Voters in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and most of Arizona’s population, elected Heap last week to be their next county recorder. He defeated Democrat Tim Stringham by about four percentage points—a relative blowout for the nation’s most populous swing county, where the last two recorder elections were decided by 0.3 points and 1.1 points, respectively.

Maricopa County has been a hotbed of conspiracy theories about voter fraud since the 2020 election, and the outgoing recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, suffered death threats for rebuffing these unfounded allegations. Heap, who defeated Richer in the GOP primary in July, has fanned those conspiracy theories and refused to recognize as legitimate the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections.

As a state representative, Heap backed legislation to ban most early-voting options in the state and to encourage hand-counting of ballots. He ran this year with the backing of a corps of prominent far-right politicians like Kari Lake, who have spent recent years sowing distrust in the state’s election results. Echoing their lie that election administration in Arizona is conducive to fraud, he vowed to pursue major changes from the recorder’s office.

“The voters are sick of our elections making us a national laughingstock,” he told the crowd at an Arizona rally for Trump in September. “The voters are sick of being mocked and condescended to when they ask sincere questions about our election system. And, most of all, voters are sick of hearing from their neighbors, ‘Why should I even vote if I can’t trust the system?’”

Heap now assumes office at the same time Trump retakes the White House, having signaled his intent to use federal law to restrict voter registration and ballot access. Heap’s promises to “clean the voter rolls” or to have all votes be counted by Election Day could test how far Trump allies can stretch this playbook in local election offices. 

But Heap will face many constraints in implementing his agenda. The recorder’s office can’t just wipe people off of voter rolls, as state law explicitly forbids that. It can’t ensure election results are known by the end of Election Day, mainly because the office doesn’t even control ballot tabulation in the county. And if Heap doubts the results of any future election, he cannot thwart certification because that, too, is outside of his office’s purview. The secretary of state’s office, in Democratic hands until at least 2026, looms as another check since it issues regulations guiding how elections must be run.

Plus, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees many election administration duties, moved just last month to take away some more power from the office Heap will inherit. 

The degree of pushback this board would give him remains to be seen. Two like-minded Republicans won supervisor elections on Tuesday, bringing the body closer to his politics. 

One is Debbie Lesko, a U.S. representative who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021; she will replace a Republican who faced threats for defending the local system. The other, Mark Stewart, has also questioned past election results. He successfully challenged Republican incumbent Jack Sellers, who got flack from conservatives for certifying election results.

After losing to Stewart in the July primary, Sellers endorsed the Democratic nominee over Stewart, because, he told Phoenix radio station KJZZ, “the future of democracy is on the ballot.” But Stewart prevailed by about four percentage points last week. 

Still, election experts in Arizona told Bolts that, even as they’ll vigilantly monitor the effects of Heap’s policies on voting rights and access, they’re cautiously hopeful that sufficient backstops exist to hold him in check if he attempts drastic measures.

“I’m a little bit worried, but I try to be optimistic that things will be OK,” said Helen Purcell, who served as the recorder in Maricopa County from 1989 to 2017. “Mr. Heap has limited abilities in what he can and cannot do as far as influencing the process. So I’ll try to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he will abide by our state laws and federal laws.”

Purcell, a Republican, is one in a string of elections officials in Maricopa County who have fought back against election deniers since 2020. Her successor in office, Democrat Adrian Fontes, is now Arizona’s secretary of state and has placed himself on the frontlines of that fight. The recorder after Fontes was Richer, who became a national figure for frequently refuting his own party’s false claims of voter fraud.

Richer this fall teamed up with the county’s GOP-run board of supervisors to restrict the powers of the recorder’s office going forward. Under the terms of an agreement they reached on Oct. 23, the supervisors will now manage the processing of early ballots, a job the county recorder previously had. The supervisors will also take control of the recorder’s IT staff and its $5 million budget.

This shift in responsibility continued a trend that has reduced the recorder’s role in elections over the last decade. When Purcell was in office, the recorder had purview over most everything to do with elections. But Republican supervisors snatched some power once Fontes, the Democrat, came into office. From that point, the recorder was left in charge of voter registration and early voting, while the supervisors handled Election Day voting, the creation of the ballots, and the tabulation of the ballots. The board will retain these roles going forward. 

As county recorder, Heap will control voter registration and the handling of early ballot requests. He’ll also control signature verification on early ballots and the process of curing early ballots that are tentatively rejected because of an error such as a mismatched or missing voter signature. 

Purcell worries that Heap could use his authority to target certain voters. “My concern is with voter registration and how he’ll instruct staff to deal with that,” she told Bolts. 

She stressed that outside organizations facilitate a lot of voter registrations. “I wonder whether he’ll take a cautious view about those groups, which could have the possibility of curtailing certain people being able to vote,” she said.

Arizona already has strict laws when it comes to how people register to vote, as it requires proof of citizenship, unlike most states. Alex Gulotta, state director of the Arizona arm of All Voting is Local, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights, worries about residents who’ll encounter issues like an error on their registration forms, or a mismatched signature on their mail ballot. 

He warns that these voters will be adversely affected if Heap does not make a point to provide easy access to outside groups and to actively reach out to voters affected by an error. 

“I have no doubt that if someone wanted to create an office that was harsher and less caring of voters, they could do that,” Gulotta told Bolts. “People rely on the recorder’s office every day to fix little things that are broken. If it’s not accessible and they don’t fix things adequately, such that there are hours-long wait times, it can really have a negative impact.”

Throughout his campaign, Heap has failed to produce concrete evidence that Maricopa County elections are mismanaged. There has been no finding of fraud or other systemic voting issues in Maricopa County; a post-2020 audit of the county elections turned up nothing. When the local PBS station pressed Heap for evidence to back up his claims, Heap provided none and rather pointed simply to the fact that he’s heard from constituents who perceive problems.

Heap did not reply to a request for comment for this article.

A majority of Maricopa County supervisors seem unlikely to be receptive to major election overhauls. Republicans have controlled this board without interruption since the 1960s, and on Tuesday they kept that streak going; as of publication, the GOP has won three of the five seats on the board and Democrats have won one. The fifth seat is too close to call.

But while incoming supervisors Stewart and Lesko are election deniers, the third Republican supervisor, Thomas Galvin, has defended the county’s election system, and he beat an election denier in the July primary. Kate Brophy McGee, the Republican leading in the unresolved race—by just 359 votes as of Tuesday morning—also has a reputation for being relatively moderate. 

Stringham, Heap’s defeated Democratic opponent, hopes that these officials can provide a backstop that would prevent Heap from upending elections, but he cautioned that it would be difficult for Republican officials to withstand pressure from the rest of their party. 

“Thomas Galvin is absolutely not an election denier, and I don’t think that Kate Brophy McGee is either,” Stringham told Bolts. “But the problem with Republican politics is that if you don’t go along with it, you’re out, so I don’t think you can look at that board and go, ‘It’s OK; there’s three non-election deniers.” He added, “I think there are four Republicans and one Democrat, and the Republican Party math is that you’ll go along with it.” 

Still, Stringham predicted that even Heap may suffer blowback from his party’s base, as Richer did, if the GOP ends up losing Arizona’s elections in 2026 or 2028 and again falsely alleges fraud. 

