Vote YES for Prop 139 for Reproductive Freedom. Vote NO on Everything Else!

On October 9, voters will receive unwieldy three-page ballots littered with propositions from the Republican Legislature. Those 11 propositions are intentionally designed to confuse and complicate the ballot. Only one is a citizen initiative supported by 823,685 voter signatures: Prop 139, the Arizona Abortion Access Act.

Prop. 139 establishes a constitutional right to a safe and legal abortion under rules previously in place under Roe v. Wade.

Get your own copy of this list to share with friends, neighbors and fellow voters, at https://ld18dems.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/8.20.24-Proposition-Flyer-LD18.pdf

Attorney Gail Kamaras explained the propositions during the LD18 Democrats meeting on August 27, identifying measures to vote NO on as the League of Women Voters and Civic Engagement Beyond Voting recommended. Several Legislative propositions are misleadingly labeled and actually do the opposite of their title.

The other citizen initiative that actually made it onto the ballot is Prop 140, Make Elections Fair Arizona. This is the open primaries, and it sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately, it was so poorly drafted that it gives too much power to the legislature.

The League of Women Voters and Civic Engagement Beyond Voting also recommends a NO vote. So, we have 11 legislative referrals. All legislative referrals are bad.

Constitutional Amendments.

Next, the first six are constitutional changes, which are much harder to get rid of once they’re in law. So Prop 133 would bar any future use of open primaries, which means if we actually get a decent citizen initiative about open primaries and ranked-choice voting, this would preclude it.

If both of these should happen to pass by some weird chance, the one that gets the most votes wins.

Next, Prop 134 is also a constitutional amendment. This is really extreme, and it’s being done in other states. This would require us to get citizen signatures. By a percentage of the county from each county, or each district rather, and in rural districts, this would make it impossible to get anything on the ballot.

The next one is Prop 135. This is a little bit longer. I’ll let people have a minute or two to read it. This would severely limit the governor’s power in emergencies. It’s just a part of a power grab. That is a theme in a number of these legislative referrals: a power grab by the legislature. The governor needs that wiggle room on emergency declarations.

This would endanger public safety and also risk federal funding for emergencies.

Next is Prop 136. This would allow anyone, for any reason at any time, to bring a lawsuit, even at the initial stages of citizen initiatives. Of course, this only refers to citizen initiatives, not to legislative referrals.

So again, I recommend no one for Prop 137 would grant Arizona Supreme Court justices life terms, making it retroactive. To shield our friends, Bollock and King, who said, yes, we should please be living in 1864. And this would shield the judiciary from any public accountability whatsoever.

We are saying no to Prop 138, which rolls back protections for tipped workers. It is charmingly entitled to something like the tipped worker’s protection amendment, which it is certainly not. It would really allow restaurant owners and managers to cook the books, and the restaurant lobby backs it. So we know it’s not good.

Statutory Amendments

Now we’re into the statutory amendments and not constitutional proposals. They’re not as permanent, but they’re just as bad in terms of what they do. So Prop 311 provides a death benefit for the families of first responders, which sounds very lovely, but it’s a duplicate of existing state and federal benefits that these families received, and it’s funded inadequately by penalizing defendants, just piling on the penalties that defendants have to pay. So again, no, please.

Prop 112. This would give property owners a tax break if they bring a nuisance claim against the city or town. This is really targeted at the homeless. But, noisy neighbors, people, with their cars propped up in the driveway forever. Anybody could bring a nuisance claim.

And this could literally bankrupt cities and towns in our state. So we’re saying no to that 1 as well. Prop 313 provides life without parole for child sex trafficking in all cases. Yes, everybody knows that people who sex-traffic children are not nice people, but this is draconian in that victims are often forced to become traffickers themselves.

There was a recent case in which a young woman who had been a victim was sentenced to 11 years in prison. So vote no.

Prop 314. This is SB 72. 0. If anybody was around the last time we tried to make the state into a federal agency, this is unconstitutional. It’ll cost the taxpayers a fortune to defend it, just as we did before with SB 1070, and it will fail.

The federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over immigration, so we can’t do their business.

Finally, Prop 315. Again, the theme is legislative overreach here. They want to be the oversight agency for executive regulatory agencies. The governor’s office, the executive branch, is separate from the legislature, something they don’t seem to understand.

This would allow them to roll back any manner of legislation or rulemaking. Oh, and the one exemption is the Arizona Corporation Commission, which they seem to love since it’s a utility lapdog. But we want to change that. At lightning speed, that’s it for the proposition.

So just tell everybody to say no to everything except Prop 139.