There is a very good chance Arizona voters will not see the proposed Arizona Fair Elections Act on their ballots in November now that a judge has kicked out tens of thousands of petition signatures.
On Thursday, Judge Joseph Mikitish of the Maricopa County Superior Court sided with arguments from the Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) that many of the petition sheets filed by a Democratic-backed committee trying to change Arizona elections laws had, in fact, failed to comply with current election laws.
In July, the committee submitted 47,690 petition sheets containing roughly 475,000 signatures in hopes of qualifying the Arizona Fair Elections Act for the 2022 General Election ballot. At least 237,645 signatures must be deemed valid once random-sampling verification is completed by the state’s 15 county recorders.
But AFEC filed a legal challenge which alleged more than 1,000 of the circulators who collected the signatures—representing one-half of the petitions—did so in violation of one or more of Arizona’s laws.
Mikitish released an order late Thursday agreeing with several of the 32 specific objections put forth by AFEC. The effect of the judge’s ruling is that nearly 97,000 signatures will be knocked off, which puts the Act in jeopardy as the verification process continues. With a typically high sampling rejection rate, there will likely be too few verified signatures to move the Act to the ballot.
“Based on the random sample that is currently being conducted, we believe they will fall short of the minimum to qualify for the ballot by more than 10,000,” according to AFEC President Scot Mussi.
In his ruling, Mikitish noted that Arizona law calls for the constitutional and statutory requirements imposed on initiative efforts to “be strictly construed.” He added that strict compliance is defined in case law as “nearly perfect compliance” even if there will be “harsh consequences” due to a seemingly small “unfortunate mistake.”
The judge held a two-day evidentiary hearing on Aug. 15-16 and received dozens of written arguments from the parties on whether the numerous challenged circulators complied with state law.
AFEC contends the provision of the proposed AFFE Act will “upend” Arizona’s election administration and voter registration laws, curtail current safeguards with the initiative and referendum process, and reduce candidate contribution limits while promoting more taxpayer subsidies to certain candidates.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has nabbed two men who issued threats to elected Arizona officials critical of the 2020 election audit and claims of fraud — but has yet to act on threats made to at least two Republican officials.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against a Missouri man for a threat of violence made against Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. It is the first of few charges brought against anyone for threats issued to election officials concerning the 2020 general election.
The DOJ also followed through with election-related death threats against Secretary of State and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs. They arrested a Massachusetts man, James Clark, for a bomb threat placed to her office in February 2021.
The FBI Phoenix field office acting special agent in charge, Chris Ormerod, claimed in the indictment announcement that the FBI takes all death threats seriously.
“The FBI takes all threat-to-life matters very seriously,” said Ormerod. “While this arrest demonstrates the FBI’s commitment to hold accountable anyone who tries to intimidate a public official, it also shows that people cannot threaten others with violence and physical harm without repercussions.”
Yet, no charges have been brought for death threats made against at least two Republican officials: Senate President Karen Fann (R-Prescott) and State Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R-Scottsdale).
“You are a completely worthless human being and an evil s**t. And you will die very soon. It will look like an accident. I’ve done this before. I have killed people,” wrote one anonymous individual to Fann. “I will kill again. I will kill you. Sleep well.”
Another to Ugenti-Rita not only threatened the legislator, but her family as well.
“Listen up you s**c b***h, you have one chance to give the American people the Audit report or were [sic] coming from [sic] you, we know where you live, we know where you get your groceries, and we know where your family lives. You better do the right thing or your [sic] going to feel the consequences. Do you understand? We the people are no longer willing to play….”
The man accused of threatening Richer — Tecumseh, Missouri man, 50-year-old Walter Lee “Butch” Hoornstra — allegedly said last May in a voicemail that the recorder wouldn’t make it to his next board meeting if he didn’t fall in line with those challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“So I see you’re for fair and competent elections, that’s what it says here on your homepage for your recorder position you’re trying to fly here. But you call things unhinged and insane lies when there’s a forensic audit going on,” stated the voicemail. “You need to check yourself. You need to do your f*****g job right because other people from other states are watching your a**. You f*****g renege on this deal or give them any more troubles, your a** will never make it to your next little board meeting.”
The Phoenix Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the case. Hoornstra faces up to five years in prison for making an interstate threat, and up to two years in prison for making a threatening phone call.