“He can’t really deliver on this crap, but he can get blamed for it,” Stringham said.

Purcell and Gulotta also worry that local guardrails may not be sufficient to keep up morale among election workers. Arizona has already seen very high turnover in election administration since 2020.

“In any institution, the attitude of the leader impacts the way people behave and whether or not people want to work in the office,” Gulotta said. 

Heap will not be the only election denier to assume leadership over an elections office in Arizona. Republican Recorder David Stevens cruised to re-election in Cochise County, which has made national news for illegally seeking hand-counts of election results. Stevens partnered with his county’s supervisors in that effort. 

In Yuma County, Republican David Lara, who is an outspoken election denier, unseated a non-election denier Republican in the primary and then won overwhelmingly last week. Lara has often lied about Arizona elections and has floated punishing voter fraud with the death penalty. His purported investigation into election tampering claims helped inspire “2,000 Mules,” the debunked movie that alleges the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Yuma County, unlike Maricopa County, places virtually all election-related duties in the office of the recorder, meaning that Lara’s control over how his office runs elections is likely to have far fewer checks than Heap’s will.

Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Arizona State University, is familiar with voter suppression in Arizona, as an advocate for the voting rights of Native people. Her legal clinic sued Apache County last week for turning away or otherwise discouraging participation by Native voters—the latest reminder, she said, of why it matters to have local elections offices that prioritize voter access. Following last week’s results, she told Bolts she looks warily toward future cycles: “People need to perform their ministerial functions they’ve been put in place to do. There should be guardrails in place to protect that, but if you start doing things that are disenfranchising your own voters, people are going to be pretty upset.”

Ferguson-Bohnee also noted that the conservative claims that Arizona elections are rigged suddenly quieted once Trump carried the state last week. 

“They’re not claiming any voter fraud because of the way the election turned out,” she said.

The post Trump Allies Gain Power Over Elections in Arizona’s Largest County appeared first on Bolts.

They voted down Prop 137, which would have largely ended judicial elections in the state and frozen in place the state supreme court’s current conservative majority. They also rejected Prop 134 and 136, which would have severely limited direct democracy by making it far tougher to qualify a measure for the ballot. 

All three measures lost handily, with Prop 137 going down by the largest margin. With some ballots remaining to be counted, it trails 77 to 23 percent as of publication. 

Arizonans on the same day approved an initiative to protect abortion in the state, overturning a 15-week ban GOP lawmakers adopted in 2022. This measure was placed on the ballot through a citizen-led effort, precisely the sort of organizing that would have become prohibitively difficult in the future if Prop 134 and 136 had passed.

“It is heartening that these measures went down pretty solidly,” said Jim Barton, an Arizona attorney who has defended ballot measure campaigns in court and opposed Prop 134 and 136. “Despite all of the work that legislators have done to try to take away citizens’ rights to make laws, we have still been able to get good things done.”

Andy Gordon, another Arizona expert in election law who worked with the group Keep Courts Accountable to convince voters to reject Prop 137, shared Barton’s relief at the results. 

Voters, he said, “recognize there are a group of initiatives that would have taken their rights without giving anything in return, and they voted ‘no’ on those. And on the one that gave them something—in this case reproductive rights—they voted ‘yes.'” 

The Republican attempts to overhaul the state’s constitution came as Democrats have gained ground in Arizona but have failed so far to take over the legislature, prompting the GOP to try to close down some of the alternative avenues the left has used to make gains.

The proposed overhaul of the judiciary would have ended the requirement that judges on the state’s appeals courts and supreme court, and some local courts, win the approval of voters at regular intervals after being appointed by the governor. 

The measure would have given judges a permanent appointment up to age 70, taking voters out of the picture unless a judge fails a performance evaluation or faces specific circumstances like being convicted of certain crimes. 

Had it passed, Prop 137 would also have applied to this year’s elections, nullifying the results of the judicial races that were on the ballot on Tuesday.

Republican lawmakers advanced the proposal this summer to voters after progressives launched a campaign to oust Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, two conservative judges on the state supreme court who had just voted to revive a near-total ban on abortion. Bolick’s wife, Shawnna Bolick, is a state Senator who voted in favor of putting Prop 137 on the ballot.

Bolick and King handily won their retention races on Tuesday, a blow to progressives hoping to reshape the court. As of publication, they have 58 and 59 percent of the vote, respectively. 

Judicial retention races are typically sleepy contests that see little controversy or campaigning. No state supreme court justice has ever lost a retention election in Arizona, and the last time Bolick ran for retention in 2018, he prevailed with 70 percent of the vote. 

But 2022 saw an unusual liberal campaign to oust conservative Justice Bill Montgomery, who survived by 10 percentage points, a slim margin for an Arizona justice. The left’s attempt to unseat Montgomery grew from fears of a right-wing domination of the courts after Republicans added seats to the supreme court under former Governor Doug Ducey. Then, conservatives bristled at the losses of several local judges in Maricopa County in 2022, claiming that these elections were overly politicizing the judiciary. Bolick wrote in an opinion piece in May that progressives are “weaponizing judicial retention.”

Timothy Berg, a constitutional law attorney who co-chairs Arizonans for an Independent Judiciary, a political action committee that advocated for voters to keep Bolick and King, told Bolts that Prop 137 would have changed the Arizona judicial system “to give voters less control.”

“Voting it down is consistent with Arizona’s longtime approach to politics: that voters want a say in who their judges are,” Berg said.

All justices on the state supreme court have been appointed by Republican governors, though that is about to change since Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs is set to pick a replacement for Justice Robert Brutinel, who announced his retirement in September. 

Hobbs was not on the ballot on Tuesday and will remain governor until at least 2026. Democrats were hoping to gain control of the legislature this year and fully run the state government for the first time since the 1960s. The final results are not yet known, but as of publication Democrats are just short of what they would need to accomplish that goal.

Absent legislative majorities for Democrats, progressives over the years have resorted to the citizen-led initiative process to ask Arizonans to approve reforms. This included establishing publicly funded elections in 1998, raising the minimum wage in 2016, legalizing recreational marijuana in 2020, and requiring campaigns to disclose the identity of major donors in 2022. And, this year, it included Prop 139, the abortion rights measure. 

“Initiatives are largely a safety valve for legislative inactivity,” said Gordon. “There was no way in hell this legislature or any legislature in recent history was going to advance the right to abortion and other reproductive rights.”

Prop 134 and 136 would have restricted this path going forward by severely tightening the already arduous process to get an initiative on the ballot. 

Prop 134 would have required citizen initiatives to meet a certain threshold of signatures from every single legislative district in Arizona. Currently, campaigns can qualify for the ballot by collecting a set number of signatures regardless of where in the state they come from. Critics said this requirement would have made the process prohibitively difficult for advocacy organizations and volunteer groups by requiring them to run costly campaigns in sparsely populated areas, and allow measures to be killed by any of the state’s 30 districts.

“This is an effort to make it harder for regular people to engage in the process,” Dawn Penich, an advocate for the campaign that qualified the abortion rights measure this year, told Bolts in May. She described how difficult it already is for organizers to put issues on the ballot. “It is grueling work,” she said. “I’m out in the field, on the streets, at trailheads with our volunteers many days a week.” 

