What they can’t stop by the popular vote – more than 60% of which comes from Maricopa County, and much of the rest comes from Pima County – anti-democracy MAGA Republicans do so by rigging the rules of the game.
The AZ GQP has been trying to nullify your constitutional right to citizens initiatives for years by imposing odious rules to qualify a citizen initiative for the ballot (while the GQP-controled legislature simply refers their right-wing allies’ ballot measures to the ballot with a simple majority vote).
Howard Fischer reports, Voters apparently will be asked to change ballot initiative rules:
Republican lawmakers are moving toward asking voters to hobble their ability to write their own laws.
On a voice vote Monday, the Arizona House voted to put a measure on the 2024 ballot to alter existing constitutional provisions that can force a public vote any time backers get the signatures of 10% of the people who voted in the last gubernatorial election.
The 10% threshold would remain — but with a twist: Initiative organizers would have to get that percentage in each of the state’s 30 legislative districts to put an issue on the ballot.
So, if 50,000 of the people who voted for the governor came from a specific legislative district, then 5,000 of the signatures needed would have to come from that district. The same scenario would play out 29 more times across the state.
Failure to get the signatures in just one of those districts would prevent everyone else in Arizona from getting a chance to weigh in. [A minority veto power.]
Rep. David Livingston, R-Peoria, said the measure, Senate Concurrent Resolution 1015, makes sense [for GQP voter suppression.]
Right now, he said, initiative circulators can get all the signatures they need in Maricopa County. That’s 255,949 to put a change in statute on the 2024 ballot. Livingston said nothing should go to voters unless there is a show of support in each of the 30 districts.
There are some “red districts” so extreme with MAGA Republicans that there is virtually no chance a citizens initiative would ever qualify for the ballot. These extremists should not hold a minority veto power over the vast majority of Arizona voters. This is an authoritarian tyranny of the minority.
“Maricopa County would not be able to dictate a statewide vote,’’ Livingston said. [Um, dumbass, Maricopa County has almost always decided every statewide election for decades.] “We need to recognize that counties out of Maricopa County matter. And this makes sure the other 14 counties matter.’’
By giving them a minority veto power to disenfranchise the vast majority of Arizona voters?
Rep. Athena Salman, D-Tempe, said there’s another side to it. Consider, she said, a proposal being pushed by residents of Mohave County.
Right now, proponents are free to get the necessary signatures wherever they can. That would change if SCR 1015 is put into the Arizona Constitution.
“If they can’t convince the legislative district residents of Scottsdale that their issues is important enough to refer to everyone else in the state, they (the Scottsdale residents) get veto power before this thing even gets a vote,’’ she said.
“That’s wrong,’’ Salman said. “That is antithetical to the citizen initiative process.’’
She said it amounts to asking residents of rural areas to “hand over that power to the voters of Maricopa County’’ [or vice versa.]
“Wow,’’ Salman said. “Talk about disenfranchising your own.’’
Lawmakers want voters to trim their own ability to create laws by proposing requirements to get signatures in each of 30 legislative districts, a move foes say effectively gives residents in any one district veto power over what everyone can consider. https://t.co/iZWGR5M0fw
— Capitol Media Services 📢 Telling it like it is (@azcapmedia) June 13, 2023
Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, D-Laveen, said it’s like saying no bill could come to the House floor unless at least one lawmaker from each district signed in support. He said the Republicans who control the Legislature would never approve giving such veto power to Democrats, who, in some districts, have both House seats and the Senate seat.
“Of course, we don’t do that here because it’s nonsensical,’’ De Los Santos said.
The measure was already approved by the Senate. A final House vote would put the change on the 2024 ballot where, as a constitutional amendment, it would have to be approved by a majority of voters.
That’s right – the majority of Maricopa and Pima County voters.
The proposal, pushed by Sen. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, comes after years of efforts by Republicans to make it harder to get voter initiatives on the ballot and easier to kick them off.
This asshole has his name attached to almost every piece of voter suppression legislation for years now.
The lines are being drawn between those who push ballot measures and don’t want the change and those who have opposed them.
The former category includes LUCHA, which was behind the 2016 measure to boost the state’s minimum wage from $8.05 and hour to the current $13.85.
Conversely, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which fought that initiative unsuccessfully, is in support of the new restrictions that the measure would impose.
Because the GQP-controlled legislature simply refers their ballot measures to the ballot with a simple majority vote, saving them the expense of collecting signatures and the expense of lawsuits to keep it off the ballot from right-wing organizations like the Club For Growth.
This isn’t the only example.