This latest arrest was executed by the DOJ’s special team formed to investigate threats against election officials and workers: the Election Threats Task Force. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco launched the task force last June.
The DOJ reported earlier this month that their task force has reviewed over 1,000 contacts reported as hostile or harassing by the election community. They said that only 11 percent of those contacts warranted a federal criminal investigation. It’s unclear whether the death threats made to Fann and Ugenti-Rita met that threshold.
The task force operates through the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section and encompasses the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section as well as the Civil Rights Division, National Security Division, and the FBI. Also involved with the task force is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
Richer said he was thankful for the FBI’s efforts. However, he said that he had plenty more threats for them to review.
🧵Thanks to @FBI for acting on this one. Very meaningful.
Unfortunately, I have PLENTY more to keep them busy. And, even worse, so too do some of the non-public facing members of @RecordersOffice and @MaricopaVote.
Phoenix Children’s Hospital’s (PCH) treatment for gender dysphoria in children is “gender-affirming care,” a euphemism for medical and surgical procedures to transition genders. Due to SB1138 which banned gender transition surgeries for minors earlier this year, PCH maintains its hormonal and therapy treatments but refers patients elsewhere for surgeries.
PCH asserts that they are the only children’s provider in Arizona with a comprehensive gender transition program. They assert on their website that it is lifesaving medical care.
.@PhxChildrens Hospital boasts about doing medical transitions on kids. They also follow WPATH guidelines which allows “gender affirming” surgeries for minors. pic.twitter.com/hvtt4PoO6n
PCH refers to gender dysphoric minors as “gender-expansive children,” though they offer two other nuanced terms to describe varying degrees of gender dysphoria. Those who “express a wider, more flexible range of gender identity and/or expression than typically associated with their sex assigned at birth” are considered gender-expansive, whereas those who are merely exploring and discovering gender identities are considered “gender questioning youth” and those who identify as a gender other than their own are considered “transgender youth.”
It appears that PCH’s adoption of the term “gender expansive” occurred in the last few years. As late as 2019, PCH referred to gender dysphoria as “gender dysmorphia.”
Kathleen D. van Leeuwen, MD, recently spoke about gender dysmorphia at the Neonatal Nurse Practitioners of AZ Conference and shared info about our Reproductive Anomalies & Disorders of Sexual Development Clinic. Great job, Dr. van Leeuwen! https://t.co/GbwuausvrNpic.twitter.com/xKvgHIdYdZ
For a girl desiring to become a boy, gender-affirming procedures may include a testosterone prescription, hysterectomy, mastectomy, and metoidioplasty. For a boy, this may include an estrogen prescription, breast mammoplasty, orchiectomy, and vaginoplasty. Prepubescent children may be given puberty blockers. There’s emerging evidence that these procedures aren’t as irreversible as first thought, and appear to cause adverse health effects.
PCH offers hormonal and therapeutic services to children through their Gender Support Program. They also offer to assist with a minor’s identity transition for school and identifying documents, as well as their legal name change.
PCH told The Arizona Republic earlier this year that a child being below the age of consent doesn’t impact their services. Rather, they said that they allowed parents to make the decision on behalf of their children.
The PCH Gender Transition Program team members include psychologist Jenna Rudo-Stern, endocrinologist Reeti Chawla, adolescent medicine physician Veenod Chulani, and Gisel Trevino-Martinez, Patrick Goodman, Andrew Medina, Ijeoma Ogbuchiekwe, and Amira El-Ahmadiyyah.
Chulani is the chief of PCH’s adolescent medicine division. He created the gender transition program.
According to PCH, their Gender Support professionals train others outside the hospital through local, regional, and national lectures and workshops. PCH also provides referrals to peer support programs: One N Ten, Arizona Trans Youth and Parent Organization (AZTYPO), Gender Proud Patient and Family Advisory Council, and Transfamilies.
Arizona Department of Education (ADE) Superintendent Kathy Hoffman is a supporter of AZTYPO.
The Gender Proud Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC) is made up of parents who had their gender dysphoric children undergo PCH’s gender transition procedures.
One of PCH’s widely-shared cases is of a gender dysphoric girl, Sheila, who underwent procedures at PCH to become “Luke.”