Prop136, meanwhile, would have allowed opponents to challenge the constitutionality of citizen initiatives as soon as it qualifies for the ballot, before they pass. Opponents said it would have made it easier to kill citizen-driven reforms with costly legal battles before voters even had a chance to weigh in, exploding the amount of money needed to run a competitive ballot campaign. 

“Moving these disputes to the court and away from the voting process, it is about taking the power away from voters,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel for the Voting Rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Direct democracy is critical for correcting some distortions in our representative democracy. It serves as a really necessary check on other institutions.” 

Barton said that many voters perceived Prop 134 and 136 as attempts to sabotage the democratic process. Tuesday’s results, he said, “means that voters paid attention more than Republicans thought they would—the citizens do not want tricks to be involved.” 

This isn’t the first time Arizonans have voted to protect direct democracy. In 1998, they amended the state constitution to stop lawmakers from weakening, tweaking or repealing citizen-driven ballot measures after they had been approved by voters. 

“Voters got tired of legislators trying to amend or change the measures they had passed,” Barton recalls. “This is another example of that, where citizens have said—we are not going to allow you to step on our rights.”

Citizen-led initiatives are used by conservatives and progressives alike. In states that are run by Democrats, the right often pursues these measures. Voters in Washington state, for instance, weighed in this fall on initiatives that would have overturned environmental regulations and repealed a capital gains tax on wealthy residents; both failed on Tuesday. Voters in California and Colorado approved initiatives to restrict some forms of punishment.

Still, Republican politicians have moved aggressively in recent years to undercut initiatives. In Montana this year, Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen barred petitions from counting signatures of registered voters who are “inactive”—those who have changed addresses or have missed two consecutive elections—though a judge blocked the rule change. And the GOP has proposed constitutional amendments in many other states to weaken the initiative process.

In 2022 and 2023, voters in Arkansas, Ohio, and South Dakota all rejected such, and in North Dakota they did it just this week: They defeated a GOP-backed measure that would have raised the number of signatures needed to qualify an initiative, and also required initiatives to be adopted twice, on two different dates—on the primary ballot and then the general election ballot. 

“Voters are closely guarding their direct democracy powers,” Clapman said. “Consistently, when it is clear to voters that a ballot measure would strengthen or weaken direct democracy, they choose to strengthen. Voters like having this power.”

Barton agrees, saying of Arizonans, “the voters worked very hard to protect their rights.”

The post Arizonans Defeat Three GOP Measures That Would Have Restricted Their Voting Power appeared first on Bolts.

In November, Arizona voters will decide on Proposition 312, a ballot measure that would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred to address people illegally camping, using drugs, or defecating in public.

The measure was put forth by critics of the homelessness policies of many Arizona cities, and can be understood by looking at two legal standoffs over unhoused camping in public spaces. One was a massive encampment in Phoenix called “The Zone,” which, at its peak, was home to over 1,000 unhoused people. The other: a mostly dry riverbed in Tucson called Navajo Wash. 

Over the past few years, dozens of unhoused people have taken up camp in a city-owned section of Navajo Wash, which was once dotted with palo verde and mesquite trees that provided some relief from the scorching desert sun. But some neighbors cut many of them down, without the city’s approval, leaving behind over 50 twisted stumps scattered across the patch of land. Those same neighbors later sued the city, demanding the camps be forcibly dismantled. The neighbors claimed they were “negatively impacted by the masses of garbage and human waste.” 

Tucson does not have a policy of clearing every homeless encampment following complaints. Instead, camps that don’t pose public safety risks are allowed to stay. The city helps remove trash, offers services and monitors the encampment. Law enforcement is only called to encampments when there are reports of violent or criminal activity, which are then swept away.

In court, Tucson’s lawyers insisted the city’s handling of Navajo Wash was adequate. City workers had handed out basic supplies like backpacks, tarps, food and water. They cleaned up trash at the site and referred people to services steering them toward a shelter or permanent living situation. The court agreed, ruling that the city adequately abated the “nuisance” without forcibly clearing people away. 

Tucson’s strategy of dealing with homelessness by getting people into permanent housing while offering voluntary services follows a widely-used model called Housing First. This model avoids requiring people to complete programs or meet other preconditions to get housing resources. Its advocates cite research showing this approach increases the likelihood of people remaining in stable housing, accessing medical care and receiving substance abuse treatment. 

However, a growing conservative backlash is taking aim at this philosophy, both by removing encampments like the one at Navajo Wash and opposing the underlying policies they blame for allowing the camps to exist. Instead, they’re pushing cities to use the criminal justice system to bear down on homelessness, despite resistance from police and prosecutors who say the problem can’t be arrested away. They want cities to use criminal enforcement as a way to apply pressure to get unhoused people into treatment and off the streets. 

Republican legislators put Proposition 312 on the ballot. The measure would allow property owners to claim a tax refund for costs they’ve incurred when cities maintain a “public nuisance” or show a pattern of not enforcing laws frequently invoked against unhoused people, like loitering or obstructing public thoroughfares. The legislation does not define what reasonable expenses could include, but proponents of the measure cite private security, surveillance systems and cleanups. No Democrats in the state legislature supported the measure, which cannot be vetoed if approved by voters.

By allowing penalties for governments who use Housing First strategies, Proposition 312 advances this ongoing, nationwide effort to dial up law enforcement as a response to homelessness. But critics worry the shift will strain resources and punish a population that needs support, ultimately proving counterproductive to getting people off the streets and into stable housing. 

Legal precedent has long held that it is not a crime to be homeless—though many cities had laws like bans on sleeping in public which were difficult or impossible to follow when unhoused. Until recently, a federal appellate court ruling provided legal guardrails, saying that, “as long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter.”

But this summer, in its ruling on City Of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those protections, clearing the way for policies and court battles pushing the country toward a more punitive handling of homeless encampments. 

In the ruling’s wake, state and local leaders nationwide have proved eager to ramp up tactics. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, for example, issued an executive order, within a month of the ruling, authorizing sweeps on state-owned land. And in recent months, cities from Spokane, Washington, to Des Moines, Iowa, have added or expanded their own camping bans or resumed enforcement of existing ones.

The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based think tank, submitted a legal brief in Grants Pass arguing that Housing First fails because many individuals do not want housing, “at least, not at the cost of giving up their addictions or other poor lifestyle choices.” The organization suggested cities could arrest and incarcerate unhoused people to compel them to treat underlying issues. 

“Allowing people to live on the streets or in tents in a park is not a compassionate response to the problem,” Goldwater’s filing reads. “A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need — including taking them into custody against their will if they are incapable of managing themselves.” 

Before it interceded in the Supreme Court case, the Goldwater Institute supported plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to clear The Zone, the large Phoenix encampment that sat between a cluster of county buildings and the state capital complex. Then it brought legislation to Republican Arizona State Senate President Warren Petersen, who helped it through the legislature, and onto the state’s November ballot as Proposition 312.

Representatives from the Goldwater Institute declined to comment, but supporters of Proposition 312 say the goal is to compensate property owners who have spent money due to their city’s inadequate response to homelessness and prevent the development of more large-scale encampments like The Zone. 

