GQP War On Voting: Enacting Onerous Rules To Make Citizens Initiatives More Difficult To Qualify For The Ballot

I touched upon this earlier this week, Arizona House sends measure boosting voter ID to ballot:

The Republican-controlled Arizona House on Monday joined the GOP-led state Senate in approving a measure that will ask voters in November to drastically boost identification requirements needed for in-person and mail voting in the battleground state.

The referral mirrors a voter initiative that Republican lawmakers and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club began collecting signatures for last August. The vote negates the need to gather those signatures, since it now will automatically be on the ballot.

As I said:

Once again, the authoritarian GQP-controlled Arizona legislature saves right-wing organizations the time, effort, and money it takes to put a measure on the ballot which they support, while at the same time they enact onerous rules which make your constitutional right to citizens inititatives damn near impossible to do, effectively nullifying the constitutional right to citizens initaitives for things they do not support. This is GQP authoritarianism writ large.

Right on cue, Another bill advances to add requirements to Arizona initiative drives:

A House panel approved legislation Wednesday that could give foes of voter-proposed initiatives a new legal tool to keep them from getting to the ballot.

Senate Bill 1094 would spell out that petition circulators would be required to either:

Read, out loud, the 300-word description that accompanies all initiatives, when asking a voter to sign it.

Or allow voters the time to read it to themselves before signing. But there is nothing in the proposal to say how long that should be.

Sen. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, who wrote the measure [this evil GQP bastard, again!], said it’s designed to ensure that people are informed about what they are being asked to sign.

So is proposal to impose a new requirement on initiative circulators a move toward transparency or just another tool for foes to use to knock them off the ballot? https://t.co/yNizSig4Rr

— Capitol Media Services 📢 Telling it like it is (@azcapmedia) March 3, 2022

Oh, you know it’s just another tool to knock citizens intiiatives off the ballot. How hard is it going to be to find someone to say “they didn’t read the whole initiative to me,” or “I didn’t have a chance to read the whole initiative”? Can’t you just smell the setup here?

“This is to make sure that what is communicated to the folks who are asking to sign petitions is accurate,” he told the Government and Elections Committee. And by “accurate,” Mesnard said that means the official, legally required summary “as opposed to whatever version the circulator can otherwise state to convince somebody, and then they’d be totally wrong or lying or distorting or whatever.”

That’s important, he said, because whatever is approved at the ballot cannot be altered by the Legislature.

“Obviously, it is high stakes,” Mesnard said.

Here’s a fact of life: people vote for things not knowing what it is about or the consequences of what they are voting for. Hell, our state legislators do this four days a week while the legislature is in session. The mythological “informed voter” is just that, it’s a myth. People vote their feelings, or out of party tribalism. They are not making a reasoned, rational decision based upon hours of research and quiet contemplation. Give me a break!

Rep. Sarah Liguori, D-Phoenix, said she sees this as just another bid by the Republican-controlled Legislature to erect new hurdles in the paths of citizens proposing their own laws. Among those are new registration requirements for paid circulators, restrictions on how they are paid, and disqualifying any signatures a circulator collected if that person does not respond to a subpoena by someone challenging the measure.

This year alone GOP lawmakers have proposed two other measures, one to require initiative circulators to get signatures in each of the state’s 30 legislative districts; and another to say an initiative cannot become law unless 60% of voters approving it.

In a true democracy, a simple majority is all that is required, i.e., 50 percent + 1. A super-majority requirement gives a veto power to an entrenched minority. That is a tyranny of the minority.

Rep. Diego Sierra, D-Avondale, chided Republicans for trying to make the process more difficult. He pointed out that the Arizona Constitution specifically gives citizens the right to craft their own laws “independently of the Legislature.”

“This is our citizens’ ability to be the counteracting force to the bad laws that we are passing here,” Sierra said.

“This should be the golden age of citizen activism,” he said. “But here we are, wallowing in pettiness and spite.”

Rep. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, said initiative circulators don’t always tell the truth.

You know, this fake GQP elector and Russian-style troll farm operator of disinformation on social media really needs to learn to STFU. He has no credibility to comment on anything, given his criminalty.

Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said he has personally heard petition circulators “outright lying about what the petition is about.”

You mean like the “Arizonans for Voter ID Act” initiative from the Arizona Free Enterprise Club that you authoritarian Republicans all just voted to refer to the ballot for them, and save them the time and expense of having to do it themselves? It is a Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression measure, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Sen. Kelli Butler, D-Paradise Valley, said the legislation Mesnard proposes essentially presumes that people who are approached to sign petitions, or those who seek out petition circulators, are unaware of the issue. She said it forces those who are aware to go through this process of having someone take the time to read the summary to them or have to read it themselves.

Judith Simons, who told lawmakers she has circulated petitions, said people sometimes do say they are ready to sign immediately. For some, she said, it’s a belief that, regardless of the issue, they just like the idea of putting issues on the ballot for voters to get the last word.

“And that’s the point: Signing a petition is just to get the proposition on the ballot,” Simons said. Once it qualifies, she noted, there are several months before the election “when voters get a chance to learn more about it and decide how they want to vote.”

Butler worried the measure could open the door to legal challenges. She envisioned a situation where “people can tell on someone,” say they saw someone sign a petition who did not take the time to read it, and have that used by initiative foes to try to have those signatures disqualified.

Hoffman had a different take. “We want an informed citizenry,” he said. “We want people who are signing petitions to be informed about what they’re signing.”

Jesus Christ! This guy operates a Russian-style troll farm of disinformation on social meida, doing exactly the opposite of this. Just STFU!

He also said there is an “incentive” for paid circulators to get people to sign.

That incentive, however, is not what it once was.

Lawmakers several years ago voted to ban the practice of paying circulators based on the number of signatures they gather. Circulators can still be paid on an hourly basis.

So “Mr. Informed Decision” is lying to you, and is spewing his disinformation about how circulators get paid by the signature.

The 7-6 party-line vote by the Republican-controlled committee sends the measure to the full House. It already cleared the Senate with only Republicans in support.

As I said, this is GQP authoritarianism writ large.