‘Payday’ Paton loses round one in his quest to kill clean elections

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I recently posted about the wannabe tinhorn dictator of Tucson, Jonathan "Payday" Paton's attempt to kill Arizona Clean Elections in order to kill the City of Tucson's Clean Elections system — a twofer! Jonathan 'Payday' Paton still trying to subjugate the citizens of Tucson:

[In 2010] was Paton's attempt to dictate to the residents of the state of Arizona that you are all just a bunch of rubes for enacting Arizona Clean Elections, Proposition 200 approved by voters in 1998. Arizona Clean Elections has proved to be popular with both voters and candidates seeking office. (In 2000 only 26% of the primary candidates ran using clean elections funding. In 2008 participating candidates increased to 65%.)

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Sen. Ken Cheuvront pointed out that Paton's proposal, while banning public funding of elections, does not spell out where the money still being raised would end up going. Paton conceded the point, saying he would have a separate measure later this session – and a separate ballot question – to deal with that.

"I'm not sure this is an honest way to do it," he said.

Paton, however, said he had a political reason for that decision: A straight-out repeal would be asking people to "repeal Clean Elections," something he said might cause voters to have second thoughts about killing the system.

Paton's purposefully deceptive bill to kill Arizona Clean Elections was not passed until last session by his Tea-Publican allies in the Arizona legislature. SCR1025, a referendum to be referred to the ballot in 2012, would have repealed the financing mechanism of Arizona Clean Elections and would have confiscated money from the City of Tucson for the state of Arizona, effectively ending clean elections in Arizona.

The proposed referendum was challenged in court, and on Wednesday, the court struck the measure from the 2012 ballot. The Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required) reports Judge tosses Clean Elections ballot measure - Arizona Capitol Times:

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge today struck from the 2012 ballot a measure that would have ended Arizona’s system of publicly financed political campaigns.

Lawmakers placed the measure on the ballot earlier this year, largely due to the near-unanimous support of Republican legislators. However, backers of Clean Elections and officials from the City of Tucson, which operates a similar public financing option for municipal candidates, quickly challenged it in court.

In a ruling today, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Dean Fink agreed with the plaintiffs that the measure violates a state constitutional prohibition on ballot measures that ask voters to accomplish more than one goal at a time.

Fink found that the measure, SCR1025, offered voters a decision on what he deemed a common purpose of banning public campaign financing on the state, legislative and municipal levels. However, he ruled that the proposed constitutional amendment ran afoul of the single-subject requirement because it would sweep the money in Tucson’s campaign finance system into the state’s coffers.

“That money is not being ‘returned’ to its source, the common fund of the municipality and its taxpayers, for them to dedicate to other uses. Instead, it is being taken from Tucson and given to the state: it is, in effect, not a reallocation but a retrospective forfeiture,” Fink wrote.

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Fink’s ruling contained a side note to what is known in political circles as “logrolling,” or the practice of forcing voters to decide multiple issues on one ballot measure.

He noted that Tucson residents are outnumbered in Arizona by “more than 10 to one,” and that residents of other locales stood to benefit from SCR1025.

“This strikes the court as classic logrolling: it is easy to imagine that a voter indifferent to the mechanics of Tucson municipal elections might well be inspired to vote for ‘free’ money,” he wrote.

Goldwater Institute attorney Clint Bolick, who defended the referendum in court, said he found a silver lining to Fink’s ruling. “We prevailed on the most important issue, which is whether we could present to voters the question of banning taxpayers’ money from being given to politicians on a statewide basis,” he said.

Indeed. "Payday" Paton now has a how-to guide from the court how to draft another bill to kill Arizona Clean Eelctions and possibly qualify for the 2012 ballot. Jonathan 'Payday' Paton still trying to subjugate the citizens of Tucson:

"Payday" Paton has a Plan-B should the Court reject the deceptively named ballot measure to kill Arizona clean elections:

After the hearing, Paton told reporters that he would again lobby the Legislature to pass a referendum aimed at crippling Clean Elections, Arizona’s public campaign finance system for statewide and legislative candidates, if Fink were to rule SCR1025 illegal.

“This is going to be on the ballot next year,” he said.

So this authoritarian will short circuit the democratic process by turning to our colonial overlords in the state of Maricopa to have the "big brother" Arizona legislature subjugate its renegade colony, the City of Tucson, by dictating to the city how it must conduct its elections — all to appease this wannabe tinhorn dictator of Tucson.