“Prop 312 gives us hope that not only will the City of Phoenix not allow another ‘Zone’ to happen, but if so, there would be some compensation for small businesses like ours,” Debbie and Joe Faillace, former owners of a sandwich shop next to the encampment and plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city, wrote in support of the measure.

Proposition 312 does not clearly define what kinds of remedies are adequate to keep cities off the hook. According to Sheriff Chris Nanos in Pima County (Tucson), law enforcement responds to practically all nuisance complaints — but not always to the liking of residents and neighboring businesses. 

“The law does not say you must take them to the county jail every time. Once you call us, it is our choice. We look at it and consider, do we need to take them to jail for urinating on the side of a building, or do we need to give them a ticket, or do we just tell them to get out of here?” Nanos said. “I think they really want to force the hand of government to do what they want. But you cannot arrest away homelessness.”

The sheriffs who run the state’s largest jail systems, including Pima and Maricopa Counties, have overseen facilities marred by overcrowding, poor conditions a streak of deaths. Jails are already straining to provide mental health and addiction resources for detainees, whose needs outpace the availability of services, Nanos said.

Josh Jacobsen, a business owner and co-chair of the Tucson Crime Free Coalition, a group backing Proposition 312, insisted that the goal isn’t frequent sweeps, which, Jacobsen says, are harmful to the unhoused and do nothing to curb homelessness. Instead, he thinks the city should make arrests, so the criminal justice system can forcefully guide people toward services. 

“With the right amount of pressure, something can be done about it,” Jacobsen said. “The goal is that with the right touch, you can get people to take advantage of services.” 

The county runs several diversion programs, including a specialty court for addressing homelessness, which allow minor charges to be dropped after meeting certain conditions, such as completing an addiction recovery program, though prosecutors warn those programs have limited space. 

In most cases, there is little police can do to meaningfully address nuisance complaints tied to homelessness, said Joe Clure, a retired officer and executive director of the Arizona Police Association, a professional group representing police labor organizations in the state. 

“You do have to manage your human police resources to be most advantageous to community safety. Whether or not that is aggressively going after homeless nuisance violations — that probably would be better left to somebody else than police,” Clure said. “When there is a potential loss of revenue, governments take that very seriously. It probably would move those types of violations up on the priority list. … We will have to be more enforcement-minded.”

“I think they know that mental illness does not cause homelessness,” said Will Knight, decriminalization director at the National Homelessness Law Center. He points instead to issues like stagnating wages, high housing costs and low housing vacancy rates. “But it’s a real easy myth to sell because of what’s the most visible parts of homelessness to most people in the community, who also themselves feel uncomfortable seeing it.” 

For decades, The Zone has been home to unsheltered people, but in recent years, a growing number slept on streets and sidewalks, in tents and other shelters cobbled together from palettes and tarps. Critics of Phoenix’s handling of The Zone accused the city of not enforcing laws against camping, obstructing thoroughfares and using illegal drugs—the same kinds of offenses whose non-enforcement would allow rebates under Proposition 312. 

Last fall, officials cleared The Zone from downtown after business and property owners, represented by the same law firm that led litigation to clear Navajo Wash, sued the city over lost business, employees and property value. Precisely how that clearing was dismantled was shaped by two major forces—one from inside the city’s bureaucracy and one from Washington, D.C.

In 2021, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Phoenix Police Department, not just for use of force and discriminatory policing, but, for the first time for any department, also how police handled unhoused people’s belongings. The investigation, released earlier this year, found city officials seized and destroyed unhoused people’s property without adequate notice or recourse. Police, who previously played a major role in encampment sweeps and cleanings, also regularly stopped, detained and arrested unhoused people—even when there wasn’t evidence of any crime.

While the investigation was underway, Phoenix created a new Office of Homeless Solutions in 2022. It expanded shelter capacity and developed a protocol for storing unattended property. This new office oversaw The Zone’s clearing.

The office cleared the encampment block-by-block, giving advance notice and connecting people with shelter, Rachel Milne, the city’s Homeless Solutions Director told Phoenix City Council in September. The city worked in a “humane and compassionate manner, offering everyone an indoor alternative place,” Milne said.

“In many circumstances, we are really reevaluating what public safety means,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said at a September city council meeting. Many calls for service that had gone to police now go to the Office of Homeless Solutions, a shift she said was called for by both progressive activists and police. “Sometimes the best person to offer help to a person isn’t an armed officer, but a social worker or mental health expert,” Gallego said. 

Even as the city tested this new approach, Maria Walter, an unhoused person who lived in The Zone, felt disrupted as she wondered where to go next as city officials cleared the area.

“It doesn’t feel good. I don’t feel any safety,” said Walter, who was one of the hundreds who had to leave as the city finished its months-long dismantling of The Zone.

In its final weeks, soon-to-be former residents tried to gather their belongings while city workers swept up what they left behind. On some already cleared blocks, people returned to sleep on the sidewalk, covered by cheap blankets, like the kind used to pad furniture when moving. 

As the city cleared the last block, people wheeled their belongings out in carts. Those headed to a shelter tried to fit their belongings into already overstuffed vehicles. “It’s time to drastically downsize,” a city worker advised. 

Phoenix then opened a sanctioned campground for some 300 people a few blocks away from The Zone, offering meals and services on-site. This year, the city opened a new shelter that allows people to stay with pets and partners and more storage for their belongings. Phoenix plans to add over 500 shelter beds by the end of 2025.

But even with efforts to open new shelters, Arizona still faces a shortage of shelter beds and affordable housing, said Jamie Podratz, public policy advocate at the Arizona Housing Coalition. The coalition, which includes organizations and municipalities providing homeless services, opposes Proposition 312 because the refunds would take away money necessary to provide services that reduce homelessness. Emphasizing clearing encampments or enforcing nuisance laws would only displace unhoused people, and make it harder for them to access help, the coalition argues.

“What’s important is what we do from here—and that’s try to increase the supports available and increase the community response rather than pull away much needed resources to address it,” said Podratz.

Despite its win in the case, the legal battle over Navajo Wash pressured Tucson officials to use a firmer hand when dealing with encampments, especially since the decision has been sent to the Arizona Court of Appeals for review following the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling, said Paul Gattone. A civil rights attorney who has worked on several lawsuits to block the city from displacing unhoused people, Gattone described how Tucson officials have closely monitored Navajo Wash to prevent drug use and ramped up enforcement across the city.

​​”It wasn’t much of a victory for the homeless because the city is still doing sweeps,” he said.

In late September, Tucson officials cleared an encampment at Santa Rita Park, a little over a mile southeast of downtown. The park has baseball diamonds, a skatepark and a growing population of unhoused people.

Leticia Valdez organized her belongings on a cart as police and the cleanup crew assembled. She had planned to stay up all night to prepare, but was too tired. She didn’t have a plan beyond moving her belongings across the street. “It’s just a hassle,” Valdez said. ”Some people don’t have nowhere to go.” 

The fight in Arizona is being replicated, in some form, across the country. 

