Republican Judges Combine To Keep The Arizonans for Free And Fair Elections initiative Off The Ballot

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish, appointed to the bench by Gov. Jan Brewer, and the Ducey-packed Arizona Supreme Court combined to thwart the voters constitutional right to citizens initiatives.

On Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court rejected much of the appeal from the enemies of democracy to the Arizonans for Free And Fair Elections initiative. Per Curiam Decision and Order. The high court sent it back down to Judge Mikitish to calculate the number of signatures consistent with its opinion.

On Thursday,  Judge Joseph Mikitish did just that, and he found that the Free And Fair Elections initiative had 2,281 more signatures than the required 237,645 signatures needed to make the ballot.

The Ducey-packed Arizona Supreme Court apparently did not expect this result. I believe they thought their ruling had killed the initiative, just as Gov. Doug Ducey and his Republican allies in the legislature wanted.

The enemies of democracy appealed again to the Arizona Supreme Court. On Thursday night the Court said that it could not tell exactly how Judge Mikitish came to his conclusion on the number of valid signatures. Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, also appointed by Gov. Jan Brewer, ordered Judge Mikitish to provide more details by midday Friday. This was a not so subtle signal to Judge Mikitish: “Didn’t we make ourselves perfectly clear that we wanted you to kill this initiative?”

The Associated Press picks it up from this point. Arizona Supreme Court keeps voting rights measure off ballot:

A voter initiative rolling back Republican-backed election law changes and expanding voting access will not appear on the November ballot, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Friday, issuing a final death knell after an on-again off-again series of court rulings.

The high court decision upholds a lower court ruling issued hours earlier, in which Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish rejected thousands of signatures and said the initiative fell 1,458 signatures short of the 238,000 required to qualify for the ballot. The judge’s Friday ruling reversed his own decision from a day earlier after the Supreme Court asked him to explain how he concluded that the initiative had enough valid signatures to qualify.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is the last word in a weeks-long battle between initiative backers and opponents. Critics, led by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, succeeded in knocking off enough qualifying signatures for the measure to barely fail.

Lawyers supporting the initiative had urged the Supreme Court to allow the measure to reach voters, saying Mikitish violated the law by letting challengers throw out more signatures than allowed.

“In reversing itself today, the trial court has done something never done before in Arizona initiative practice and which is not authorized by statute,” they wrote. “It has allowed initiative challengers to strike individual signatures under (the law), for any reason, AND allowed them to benefit from the invalidity rate calculated by the County Recorders’ random sample that the challengers DID NOT include in this lawsuit.”

But Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, in a brief order, simply upheld the revised ruling and kept the initiative off the ballot. When the judge upheld the measure the day before, Brutinel had refused to accept it, saying court was unable to determine exactly how Mikitish came to his determination that backers had collected enough valid signatures for the measure to appear on November’s ballot.

The Arizona Free Enterprise Club said in a statement that the high court ruling “vindicates what we knew all along: the radical Free and Fair election initiative lacked enough lawful signatures to qualify for the ballot.

What is “radical” is GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws that seek to take us back to the early 1960s before the Voting Rights Act.

The initiative backers called the legal challenge a continuation of Republican-led efforts to gut Arizona’s initiative process. The state constitution says the people have the right to craft their own laws, but the Legislature and business groups have pushed for changes that make it easier to kick initiatives off the ballot.

Voters will see GOP efforts along those lines in November. Several laws making it harder for initiatives to pass or be changed were referred to the ballot for voters to weigh.

Voters must reject all of these GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression ballot measures.

“Certain politicians have been intentionally trying to attack the ballot measure process for over a decade to prevent voters from being able to make decisions about Arizona’s future at the ballot box,” the initiative committee said in a statement. “Today’s decision is a continuation of these attacks and reflects an increasingly extreme MAGA agenda.”

The high court had already ruled in challenges to two other initiatives, keeping them on the November ballot. The justices said Wednesday that business groups that challenged a proposal requiring greater transparency for political spending and boosting the amount of assets shielded from creditors failed to knock off enough signatures.

Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP leaders of the House and Senate had urged the high court to reject all three measures. Ducey has appointed five of the seven justices.

Mikitish has presided over three weeks of hearings in a case filed by a pro-business group that challenged many of the nearly 400,000 signatures the initiative backers filed. After lawyers for the Arizona Free Enterprise Club succeeded in knocking off nearly 96,000 signatures, and a county review to determine if the signatures were valid kicked off nearly 64,000 more, it was left with just 2,281 more than the required 237,645 signatures needed to make the ballot.

On Friday, Mikitish flipped those numbers. WTF?

UPDATE:

Basically, let's say one bad signatures in the sample can knock off twenty from the total. But unless the new file from the special master is resampled by the counties, there could be cases in which 1 bad signature knocks off forty in the total.

— The AZ – abc15 – Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) August 26, 2022

The Free and Fair Elections measure sought to change a slew of election laws. It would have specifically blocked the Legislature from overturning the results of presidential elections, an avenue some Republicans explored after former President Donald Trump’s loss in the state in 2020.

It also would have guaranteed ballot privacy and bars handing election materials or ballots over to outside groups like the state Senate did after 2020, expanded voting access, mandated that all voters can go to any polling site, extended early voting and limited lobbyists’ ability to wine and dine lawmakers.

The measure also would eliminate the “strict compliance” legal standard that led Mikitish to disqualify many of the petition sheets. The GOP-controlled Legislature required that standard for initiatives in 2017, making it easier to throw them out for relatively minor paperwork errors.

The Free Enterprise Club challenged tens of thousands of signatures, many for exceptionally minor [ticky-tack] issues. [GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression.]

For instance, 7,000 signatures were challenged because a volunteer petition circulator mistakenly checked a box that indicated they were paid circulators.

Note: That’s 7,000 signatures that would have put the initiaitve on the ballot, but for GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws, and a Republican judiciary.

It is now imperative that voters elect Democrats to all of the state’s top statewide offices, and to elect Democrats to control the Arizona Senate for the first time since the 40th state legislature in 1991-1992. This will empower Democrats to pass legilslation to reverse the GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws, and to refer ballot measures to the ballot like Republicans do.

It is also imperative that voters start voting strategically when it comes to the Judicial Retention Ballot. There are three Supreme Court Justices on the Judicial Retention ballot this year. Voters can send a strong signal to the Arizona Supreme Court that they will not tolerate their judicial overreach by rejecting all three justices:

Hon. James P. Beene – Appointed by Gov. Doug Ducey
Hon. William “Bill” G. Montgomery – Appointed by Gov. Doug Ducey
Hon. Ann Scott Timmer – Appointed by Gov. Jane Dee Hull

This would create three vacancies on the Arizona Supreme Court which the new Democratic governor could fill by appointing three new justices, to begin restoring some balance to the high court. (It woud still be a 4-3 Republican majority, but three justices losing their retention elections would certainly chasten the behavior of the four Republicans).

And when Judge Mikitish comes up for rention in the future, you can vote him off the bench as well.