The new chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors took over on Wednesday and promptly extended an olive branch to his fellow Republicans in the Arizona Legislature.
“Rather than issue subpoenas, rather than file endless lawsuits, rather than mean tweet disinformation and displeasure, let’s sit down and have a conversation about real changes to election laws that will make our state the envy of others,,” Chairman Clint Hickman said.
“Instead of listening to a guy that sells pillows, let’s bring people who actually run elections to the table. Let’s start with a shared set of facts and go from there. Let’s treat all 15 counties the same and come up with improvements that we can implement in 2024 for future elections. I’m willing to put past conflicts aside to do this.”
It’s a nice idea – certainly one that public officials of goodwill should be able to embrace, especially in a state where there clearly is work to do to improve our elections before 2024.
But the Arizona Legislature? Working with the people on the front lines who actually know how elections work?
I put the chances of that happening somewhere between no way and no way in hell.
This year’s state Senate looks to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Turning Point USA, the hard-right group that has taken over the Arizona Republican Party. This Senate appears more prone to conspiracy-think, even, than the 2021 crew that threatened to throw Hickman and his fellow supervisors in jail.
The new Senate president is Sen. Warren Petersen of Gilbert, one of the architects of the Senate’s Cyber Ninjas audit.
The chairwoman of the Senate Elections Committee is Sen. Wendy Rogers of Flagstaff, who wanted to decertify the 2020 election and arrest of elections officials. Last fall, she was caught on tape urging voters to falsely claim identity theft at the polls, hoping to gum up the works in the November election.
Since being tapped by Petersen to run point on election bills, Rogers has vowed to somehow engineer a do-over of Maricopa County’s 2022 election and, of course, she’s renewed her call for arrests due to all that fraud that nobody ever seems to find.
“I want perp walks!” she wrote in November fundraising appeal, after being to oversee the Senate’s election bills.
Rogers’ go-to solution to any imagined problem is perp walks. That, or a public gallows where she can hang her political enemies.In the House, it gets worse.
The Municipal Oversight and Elections Committee is chaired by Rep. Jacqueline Parker of Mesa, who, like Rogers, was a co-sponsor of then-Rep. Mark Finchem’s 2022 proposal to decertify Arizona’s 2020 presidential election.Her vice chairman is Rep. Alexander Kolodin of Scottsdale. He’s the attorney who teamed with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell on a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election due to “massive widespread fraud.” Last year, he sued to try to kill the state’s wildly popular early voting program. He’s now working on Abe Hamadeh’s continuing quest to be declared attorney general.
Also on the House committee are Republican Reps. Austin Smith of Mesa, who has called Maricopa County’s 2020 election “a national disgrace,” and Rachel Jones of Tucson and Liz Harris of Chandler, both of whom want to decertify the 2022 election.
“I will NOT move on like everything is o.k. I will NOT pretend like Fake Katie Hobbs is the legitimate governor of AZ,” Jones recently tweeted. “I will NOT standby while my favorite state is stolen by radical leftists. I will NOT allow this election to be stolen. #decertifynow”In 2021, Harris ran a door-knocking campaign that claimed to have found massive fraud in the 2020 election. It was debunked in about a minute and a half. More recently, she announced that there were “clear signs of foul play” in the Nov. 8 election and has vowed not to vote on any bills this year unless a new election is held.
Which, come to think of it, maybe isn’t such a bad thing.
Reach Roberts at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.
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