In October, Florida enacted a law conceived by the Cicero Institute, a leading critic of Housing First, banning unhoused people from camping in public and allowing residents, businesses and state prosecutors to sue cities for not quickly clearing out encampments. Like Goldwater, Cicero petitioned the Supreme Court to eliminate protections of unhoused people in the Grants Pass case. 

Cicero has propagated aspects of its model legislation in states across the U.S. In Tennessee, sleeping on public property is a felony. Over the summer, Kentucky passed a law allowing property owners to use, in some cases, lethal force, against people shoplifting, trespassing or illegally camping. Meanwhile, presidential candidate Donald Trump has promoted camping bans except for sanctioned campgrounds. 

A proposition on California’s November ballot similarly uses the criminal justice system as a main tool for managing homelessness. The ballot measure ramps up criminal penalties for certain drug and theft offenses, but allows people charged with those crimes to avoid prison by completing an addiction or mental health treatment program. Breaking with Housing First advocates who hold that individuals with stable housing are more successful at treating behavioral health issues, proponents of the measure claim involuntary treatment works “because people who receive treatment have a much greater chance of staying housed,” according to the campaign’s website. 

Gattone, the Tucson civil rights attorney, argues that displacing a person violating the law simply for living outside doesn’t fix the problem, it just moves that problem someplace else. Arizona has thousands fewer shelter beds than unhoused people, meaning there is no feasible way for cities to enforce the law without simply sweeping people from one location to another.

“The answer to homelessness is housing,” Gattone said. “People have to live somewhere. They are not going to disappear.”

The post The Next Front in the Fight Over Homelessness Is on the Arizona Ballot appeared first on Bolts.

While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

The Arizona GOP put Proposition 137 on the ballot in June, amid widespread outrage over the state supreme court’s April decision to uphold a Civil War-era abortion ban. Within weeks of that ruling, the progressive group Progress Arizona launched a campaign to unseat two of the justices who sided with the majority and are up for retention this fall, Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, providing an outlet for voters put off by the decision and the court’s ideological makeup.

Prop 137, if it passes on Nov. 5, would nullify Bolick and King’s retention races that are taking place on the same day, as well as cancel future elections. 

The proposal is “a power grab,” said Abigail Jackson, digital director of Progress Arizona. “This was responding to the energy and the anger we saw around that decision. The extremist legislators who pushed the proposal forward did it with the intention of protecting these judges.” 

She added, “It is designed to take away our voices.”

Jake Faleschini, program director for the Alliance for Justice, a national organization that works to build progressive strength in the judiciary, points to a string of changes the GOP has pushed nationwide to consolidate power in state courts. In Arizona, Republicans last decade expanded the state supreme court and secured a strong conservative majority. 

“At the end of the day, they want policy outcomes from the courts and they are willing to change the rules to achieve that,” Faleschini told Bolts.

“What we are seeing now is a bit of an awakening from the left around just how important these courts are for maintaining our rights,” he said. “As these rights have been taken away by the [U.S.] Supreme Court, some of the state supreme courts are no longer there as willing participants in proactively protecting their rights.”

Supporters of Prop 137 say it is designed to insulate judges from such blowback against their rulings so they don’t have to pander to win votes. Republican Senator David Gowan, one of the measure’s chief sponsors, says he’s worried about national groups flooding state elections.

“This proposition makes it difficult for nefarious outsiders to manipulate our judicial process,” Gowan told Bolts. “We see a lot of dollars pour in from out of state to unseat judges who can’t defend themselves because they aren’t politicians.” 

Gowan, a conservative who used to be state Speaker, has a history of proposals that would override election results. He proposed a bill in 2021 to allow lawmakers to attribute Arizona’s electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate they choose, regardless of how people vote. 

This year’s Prop 137 would cancel retention elections for supreme court justices, judges on the state’s court of Appeals, and superior court judges in counties above 250,000 residents.

Currently, all judges first make it on the court through an appointment by the governor, though the state has some guardrails for who governors can choose: They must select their nominee from a shortlist of candidates assembled by a 16-member panel, though that panel’s members are also chosen by the governor. 

Once judges are on the court, they face regular performance reviews, as well as retention elections every four to six years that give the public some say; these races are ‘up-or-down’ questions, in which Arizona judges never face an opponent. As long as they win these retention tests, judges can stay on the court—up until the mandatory retirement age of 70. 

The system was approved by Arizona voters in 1974, with support from Sandra Day O’Connor, who at the time was a Republican state senator. After she retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006, O’Connor worked to bring Arizona’s system to other states.

This year, the Arizona Judges Association, a professional organization that represents hundreds of judges, advocated for the measure to end retention elections. Jonathan Paton, a former GOP lawmaker who lobbies on their behalf, told lawmakers that scrapping retention elections would improve accountability because it’s too difficult for voters to make informed decisions on judges.

“I represent the Judges Association, and I don’t know who most of these people are that appear on the ballot,” Paton testified in the legislature. “So, do we think that the average voter knows?”

Paton is married to Court of Appeals Judge Angela Paton, who is also up for retention this fall and has been targeted by a progressive group. If Prop 137 passes, it would also nullify the results of her election. 

But many Arizona jurists don’t want the public to be cut out of the process of deciding who runs the courts, and the debate over Prop 137 created large rifts within the legal community. 

Retired Chief Justice Ruth McGregor, a former president of the Arizona Judges Association, spoke against Prop 137 at the launch event of Keep Courts Accountable, a political action committee formed in August to convince voters to reject the amendment. Former Chief Justice Scott Bales and former Justice John Pelander spoke at the event as well. 

Reached for comment, Paton would not say whether the Arizona Judges Association still backs the reform. The association’s website was taken offline in the last month. Paton also told Bolts that, as a lobbyist for judges, he cannot reply to questions about an active ballot measure.

“Without the vote of the people, the judges would have no accountability,” Felicia Rotellini, who chairs the Keep Courts Accountable PAC, told Bolts. “If there is no accountability to the people, then there is a motivation to lean towards their own ideological preferences, their personal preferences, their political preferences.”

“We will lose part of our democracy,” said Rotellini, who is also a former head of the state Democratic Party.

Arizona is among the 31 states that hold elections for their justices. Ending that practice would make it an outlier in the West, where many states adopted judicial elections during the Progressive Era as part of a broader wave to end corruption and cronyism. The 19 states that have no judicial elections are heavily concentrated in the northeast of the country.

In Arizona, a commission of laypeople and legal experts periodically reviews judges’ performance to determine if they meet the standards for the bench, based on surveys collected from attorneys, fellow judges and people who have appeared before them in court. The scores are shared with voters before each election to help voters decide whether to keep them based on standards of merit, such as legal ability and integrity, rather than political issues.

If Prop 137 is approved, judges would only go before the voters if they fail their performance review, a rarity in Arizona, or if they are convicted of certain crimes, declare bankruptcy, or foreclose upon a mortgage. Gowan is making the case that this reform would help voters make decisions that are a lot more informed.

“The judicial retention portion of the ballot, that’s two pages long,” he said. “If we take the high performing judges off the ballot, it allows the people to see the low-performing judges, and they are no longer able to hide in the crowd, because those are the ones we want to knock out.”