The Gender Proud PFAC (source: Phoenix Children’s Hospital website)
The supplemental resources that PCH offers are links to the Genderbread Person, a pronoun guide from the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a Gender Support Plan from Gender Spectrum, and information on how to change a child’s legal name and gender in government records.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
On Wednesday, YouTube suspended the “Louder With Crowder” show for their interview with Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake last week.
YouTube explained in a notice that the show contained content that propagated “false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches” changed the 2020 election results leading to Joe Biden’s presidency.
Wow. Won’t be able to steam to @YouTube because of comments from a CURRENT GUBERNATORIAL candidate. On a show with all references provided. If this isn’t suppression of political speech, then nothing is. See you tomorrow on Rumble and #MugClub with updates. War. pic.twitter.com/d4OruSTEGs
While on the show, Lake shared her doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results. She said that she believed the election was stolen.
Lake also expressed support for disbanding the FBI.
The show is hosted by popular conservative pundit and comedian Steven Crowder. The offending video is available on Rumble and BlazeTV, while the audio version is available on Crowder’s website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, and Deezer.
Lake denounced YouTube’s action as an effort of Big Tech censorship ahead of a critical election. She applauded Rumble for exhibiting free speech friendliness.
Rumble warned social media users that censorship was only about to get worse ahead of the midterm elections.
Was it something I said…😇 Tech tyrants are censoring @scrowder for something we talked about on his show last week. Who knows what it was & who cares–this is wrong. IT IS UNAMERICAN. We the people must denounce censorship in any form.
Wednesday’s suspension was far from Crowder’s first over the years. Last year alone, the show was suspended in March, April, October, and December. The platform removed Crowder from its YouTube Partner program as well last year, removing his ability to run ads. He has over 5.7 million followers on YouTube, and nearly 2 million followers on Twitter.
Crowder filed a lawsuit against YouTube last March.
Over the years, Crowder and YouTube have traded jabs. The frequency of YouTube’s suspensions moved Crowder to divide his live daily shows into two segments: one that is “YouTube friendly,” and another, longer half for his “Mug Club” subscribers over at BlazeTV.
Crowder ends his “YouTube friendly” shows with a direct jab at the platform: “Piss off, YouTube,” followed by a cartoon of his brand’s mug urinating on YouTube’s logo.
Libs of TikTok commented on Crowder’s suspension that YouTube was “unreal,” and called the platform “trash.” Three hours later, Libs of TikTok was banned permanently from Facebook. The social media giant didn’t offer a reason. Alphabet (Google) owns YouTube, not Facebook.
Last week, Crowder earned criticisms from Big Tech and the mainstream media for his response to the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago.
Voters in the southern Sulphur Springs Valley will find out later this week whether they get to vote on the creation of a Douglas Groundwater Basin Active Management Area that will establish new regulations for the withdrawal and use of groundwater by private landowners across a large swath of Cochise County.
And the Douglas AMA initiative could make it on the 2022 general election ballot even if not enough verified, valid petition signatures were turned in, according to an argument put forth by the group which collected the signatures.
Judge Laura Cardinal will conduct a hearing Friday on a challenge by Rural Water Assurance to block the AMA initiative from the ballots of roughly 13,450 voters whose addresses fall within the boundary of the proposed Douglas AMA.
The city of Douglas as well as the agriculture-heavy communities of McNeal and Elfrida will be impacted if the Douglas AMA is approved, as will be a portion of the city of Bisbee and surrounding areas.
Proponents of the Douglas AMA contend unregulated pumping from large agricultural wells in central and southeastern Cochise County is depleting the aquifer. They are calling for several restrictions on groundwater use and irrigation which proponents claim are necessary to prevent harm to local residents who live in the area.
Critics like Rural Water Assurance, however, argue that an AMA interferes with private property rights in a number of ways. There will also be a loss of property value from newly implemented AMA-related restrictions placed on the use of the land, they argue, including a 100-year assured water supply certification required for subdivision development.
There is also concern that the push for a Douglas AMA comes at a time when southeast Arizona is expecting to see long-anticipated renewed economic activity thanks to Congressional plans to overhaul the current Douglas Port of Entry at the Mexico border.
But the issue before Cardinal will not be about the political arguments or water policy. Instead, she is being asked to rule whether Arizona Water Defenders submitted enough petition signature to get the AMA initiative on the upcoming ballot.
Part of what Cardinal must decide is whether it matters if those petition signatures are legitimate signatures of actual registered voters living within the boundaries of the proposed AMA. Or is a random sampling good enough.
