PHOENIX – On Wednesday, the Arizona State Senate passed HB 2569, legislation targeting the Big Tech companies that targeted swing states during the 2020 election cycle. The bill sponsored by Rep. Jake Hoffman prohibits government entities from receiving private monies to conduct elections.
The vote fell along party lines, with Republicans supporting the bill and all Democrats voting against it.
“Nearly half a billion dollars in private funding was spent by out of state Democrat billionaires to influence the administration of county and state elections operations nationally, including millions here in Arizona,” said Hoffman referring to entities like the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), which spent in the neighborhood of $1.4 million to influence the election in 2018 and over $350 million in 2020.
Critics note that CTCL received millions from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to change the way local elections offices conducted the election. According to the Capital Research Center, CTCL spent $5 million in Arizona, $3 million of which went to Maricopa County, which election integrity supporters say essentially decided the state’s election.
“The Arizona legislature doesn’t want billionaires from any Party, or of any kind, attempting to influence our election system,” said Hoffman.
Hoffman argues that his bill is “common sense legislation that will ensure Arizona’s elections are free from outside influence and that our voters can have confidence in the integrity of the process. The passage of this bill is a win for Arizona and a win for America, as I fully expect other states to follow suit in prohibiting this deeply troubling new Democrat tactic.”
“Even the appearance of impropriety in elections is dangerous,” said Arizona Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi. “Elections should be funded, directed, and guided by state governments, not private organizations and especially not Big Tech. The Club commends the Senate for passing HB2569 and urges Governor Ducey to sign this important bill to protect the integrity of our elections.”
“Arizonans have the right to know their elections are being run without outside influence, and Gov. Ducey should promptly sign the bill into law,” said Jessica Anderson, Executive Director of Heritage Action.
The House of Representatives previously approved HB 2569 on March 3. It will now be sent to Governor Ducey for his signature.
The near-universal effect of CTCL’s grants was disproportionately greater turnout for one political party. Here’s how it broke down in Arizona, comparing the votes for president in 2020 versus 2016. All 15 counties increased their votes for both parties, but not at all equally. And both parties saw their votes increase even more in the nine counties CTCL funded than the six counties it did not. Here especially the results were unequal.
For the Republicans, the funded counties’ votes increased by 46% more than the rate at which unfunded counties increased. For Democrats, funded counties’ votes skyrocketed upwards 81% more quickly than they rose in unfunded counties.
In the opening lines of a behemoth post-election analysis, Time Magazine tipped their hats to the “business titans” for their help in securing the election for President Joe Biden.
Amongst those titans are the ones controlling a majority of modern social interactions, transactions, and entertainment – Big Tech.
Just two days after he took part in a vehicle pursuit and arrest involving human smuggling, Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels is set to meet with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday in Texas.
Mayorkas is scheduled to visit with law enforcement officials and tour facilities in El Paso and McAllen. Among those invited to discuss the immigration crisis along the country’s 1,900-mile southwest border will be Dannels, who serves as chairman of the National Sheriffs’ Association’s border security committee.
The group, Dannels told AZ Free News, is striving “to bring collective resolutions and answers to our border security issues.”
Cochise County shares an 83-mile stretch of the international border. It was Dannels’ experiences with drug and human smuggling that prompted then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen to swear in the sheriff on the Homeland Security Advisory Council in 2018.
But last month, Dannels was one of 32 HSAC members fired by Mayorkas, leaving just three members in place. Dannels says he plans to bring a letter to hand deliver to Mayorkas addressing the sheriff’s thoughts about HSAC, which the secretary has said will be reformatted in the coming weeks.
“I hope all stakeholders will have a better understanding with some defined objectives to work toward as we promote collaboration,” Dannels said, adding the current border situation “is more important than me and my appointment.”
Dannels has been outspoken about the Biden Administration’s lack of coordination and communication with local officials concerning the surge of undocumented immigrants coming into the United States. He is also being suggested as a possible Republican candidate for U.S. Representative when Ann Kirkpatrick seat comes open with her retirement in 2022.
On Tuesday, Dannels was involved in a vehicle pursuit which led to the arrest of three men on a residential property in Hereford. One of the men was a Phoenix resident suspected of transporting two illegal immigrants for financial gain.
According to the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were alerted to a possible human smuggling incident south of Sierra Vista around 3 p.m. A vehicle description was provided along with a license plate number.
Dannels was the first to locate the vehicle “travelling well over the posted speed limit for that area,” a CCSO statement reads. “Sheriff Dannels and a second Deputy conducted a traffic stop near Three Canyons and Highway 92, however as they approached the vehicle the driver sped away from the scene heading north on Highway 92.”
A short time later the occupants of the truck exited the vehicle near a residence. Dannels and his deputies were assisted by Arizona Department of Public Safety and the U.S. Border Patrol to apprehend the men without injury, although one of the men attempted unsuccessfully to climb up to a second floor balcony of the house, losing his shoes in the process.
“Initial interviews of the apprehended suspects revealed that two of the men were undocumented immigrants who were identified and released to US Border Patrol, while the third man without the shoes was identified as a US citizen and the driver of the vehicle,” the statement reads. That third man was Dustin Howerton, 23, of Phoenix.
PHOENIX — Rep. Michelle Udall, chair of the House Education Committee, sent a letter to Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction asking why the state is holding on to $85 million, that Udall says could help school districts avoid teacher layoffs.