But Prop 137 would also modify the performance review process by injecting legislators into it: The majority party in each chamber would appoint a member to the otherwise nonpartisan commission charged with assessing judges for impartiality, temperament and expertise. 

According to Bales, the former chief justice who spoke at the launch of the PAC that opposes Prop 137, the change would “make judges more susceptible to criticisms from the legislature, and perhaps a little less susceptible to the kind of public input you get through the [election process].” 

Prop 137 would also give legislators authority to order investigations against judges suspected of “a pattern of malfeasance,” though the proposal does not define what activities would warrant such an inquiry. 

Bates worries this would empower legislators to attack judges they disagree with. “What I think this really is, is a blank check for any individual legislator who has a grievance against a judge or wants to get some political milage out of asserting a grievance against a judge,” he said.

The effort to end judicial terms in Arizona comes as reformers at the federal level are pushing for the inverse change of rolling back lifetime judicial appointments. Following revelations that U.S. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alitto accepted millions of dollars in undisclosed gifts from individuals with cases before the court, groups like Alliance for Justice are making the case that federal judges are not accountable enough and that the federal system needs stronger guardrails, such as term limits and an enforceable code of ethics.  

If Prop 137 passes, Arizona judges would look a lot more like the federal bench, Falschini said. They “would have zero accountability to the people, just like federal judges.” 

Bolick, one of the two justices up for retention this fall, published an opinion article in May in the Arizona Republic, arguing that it’s the campaign to oust him that’s responsible for politicizing the judiciary and diluting the state’s emphasis on merit.

Progressives, he wrote, are “weaponizing judicial retention” and “cynically harnessing anger over our recent abortion decision to replace us with justices who will rubber-stamp their ideological agenda.”

The latest efforts over Bolick’s reelection and Prop 137 are an escalation of fights that took off last decade, though. Republicans, led by former Governor Doug Ducey, changed the norms around court appointments, helping ensure courts would lean conservative. Their maneuvers allowed Ducey to appoint five of the seven justices currently sitting on the all-Republican court.

In 2016, Republicans expanded the state supreme court by adding two seats, enabling Ducey to appoint two new judges despite unanimous opposition from sitting justices.

Then, in 2019, Ducey upended the nominating commission to ensure he’d be able to nominate his preferred candidate. Earlier that year, the commission had refused to include Bill Montgomery, Maricopa County’s conservative prosecutor, on its shortlist for a judicial vacancy. Ducey then replaced some of the commission’s members, paving the way for the new panel to recommend Montgomery and for the governor to place him on the supreme court. 

Although no Arizona justice has ever lost a retention race, progressives in 2022 mounted an unusually solid effort to oust Montgomery, questioning his ideology and ethics. The justice also received relatively low performance scores in his evaluations, but was ultimately retained. 

But in Maricopa County, the largest county in the state, voters chose to not to retain three local judges, an unusual result. One of the ousted judges, Stephen Hopkins, was the only judge that year to fail to meet the performance standards of the review process. 

In March of this year, GOP lawmakers passed a resolution to end judicial elections through the state Senate; that was right before the supreme court’s decision on abortion. The House took up the bill months later, amid the surge of pro-choice activism against Bolick and King. The vote to advance the measure was strictly along party lines in both chambers, with all Republicans supporting it. 

State Senator Shawnna Bolick, a Republican who is married to Clint Bolick, voted in favor of the resolution that would end her spouse’s future elections. 

Democrats in 2022 also flipped the governor’s mansion, and this November they have a shot at gaining the legislature and controlling the state’s government for the first time since the 1960s. 

Republicans have reacted with frustration as they’ve lost their advantage in the state, and have pursued other steps to use this year’s ballot to limit the will of voters, including a measure to make it prohibitively difficult to qualify a citizen’s initiative. In Maricopa County, GOP candidates who have spread conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen are trying to win control over the elections systems. 

And if voters pass Prop 137 this fall, it would void the results of the concurrent retention races, including Bolick and King’s. 

But if they reject the amendment while ousting one or both of Bolick or King, Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs would have the power to nominate their replacements. 

Regardless, Hobbs will soon get her first appointment to the court. Justice Robert Brutinel, who was appointed to the court by Republican Governor Jan Brewer in 2010 and who dissented in the court’s decision to revive the abortion ban, announced on Tuesday that he is retiring.

For Faleschini, Prop 137 is about freezing the court’s conservative majority in place. “It’s not that they are looking for a change to the system to make it more fair and impartial,” he said. “They are seeking changes to make sure that the types of political justices they want on courts can stay.”

He added, “Republicans are concerned they will not win a statewide election again in a very long time. They think the only power they can hold onto is through the supreme court.”

The post Arizona GOP Asks Voters to Nullify the Judicial Elections They’ll Be Voting On appeared first on Bolts.

Democrat Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, the elections head in Arizona’s Pima County, says she drove to work in silence on Wednesday morning, after her counterpart in Maricopa County, Republican Stephen Richer, lost his primary to a far-right challenger.

“Are you allowed to print expletives?” she told Bolts.

Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 4.5 million residents, is the nation’s most populous swing county—and it’s lately seen a torrent of right-wing activism pushing false claims about recent elections. Richer, who came into office in 2021, relentlessly defended how elections are run in the county, taking it upon himself to constantly debunk unfounded claims—pushed by everyone from Arizona politicians to Elon Musk—that fraud is rampant and results are rigged. 

He faced persistent harassment and criticism from fellow Republicans for this stance, and even got death threats; one local Republican, who chaired Arizona’s delegation at last month’s Republican National Convention, said she wanted to “lynch” Richer. 

He was ousted on Tuesday in the GOP primary by state representative Justin Heap, who drew support from some of the country’s most vocal election deniers, and whose campaign was led by an indicted 2020 “fake elector” for Donald Trump. Heap beat Richer by about seven percentage points and moves on to face Democrat Timothy Stringham in the general election. 

“This November, we will end the laughingstock elections that have plagued our county, state and nation,” Heap posted on the social media platform X after his win.

Arizona’s elections infrastructure has largely held up since 2020 amid a barrage of Trumpian lawsuits and extensive organizing by conservatives who falsely say that state elections are stolen from them. But the Arizona primaries underscored the potency in Republican politics of the false narrative that elections can’t be trusted—and that something drastic has to be done about it.

Heap’s was one in a string of big GOP primary wins on Tuesday for candidates who have baselessly cast doubt on elections. 

Republicans Kari Lake, Abe Hamadeh, and Mark Finchem, all of whom lost statewide races in 2022 and then refused to concede, won congressional and legislative primaries. A rare Republican senator who had opposed new restrictions on voting in the state’s most recent session lost his reelection bid. Wendy Rogers, another senator who is a member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group, beat back a more moderate challenger. In Yuma County, just west of Maricopa County, a county recorder who has resisted election conspiracies lost to a staunch election denier.

And in Maricopa County, primary results left the local elections system several steps closer to falling in the hands of Republicans who have echoed Trumpian lies.

Jack Sellers, the Republican chair of the county board, the body that certifies local election results, lost by a large margin to Mark Stewart, a Chandler city councilor who has refused to say if he’d have certified the results of recent elections. Debbie Lesko, a U.S. representative who voted to overturn the results of the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021,, won the GOP primary for an open seat on the board.

