Arizona is ground zero for election changes
You’ve probably never heard of Republican Rep. Rusty Bowers, but the Arizona House speaker has quietly made a name for himself in the state as the stealth killer of his party’s most extreme election ideas.
Bowers told CNN’s Dianne Gallagher that he voted and campaigned for Trump but rebuffed that. “I said, ‘No, I won’t,'” Bowers recounted in a CNN interview last year, adding, “‘3.5 million people voted here, I’m not gonna unilaterally do that.'”
Bowers is term-limited in the Arizona House, and last week announced plans to run for the state Senate.
Arizona at ground zero
Even as headline-grabbing election bills falter in Arizona, Republican lawmakers still are weighing a raft of proposals that could alter voting practices in a battleground state that President Joe Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes.
They include bills that would:
- Allow a third-party to scour the voter registration database for ineligible voters
- Make it a crime to misplace a ballot
- Restrict the use of ballot drop boxes
- Make it a felony for a public official to register someone to vote on the same day as election day
- Create a new election integrity unit to investigate voter fraud
Alex Gulotta, a voting rights activist who runs the Arizona branch of All Voting is Local, said he credits Bowers with “holding the line” to block some of the most blatantly undemocratic ideas floated in the state.
But, he said, “there are actually a lot of bad things” moving through the legislature “that people are being silent about.”
Dates to watch
The stakes are high in Arizona this year.
Voters will fill an open gubernatorial seat, now held by term-limited Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, and decide whether to return one of most vulnerable Senate incumbents, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, to Congress.
The filing deadline for candidates in Arizona is April 4. The primary election for legislative and statewide offices is slated for August 2.
The deadline to register to vote in that primary is July 5.
Lone star on the horizon
The first statewide primary of the year is just a week away in Texas. The governor’s seat, six other statewide offices and an array of congressional and state legislative races are on the ballot.
The last day of early, in-person voting in the Lone Star State is Friday, February 25. Election day is March 1.
You need to read
- Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ recent op-ed in The New York Times, making the case for an overhaul of the arcane 1887 law that sets out procedures for Congress to count presidential electors. The process was disrupted temporarily when pro-Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Republican senator recounts the terror and chaos of that day as she argues for shoring up the Electoral Count Act.
- CNN’s Jamie Gangel and Jeremy Herb’s “Anatomy of a tweet” piece, looking at how a retired judge and Twitter newbie strung together tweets to try to stop an insurrection.
- Our colleague Chris Cillizza’s take on an election denier announcing a run for Colorado secretary of state.
- A look from the New York Times at how the Wisconsin Republican party is being torn apart by election deniers in the party who still believe former President Donald Trump can be reinstalled in the White House.
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