Sandy Bahr, lobbyist for the Sierra Club, said people take to the streets with their petitions when lawmakers refuse to consider certain issues. That’s not new, she noted, citing the fact that it took an initiative in 1912 to grant women the right to vote in Arizona, eight years before the U.S. Constitution was amended.
“The Legislature would not deal with that, so it was referred to the ballot,’’ Bahr said.
More recently, voters approved a ban on leghold traps, snares and poisons on public lands in 1994 over the objections of hunters and some rural residents. Four years later, after lawmakers refused to take up the issue, foes of cockfighting got a ban on the ballot and got it approved.
And in 2006, voters decided that farmers can no longer keep pigs and and calves in gestation crates.
Groups, including the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation, have supported the additional signature requirement.
Vote NO on this GQP voter suppression measure from the Chamber of Commerce corporate plutocrats and their Republican lickspittle lackeys in the Arizona legislature.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Laurie Roberts of The Republic writes, “Arizona’s GOP legislators show us again that they are terrified of voters”, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2023/06/13/arizona-legislature-sends-ballot-initiative-voters-must-reject/70317864007/
[O]ur leaders are at it again, trying to make it more difficult for Arizona citizens to exercise our constitutional right to make laws at the ballot box.
On Monday, Republican legislators sent Senate Concurrent Resolution 1015 to the 2024 ballot, wherein they will ask us to allow a few thousand people in one small corner of the state to essentially veto any voter initiative they don’t like.
Surely, we aren’t that dumb.
[Au contraire, they are that dumb. They got Arizonans to limit their own constitutional right to citizens initiatives in the 2022 election: Prop 132 requires a 60% vote to pass; Prop. 129, requires ballot measures to embrace a single subject. Prop 132 alone pretty much ensures citizens initiatives will never again pass. Way to go, geniuses.]
Since then every year, our leaders have devised new and improved ways to weaken our constitutional right to make laws via citizen initiative.
They’ve made it more expensive to mount initiative campaigns by changing the way that petition circulators must be paid and easier to challenge signatures by creating new hoops through which both volunteer and paid circulators must jump.
They’ve passed laws restricting everything from the size of the type that must be used on petitions to the width of the margins.
Then they required that initiative campaigns adhere to “strict compliance” with the law as opposed to the previous “substantial compliance” standard used by judges since the 1930s.
Now, such minor offenses as being a quarter-inch off in the margins could result in an initiative petition signed by hundreds of thousands of Arizona voters being tossed into the trash.
Signature mandate only applies to initiatives
Now comes SCR 1015.
In order to put a voter initiative the ballot, the Arizona Constitution requires a petition campaign to get signatures equal to at least 10% of those who voted in the last gubernatorial election — 15% if it’s a constitutional change.
SCR 1015 would amend the constitution to mandate that the percentage requirement be met not just statewide but in each of the state’s 30 legislative districts.
This bad idea comes to you from Sen. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, and his fellow Republicans who contend that initiatives should be required to demonstrate support from every county in the state in order to qualify for the ballot.
“We need to recognize that the counties outside Maricopa matter and this makes sure the other 14 counties matter,” Rep. David Livingston, R-Peoria, said during Monday’s final vote on the bill.
One would think then — if the goal is really to ensure that there is broad geographical support before something can go before the voters — that there would be a companion bill requiring legislators to get their nominating signatures from every precinct within their district.
Yet strangely, there is no such bill.
A few could veto the majority’s will
Instead, we have this bill that would confer veto authority on a few people in one corner of the state.
Based on 2022 election, it will take the signatures of 255,949 voters to put a citizen initiative on the 2024 ballot — or half again more if it’s a proposal to change the constitution.
It’ll take a majority of the state’s voters — a million or more, depending on turnout — to change state law.
Under SCR 1015, a few thousand people in, say, ruby red Mohave County or staunchly blue west Phoenix could prevent a proposal supported by hundreds of thousands of voters from ever reaching the ballot.
I’ll give you a guess which scenario Republicans envisioned when they passed SCR 1015 on a partyline vote, sending it directly to the ballot.
This isn’t about making sure that Maricopa County — where, by the way, 62% of Arizona’s voters live — is held in check. And it sure isn’t about strengthening democracy.
It’s about limiting our right to go around our leaders and make laws on our own, a right given to us 111 years ago by the founders of our beloved state.
Surely, we aren’t that dumb.
I worry that this ballot proposal may be able to get large percentages voting for it in rural counties, using the anti-Maricopa/Pima rhetoric, despite many voters in those counties being for certain proposals. There will need to be a large percentage voting against this in Maricopa and Pima counties to defeat it.