Some of these candidates are likely to coast in November because they’re running in conservative areas. The general elections will be highly competitive for others. 

Maricopa County Democrats have a strong chance of flipping the recorder’s office by defeating Heap; they are also likely to target Stewart in a competitive district within Maricopa County. 

These contests won’t affect how elections are run this fall, since none of the winners will be seated until next year. But they’ll shape who will run, count, and certify elections in this state starting next year, at least through the 2026 midterm election and the 2028 presidential election.

U.S. states vary widely in their respective approaches to election administration. Even within Arizona there is variance. Maricopa County’s approach is to split the job between the county recorder and its county board: The recorder oversees voter registration and mail voting, while the elected board of supervisors oversees voting on Election Day and vote tabulation, then certifies the results of the election.

In these roles, Richer and the county supervisors found themselves on the frontlines against election deniers. The supervisors indulged conspiracy theorists after 2020 by ordering an audit that turned up nothing. But they then partnered with Richer to reject these allegations, standing unanimously by him in certifying the results of the 2022 midterm elections, over much Republican outcry. 

“This is a war between good and evil, and you all are on the side of evil,” a right-wing organizer told the board during the certification meeting, which was marked by other angry outbursts. 

All five seats on the board are up for election this year. Lesko and Stewart’s victories in the county’s first and fourth districts mark gains for the far right, but candidates aligned with election deniers failed to win Republican primaries in the second and third districts; their biggest failure of the night came when Supervisor Thomas Galvin survived against a Lake-endorsed challenger, Michelle Ugenti-Rita. An election denier also secured the GOP nomination in the fifth district, but that area is staunchly Democratic. 

This means that candidates who have openly signaled a willingness to stall election certification are unlikely to claim an outright majority on the board this fall.

Still, a scenario in which multiple supervisors vote to reject certification, and give voice to baseless allegations of fraud in an official setting, may give new ammunition to lawsuits by election deniers—and calls for new legislation by their statehouse allies.

Elections experts in Arizona believe that sufficient backstops exist—in state law, in the judiciary, and in key statewide offices held by Democrats—to prevent local officials from single-handedly undoing legitimate election results in the future. 

But Trump-aligned lawyers in the past have theorized that they’d be able to weaponize any chaos created by local officials during the process of counting and certifying presidential results, encouraging their allies to foster a “cloud of confusion.” 

“When you’re talking about literally millions of people, tabulating their results, accounting for them, tracking them, in a very ridiculously short period of time, that is a complicated piece of machinery,” said Jim Barton, a Democratic elections attorney based in Arizona. “When you have people who don’t know what they’re doing making rules about it and interfering with it, it can throw sand in the gears of this finely tuned system.”

Arizona has experienced such gear-grinding. Officials in some counties have pushed for hand counting of ballots, a priority for conservatives who say without evidence that voting machines are unreliable and easily rigged. These officials have also sought to delay election certification in some cases. 

Election experts also say they’re anxious about the ability of local leaders to make voting harder or more confusing. Recorders cannot unilaterally remove existing voting options, or just boot eligible voters from the rolls. But they run and staff various voter services, oversee public outreach and education, handle public records requests, and determine how—or whether—to assist people who need help to register or to obtain a ballot.

If he becomes the chief elections official In Maricopa County, Heap has promised to “clean the voter rolls,” alleging that Richer has failed to properly regulate voter registration. There is no evidence that Richer’s office has allowed ballot access to ineligible people.

Heap has dodged questions about whether he thinks the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections are accurate. In the statehouse, he’s part of the far-right Freedom Caucus, which has championed major changes to election laws. He supported legislation to ban most early-voting options in the state and encourage hand-counting of ballots.

Heap has said he was recruited to run for the position by state Senator Jake Hoffman, who is facing felony charges for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Hoffman served as chief strategist during this campaign, Heap said.

The general election between Heap and Stringham, a Democrat who vows to defend voting rights, is likely to be very competitive in this swing county. Richer in 2020 won with a margin of just 0.3 percent against Democrat Adrian Fontes, who then went on to carry the county two years later on his way to becoming Arizona’s secretary of state.

Beyond Fontes’ race, Republicans generally and unexpectedly struggled in Arizona’s most high-profile races in 2022, a result that was widely attributed to the fact that their ticket was almost entirely led by candidates who prioritized election conspiracies. 

Hoping to recreate that cycle’s dynamic, Stringham on Tuesday night wasted no time appealing to GOP voters who don’t believe in Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections. 

“For all of my Republican friends who are hoping and waiting for the days of the old Republican Party to return – it isn’t,” he posted on X. “If you voted for Stephen Richer, I imagine you did so because of his honesty in the face of lies over the last four years. I’m asking you to continue to vote for the honest candidate.”

In Yuma, the other Arizona county where an incumbent Republican recorder faced a far-right challenger, the general election contest remains uncertain as of publication.

Challenger David Lara held an edge of just 77 votes over incumbent Richard Colwell out of the more than 10,000 counted as of Thursday evening.

While no Democrat appeared on the ballot, Emilia Cortez ran a write-in campaign. If the county confirms that enough voters wrote in her name, she would face Lara or Colwell in November. (Update: Lara prevailed in the final count, and Cortez gathered enough signatures to move to the general election.)

Lara has often lied about elections in Arizona, saying election fraud has taken place for “many years, wide open.” He has also floated punishing that fraud with the death penalty. His complaints helped inspire parts of the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which is popular on the right for alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the movie drew from a purported investigation that Lara conducted alongside another county resident into election tampering.

Unlike in Maricopa County, the Yuma County recorder oversees all aspects of the elections system, so a takeover by Lara could trip up local elections and certification even more directly.

On her Wednesday commute, Cázares-Kelly, the Pima County recorder, considered what would happen if Arizona’s elections infrastructure, already under deep pressure, takes a turn to the right.

“I’m thinking about all of the wonderful people who work in elections, of my colleagues and the state elections officers who are so knowledgeable, who have decades of experience in elections and a very high level of personal accountability and passion for the work,” she said. “I’m wondering how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and I am deeply disappointed.”

“These conspiracy theories are very concerning, and clouding our ability to serve the public,” Cázares-Kelly added. “We have a duty to our voters in protecting the right to vote.”

Editor’s note: The article was updated with the final results in the recorder primary in Yuma County.

The post In Nation’s Largest Swing County, Election Deniers Move Closer to Taking Over Elections appeared first on Bolts.

All Arizonans this fall could decide whether to boost the role of local police in border enforcement, as Republicans placed a measure on the statewide ballot that would empower cops to arrest people suspected of being undocumented. But the issue is also playing out locally this year, highlighting critical disagreements among law enforcement in Arizona over just how much to collaborate with federal border police.

A local election next week will help decide if the leadership of a populous border county will have any appetite to increase partnerships with the border patrol in coming years.

Operation Stonegarden, a federal grant program that gives local police the funds and equipment to patrol the border region for immigration enforcement, has become a dividing line among candidates in this year’s race for sheriff of Pima County, home to Tucson. While the incumbent sheriff, Chris Nanos, says he agrees with the county’s decision to leave the program several years ago, his opponent in the July 30 Democratic primary wants Pima County to rejoin Operation Stonegarden. 

