Article shared by Cathy L. Stewart on July 23, 2024 at 8:04 AM

Legislators found a sneaky way to kill a measure that'd blow up partisan primaries.

By Laurie Roberts, originally posted July 19, 2024 on azcentral.com

It’s the most important thing on the ballot this year — a citizen-driven initiative that would upend partisan politics, creating a new system in which Arizona’s leaders might actually be representative of Arizona’s voters.

So naturally, there’s a brazen, bipartisan, back-door push on at the state Capitol to kill it.

The Republicans and Democrats in the Arizona Legislature? They like it just fine that our taxpayer-funded partisan primary system is designed to keep them in power.

They like it even better as fully a third of the state’s voters have deserted the parties and become independents.

A misleading description that would be sent to voters

So earlier this month, legislative leaders mounted a sneak(y) attack on the initiative, adopting a wildly misleading description of the measure for the state’s official publicity pamphlet that is mailed to every voter.

Having been unable to stop more than a half a million Arizonans from signing petitions to put the Make Elections Fair Arizona initiative on the Nov. 5 ballot, our so-called leaders now hope to fool us into voting down a proposal that could dilute their power and increase our own.

Simply put, the Make Elections Fair Arizona initiative would scrap partisan primaries – the ones that allow the two major parties to dictate our choices come November – and replace them with a single open primary.

One in which every candidate would play by the same rules – currently, independents have to collect six times the signatures as their Republican and Democratic counterparts – and every voter would have an equal voice.

That’s it. That’s what the initiative does.

Confusing voters with 'ranked choice voting' at the top

Yet the Legislative Council, a 14-member panel that must approve an impartial summary of the proposal for the publicity pamphlet, voted 14-0 to bury the explanation of what the bill actually does.

Instead, their approved summary leads off with a warning of what our leaders fear: Ranked choice voting, a complicated system in which voters rank their choices in order of preference.

But Make Elections Fair doesn’t mandate ranked choice voting.

Under the initiative, it would be up to the Legislature and governor – or if they can’t, the secretary of state – to decide how many candidates would move on to the general election. If they decide it should be more than two candidates for a single seat, then voters would rank their choices in November.

An impartial person might think an impartial summary of the proposal would lead off with what the proposal requires — not what it doesn’t require.

The courts have an opportunity to set this right

Yet here is how the lawmaker-approved summary begins:

“Proposition _ would amend the Arizona Constitution to: 1. Allow for the use of voter rankings at all elections held in this state to determine which candidate received the highest number of legal votes (see also paragraph 4 below).”

The Make Elections Fair campaign this week filed a lawsuit, asking a judge to reword the summary, explaining first what the initiative requires and then what it allows.

“The decision to amplify voter rankings over the mandated changes to primary elections has no rational basis, and Legislative Council offered none,” the lawsuit says.

There may not be a rational basis for what they are doing but certainly there is an obvious explanation.

The GOP-run Legislature was so appalled by the prospect of a single open primary that it voted last year to put its own competing constitutional amendment on the Nov. 5 ballot — one aimed at protecting the status quo by protecting taxpayer-funded partisan primaries.