in the SRP election this year in a big way and went up against environmental groups working to move the utility closer to a clean energy future.
Preliminary results are expected on Wednesday.
Jerod MacDonald-Evoy has been following this normally sleepy election for the Arizona Mirror and joined The Show to talk more.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Have you ever seen this kind of interest in an SRP election?
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: No. Typically we see a turnout of around 5% in these elections. And so this is pretty unprecedented.
GILGER: And tell us more about how these elections work. I've seen headlines calling them "bizarre" of late. I mentioned that they're based on property ownership, but it's really not even that straightforward, right?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. Only eligible landowners or who actively request a ballot will receive one in these elections. And, generally, the way it works is it's not a one person, one vote sort of situation. If you own land in SRP territory, you do get to vote, but your vote depends on the number of acres that you own.
So say you have 20 acres, that's 20 votes. So the number of acres you have is about the number of votes that you get in the election.
GILGER: And that means that there are some landowners, property owners in this area who get a lot of votes, right?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct.
GILGER: So let's talk about Turning Point USA here and their involvement in this race. This time around, they backed a slate of mostly incumbents in the race. Why did they say that they decided to campaign so heavily for an election that is, you know, pretty obscure?
MACDONALD-EVOY: So Turning Point, which is, as you point out, the conservative political group that was founded by the late Charlie Kirk, they've come out because ... the big issue that is at the heart of this, this election is clean energy.
And one side is saying that this is really advocating for continued clean energy use in the state. And the other side is saying, no, we need to not have this kind of continued focus on clean energy. And that would be the Turning Point USA side. Their kind of claim is that we need to move away from renewable energies in order to move to different energies. And the big argument on that is because of data centers, because we have a big boom on data centers.
And so each side is kind of saying that, that their side has the better idea for how we're going to, you know, tackle the upcoming energy that is going to be needed for these data centers that are coming to our state.
GILGER: Right, right. I mean, and this is — I've seen signs around the Valley for this. There's been some money poured into this race. Some major environmental advocacy groups got involved on the other side. We saw Jane Fonda talking about this, right?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct. The other side has had major, a major influx of money from environmental groups that have the backing of Jane Fonda, and their slate had had big wins, you know, in previous elections. And so Turning Point has this year been, it's been estimated that they are likely to outspend the other side though by 10 to 1. But we don't exactly have a good idea of the spending quite yet. We haven't seen many releases on the spending on either side yet.
GILGER: You broke a story earlier this week, Jerod, about some of the ballot collection tactics from Turning Point USA in this election. We should say they're, they're legal, what they're doing in this election, collecting ballots and turning them in. But it's a practice that Turning Point and other conservatives have criticized in the past when Democratic groups were doing it, right?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct. Arizona made the act of ballot collection, which has kind of pejoratively been referred to as ballot harvesting by conservatives and groups like Turning Point USA in 2016. But there is a carve-out in state that state law that was created in 2016 for special elections by special taxing districts like SRP. Turning Point USA has put a lot of effort this on this election to do a lot of ballot collection.
And Turning Point in the past has been very vocal in their opposition to the act of ballot harvesting. They've promoted a lot of conspiracy theories in regards to the, the ballot harvesting is a vector for, you know, widespread fraud. They promoted, you know, films like "2000 Mules," which was an attempt to prove that ballot collection was a vector for fraud in elections, even though that film was, was widely debunked. And those have been largely discredited.
GILGER: OK. So let's talk about where we are, what we're looking at now. We've seen the board at SRP been kind of not taken over, but there have been more clean energy advocates kind of slowly making incremental strides to gain power on that SRP board for some time now.
So what are the candidates on the slate now? How likely is it that more of them might, you know, be able to take a seat given this election or this campaign against them from Turning Point?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Well, to be honest, it's unclear as of right now. I mean, we had record turnout yesterday. We saw that ... there was a good number of people coming out yesterday in the line saying that they came out because of the Turning Point USA kind of action in this race.
And then we saw a lot of people coming out yesterday. They were saying they were coming out because of Turning Point, you know, to support, against and for it. I mean, we saw, I think that the Turning Point's involvement kind of galvanized both sides the aisle on this issue. So we — it's hard to tell who is going to come out on top until we see these results start pouring in.
GILGER: Yeah. Water rates are going up, Jerod. There's a lot of concern about our state's water future in particular. And of course, this is part of what the utility does.
How influential could the results of this be in regulating ... what is one of the state's largest utilities? Like if clean energy advocates are successful or not here? How much could it really sway what ends up happening on that front?
MACDONALD-EVOY: This is going to be incredibly influential. Utility estimates are, you know, for the next several years. I mean, we're looking at — demand is going to grow by around 4% per year between 2023 and 2035 is one of the estimates. And that's large in part due to things like data centers and also urban sprawl. And also the increase of the adoption of things like electric vehicles.
So we're looking at seeing whoever is going to be controlling this board is going to have a big influence over what our rates are going to be and what, how we're going to react to this new energy demand that we're seeing not just in Arizona, but across the country.
GILGER: Yeah. And of course, data centers, water rates, all a part of that bigger picture going forward.
MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct.
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