Arizona Water Defenders needed at least 1,346 petition signatures to qualify for the ballot. The group submitted 2,271 signatures on July 6 and Cochise County Elections Director Lisa Marra later reported there were 1,683 valid signatures.
However, the process Marra used did not actually verify the validity of all of the signatures. Instead, a few dozen signatures were discounted immediately due to technical issues after which a random sample validation process was used.
This resulted in an extrapolated figure being provided by Marra without any verification if all of the presumed valid signatures were in fact valid.
In its election challenge, Rural Water Assurance argues Cardinal must disqualify nearly all of the submitted petition signatures as deficient for myriad reasons from mismatched voter signatures to signers not living within the proposed AMA boundaries.
A more crucial problem, the election challenge argues, is some of the 206 petition sheets did not include a completed circulator affidavit. That affidavit must be filled out by the person who circulated the petition to collect signatures.
With 10 signatures possible on each petition sheet, any petitions not properly circulated could result in a large number of disqualifications whether the voters’ signatures themselves are valid.
For its part, Arizona Water Defenders has asked Cardinal to dismiss the election challenge. The group argues that under current state law, it is legally irrelevant whether there is actually 1,346 verified petition signatures for getting the Douglas AMA initiative on the ballot.
The only important factor, according to the group’s attorney, is that Marra’s random-sampling calculation gave the group credit for more than the required number.
“There are no longer any remaining statutory requirements for the examination and verification of each signature of each petition by the Recorder,” attorney John A. MacKinnon argues in a motion to dismiss. “If the number of valid signatures as projected from the random sample equals or exceeds the minimum required number, the initiative is entitled to be on the ballot” under one of two statues.
The Cochise County Board of Supervisors and Cochise County Recorder David Stevens have been subpoenaed to court for Friday’s hearing, as has Marra and members of Arizona Water Defenders.
Arizona currently has five AMAs. The four located in Prescott, Phoenix, Pinal County, and Tucson where created by the Legislature. The fifth was approved by Santa Cruz County voters several years ago.
The legal team under the Democratic Party’s top election lawyer, Marc Elias, is suing to keep Arizona’s voter rolls as they are, even if they’re rife with ineligible voters.
According to a lawsuit filed on Monday, the legal team argued that SB1260, which Governor Doug Ducey signed into law in June, infringed on the right to vote as well as the rights of free speech and association. SB1260 requires county recorders to cancel voter registrations for persons registered to vote in another county, and makes it a felony to help cast a vote for an individual registered out of state.
Elias’ team claimed that SB1260’s language made it too easy for individuals or organizations to petition for the cancellation of voter registrations en masse. They asserted repeatedly throughout their complaint that it’s common for voters to have active registrations in more than one county, or even state.
“Though voting in more than one state is illegal, it is perfectly legal to be registered to vote in more than one state or more than one county in Arizona. In fact, it is quite common,” argued the lawyers.
Additionally, Elias’ team expressed a lack of confidence in the ability of county officials to cancel voter registrations upon request. They insisted that people who move frequently would be burdened by the new election integrity law.
“Being registered to vote in more than one state or county is not prohibited, and for good reason,” argued the lawyers. “People do not ordinarily think to affirmatively cancel their voter registration when they move, and there often is no obvious or easy way to do so. Nor is there any assurance that a jurisdiction will actually cancel a voter’s registration immediately upon receiving a request.”
Elias’ firm filed suit on behalf of the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, Voto Latino, and Priorities USA against Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and all county recorders. Elias Law Group attorneys Aria Branch, Daniel Cohen, and Joel Ramirez joined Phoenix-based Roy Herrera of the Herrera Arellano firm to file the lawsuit.
Elias’ team posited that the felony provision of SB1260 would criminalize voter registration efforts made by the three plaintiff organizations, or even by a voter’s parents in the case of college students.
Elias offers updates on this and other election-related court cases via his media platform established in 2020, Democracy Docket.
Another lawsuit was filed on Monday challenging a separate election law in Arizona, HB2492 which requires individuals to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The Biden administration filed a similar lawsuit against the state early last month. The Scottsdale-based firm Papetti Samuels Weiss McKirgan and Washington, D.C.-based firm WilmerHale filed the latest lawsuit on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Arizona Democratic Party.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
