Get Good Dems on the Ballot! Especially for the AZ Corporation Commission!

You may or may not be aware, but the Arizona Secretary of State maintains a system called E-Qual that allows Arizona’s citizens to sign candidates’ nomination petitions securely online. You can also give Clean Elections candidates their qualifying $5 donations via the system.

This has a few advantages: you don’t have to seek out individual paper petitions for every candidate you would like to get on the ballot (all candidates in who’s district you reside will be listed when you log in), you don’t have to have your personal information floating around on a bunch of petitions (E-Qual identifies you with your Driver License OR voter ID number rather than your address and signature), and it is nearly impossible to challenge an E-Qual signature in court (whereas paper petitions are regularly challenged, adding expense for the campaign and possibly preventing your candidate ballot access). So, it’s really just a much better way of doing things and you can even do it on your phone.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could also sign citizens’ Initiative petitions this way? Well, you can’t. The mean old GOP legislature wants it to remain as difficult and expensive as possible for we citizens to legislate, as is our right under our Arizona Constitution. There are a few legal roadblocks to the Secretary of State making E-Qual available for this purpose, but that’s a story for another day – suffice it say that is one of the first things we should tackle when Dems take the legislature this year!

Now, I mention this for a reason. There are lots of wonderful and qualified candidates who would be wonderful electeds, but they need to get on the ballot first and the deadline for nomination petitions looms (April 8th).

I am asking for readers to sign in and choose all your candidates to nominate from the bottom to the top of the ballot. You might have noticed we here at BlogForArizona have given a lot of attention to the AZ Corporation Commission recently, led off by my case that we should make the ACC a key part of our 2024 strategy. We now have three Democratic candidates for the three contested (of five) seats this cycle. Dems single member on the ACC currently, Anna Tovar, is not running for re-election. That means control of the ACC is up for grabs in this cycle, and we intend for Democrats to control the Governorship, the state House and Senate, AND the ACC. This will open a lot of doors to accomplishing so much around sustainable, cheaper, clean and healthy energy, updating our energy grid, addressing our water use issues, updating rules on rail safety, and so much more if the ACC can work in conjunction with the legislature and Governor.

So sign in to E-Qual and sign petitions for Joshua, Ylenia and Jonathan. We need them on the ballot before they can win control of the ACC for Democrats this November. While you are at it, visit their websites (linked to their names above), drop them a $5 qualifier (Ylenia and Jon are Clean Election candidates), or a nice donation (Joshua is running traditionally financed).

You can meet the three ACC candidates on March 12th at 6pm at an upcoming TheDGT.org panel discussion via Zoom.