Udall also noted in her letter to Superintendent Kathy Hoffman that “in addition to withholding these millions from our schools, ADE is also spending more than $7 million of it to simply administer the funds (the maximum allowed).”
Udall’s questions come in the wake of several districts announcing layoffs due to declining enrollment. Declining enrollment means declining funding as school dollars are allocated based on attendance.
“Unfortunately, as we see from the current events in Gilbert and other districts facing similar decisions in the coming weeks, this money has not been allotted where it is needed most,” wrote Udall referring to reports of teacher layoffs.
From the Yellow Sheet:
The AZ Dept of Education plans to use some of its Covid relief dollars for a marketing campaign to bring families back to the fold. The campaign, which will cost about $150,000, is aimed at students who left district and charter schools for alternative options during the pandemic or who delayed enrollment.”
“Instead of allocating all of the available money to districts who need it, the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) is for some reason holding onto nearly $85 million of discretionary money from the initial $1.5 billion allotment that should be put to use to help stabilize Arizona schools so that they don’t have to make premature reductions in staffing when many of those students may be returning in the coming school year.
Across the state, districts are seeing dramatic declines in enrollment as parents go in search of educational opportunities other than the hybrid-online type that the teacher’s union pushed even as the pandemic waned, and evidence showed that children were not super-spreaders. In fact, over 55,000 K-12 students have disenrolled for the state’s traditional public schools.
Despite the decline, which has been occurring over a number of years and was only exacerbated by the teachers’ recent refusal to return to in-classroom learning, Udall believes that students may return, and premature layoffs would lead the districts to rely on long-term substitute teachers.
Even though the ADE has received over $1 billion in CARES Act ESSER and ESSER II funding, Udall told Hoffman that the Legislature “is currently working on a state budget that, I believe, will help alleviate the intense fiscal pressure some of these schools are facing.”
“But that won’t happen until the budget process is finished,” warned Udall. “You currently have on hand millions in discretionary funds that could, and should, be made available immediately – discretionary funds that were given to the Arizona Department of Education for precisely this purpose.”
Hoffman responded on Twitter that the money was not enough.
It’s no secret that Arizona public schools need funds to stabilize their budgets and ensure that all students have access to high-quality educators and programs. Other school leaders and I have been ringing this alarm for months.
Udall and Hoffman may not believe there will ever be enough money for schools. On the other hand, parents who have fled the schools believe that there will never be again enough students to fill the schools and employ the teachers that abandoned their kids at such a critical time.
The left has been stoking public outcry over election integrity reforms around the country, prompting Joe Biden to refer to Georgia’s recent election bill “Jim Crow on steroids.” The misguided outrage has been focused on Arizona too, and democrats have been referring to many of the bills here as a reaction to what they call the “Big Lie” referring to the 2020 election. In reality, the only “Big Lie” is the narrative from the media and left that these measures are voter suppression bills.
One bill they are targeting is SB 1485, which was introduced by Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita and has passed the Senate on party lines, the House Government & Elections Committee, and is waiting for a Floor vote in the House. Calling this a reaction to 2020 is easily disproven evidenced by the fact that Senator Ugenti-Rita introduced the same exact bill in 2019.
The bill simply requires county recorders to send a notice to a voter on the permanent early voter list who has not cast their mail-in ballot in four consecutive elections. If the voter fails to respond to the notice within 30 days, the voter would be removed from the early voter list.
It is important to note that unlike many other states, Arizonans can vote early in person for 27 days and should someone be removed from the early voter list, they can immediately re-register or simply choose to vote in person. No one is being disenfranchised.
But since the media and left have taken such a vocal stance against these bills, let’s compare SB 1485 to the rest of the country. Unlike Arizona, most states do not allow automatic early voting by mail and even those that do are far more restrictive than what SB 1485 proposes.
In Connecticut for example, the only people who can automatically vote by mail are those who are permanently physically disabled. And even then, it should not be called “permanent” because a voter is removed for failing to respond to an annual notice within 30 days. (§ 9-140e). Compare that with SB 1485, where a notice is sent only after failing to vote in four consecutive elections. Which is more reasonable?
In California, where any registered voter may sign up to automatically receive a ballot by mail similar to Arizona’s permanent early voter list, a voter is automatically removed after failing to vote in four consecutive elections (§ 3206). So, in reality, SB1485 doesn’t even go as far as California, a state in which democrats have held a trifecta since 2011.
And what about in D.C, where they allow voters to “permanently” request an absentee ballot but remove any voter who misses two consecutive elections (DCMR 3, § 720.4)? Where is the public outcry over D.C’s voter “suppression”?
The truth is that these reforms do not even go as far as laws that currently exist around the country, including in democrat strongholds. In Arizona, it is far easier to automatically vote by mail than it is in most states, but the lies being peddled by the media and woke left are duping corporations like Delta, Coca-Cola, and the MLB in Georgia, and now many here in Arizona too.
By cancel culture, I mean the idea that people have rights and responsibilities and obligations and entitlements based on their skin color or their ethnic origin. A person’s identity is defined by the group they belong to. There are no individual rights. There are only group rights.
The cancel culture rejects the political view encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence. In particular, it rejects the idea that people have a right to pursue their own happiness. It also rejects the idea of basic rights guaranteed in the Constitution, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly.
Offensive speech can be seen as a “micro aggression”—and thus a form of force. There are no limits to what constitutes such aggression. For example, if you say you voted for Donald Trump, or you like capitalism, or you think free markets have lifted people out of poverty all over the world, you might be accused of offensive speech.