Sandy Rosenthal, a former deputy with the Pima sheriff’s office and Nanos’ challenger next week, has sharply criticized the sheriff for leaving Stonegarden money on the table amid budget and staff shortages that have contributed to poor conditions at the jail. At a June candidate forum, Rosenthal endorsed the federal border partnership as a way to stem the flow of fentanyl into the community.

“It allows us to get more deputies out in the farther reaches of Pima County,” Rosenthal said during last month’s forum. “When you give up an area, when you give up a responsibility, bad things happen. The cartels, they enjoy what’s happening now. They don’t have to worry about any deputy sheriff being out along the border. There’s no coverage whatsoever.” Rosenthal did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts.

Nanos told Bolts that local law enforcement should not take up border enforcement duties since securing the border is primarily a federal function—a position the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed. Nanos also said the county didn’t benefit from the Stonegarden patrols, which typically occurred in remote areas that have little crime: The sheriff said that less than 1 percent of emergency calls his office receives come from the area along the border. Cartels, Nanos said, practically never smuggle fentanyl through the open desert, opting instead to use vehicles crossing ports of entry.

“That grant didn’t benefit the community at all. It benefitted border patrol because it gave them boots on the ground,” Nanos told Bolts. Officers on Stonegarden assignments, Nanos said, “didn’t work for the sheriff. They worked for border patrol. They were on border patrol radio. They answered to border patrol supervisors.”

Public officials often point to the border as a proxy for the everyday issues that Pima residents face, especially the drug crisis and crime, Nanos said. Stoked by voices from the far right on the national stage, residents across the political spectrum in Southern Arizona have echoed fears that migrants are responsible for a flood of fentanyl pouring across the Mexican border that has resulted in countless overdoses and deaths.

But extensive research indicates that immigrants commit less crime than U.S.-born people and that there’s no correlation between undocumented people and rising crime. As for drug smuggling, fentanyl rarely moves into the country through the open desert and is almost always smuggled in through legal ports of entry, with U.S. citizens accounting for 89 percent of convicted fentanyl traffickers, according to a report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Adelita Grijalva, the Democratic chair of Pima County’s Board of Supervisors who opposes Stonegarden grants, told Bolts she worries about what their return would mean for her constituents. More than a third of people in this county of more than one million residents are Hispanic, according to the 2020 census. 

“People of color, specifically Latinos, are going to be targeted because of the way we look,” Grijalva said. “There’s an assumption people shouldn’t be in our communities because of what we look like—what my family looks like—that we may or may not be citizens. So having our Pima County Sheriff pulling people over based on that suspicion is a huge concern.”

As immigration crackdowns escalated at both the state and federal levels, a decades-long immigrant rights’ movement in Arizona pressured local governments to end participation in the Stonegarden program. 

In 2010, then-Governor Jan Brewer signed what became known as the state’s “show me your papers” law. Under the law, police could arrest and charge immigrants with a state crime if they were not carrying their immigration documents. Critics said the law, portions of which were eventually struck down, gave local police free reign to target people based on their ethnicity and would lead to racial profiling.

The 2010 law made Arizona unlivable for many in the state without papers who struggled to find necessities like work, housing and medical care, said Tony Pineda, a staff member of the Southside Worker Center. The center formed in 2006 to give day laborers a safe place to find employment and negotiate wages after jobseekers ran into problems with border patrol and local police. But even with the center’s help getting legal support, housing assistance and other essentials, immigrant families in the area struggled under what was the country’s strictest immigration policy at the time, Pineda said.

“It was something we suffered a lot from. At that time, I was undocumented as well. There was a big impact on the city for immigrants, and I saw it harm the members of the Worker Center,” Pineda said.

This organizing against Brewer’s signature law laid the groundwork for the fights to come. Neighborhood groups across Tucson and immigrant rights organizations became more active and built stronger connections with each other to unite against the restrictions, Pineda said, eventually pushing the city of Tucson to sue the state to block the law. The Southside Worker Center later joined groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to challenge the “show me your papers” law in court.

Another massive mobilization in support of immigrant rights came around 2018 after the federal government adopted a zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border and incarcerated them in detention centers widely condemned for abusive conditions. Many in Pima County found the hardline border policies inhumane and cruel, Pineda said. As images of children locked in cages and stories of newborns ripped from their mothers’ arms spread across social media, voices grew louder against the family separations and the anti-immigrant sentiment at the policy’s root.

“It had a big impact on the community, even for people who are already established here, regardless of legal status,” Pineda said. “They also suffer because they have families too. It was something that took root in the entire city, and across Pima County.” 

As the unfolding family separation crisis became the face of federal immigration policy, attitudes in Pima County toward border authorities soured, said Isabel Garcia, co-founder of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos and the former Pima County Legal Defender. This heightened pressure on elected officials to separate their local police forces from border patrol missions, Garcia said.

“We were protesting all over. We had massive demonstrations in front of the federal courthouse. Everybody came out about the children,” Garcia said. “We were very inspired by the unity, more than anything. So they couldn’t lie to us anymore. We knew exactly what it entailed—that these police officers, when they checked in, had to become border patrol agents and follow the commands of border patrol.”

Garcia said that the Stonegarden program had a chilling effect on public trust in law enforcement, where people stopped reporting crimes and calling 911 for help out of fear that they or their loved ones would be arrested and deported.

These are complaints that immigrants’ rights activists have voiced against local partnerships with federal immigration enforcement elsewhere in the country. In neighboring Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio reshaped the department to act as an extension of immigration agencies during his long tenure from 1993 to 2017. His actions spurred a legal battle in 2007 that eventually led to a federal court ruling that the sheriff’s office had engaged in racial profiling and ordering the department to reform the discriminatory practices. 

Critics of the Stonegarden program in Pima County say it did little to benefit public safety and resulted in thousands of people being needlessly detained, interrogated and harassed by local cops over immigration status—especially Latino drivers.

“It was all just to check them for Border Patrol. We wound up with people getting arrested and deported at that point,” Garcia said. “Imagine all of these stops. If I get stopped, I’m still scared, and I’m a lawyer and a citizen. There is no justice for us anymore.”

In 2018, over objections from the Republican sheriff at the time, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted to end the county’s participation in Operation Stonegarden, which had given the county around $16 million over the prior 12 years. Board members who voted to not apply for the grants expressed concerns that the program banned using the grant funds for humanitarian relief and that targeting immigrants could chill people’s trust in local police.

Tucson, the county’s largest city, also withdrew its police department from the Stonegarden program in 2020 after federal officials denied the city’s requests to spend some of the grant money on humanitarian aid for migrants seeking asylum. The city’s police chief at the time told the Arizona Daily Star that the feds’ denial “really seemed like the end of the line” for the program, which the chief said was “not a great fit for the work we were doing.” On the other hand, the neighboring town of Marana still participates in Operation Stonegarden. Marana Police uses the funds to assign patrols in rural areas thought to be routes for smugglers and drug cartels, a police spokesperson said. 

While the members of the Pima County Board of Supervisors have changed since initially rejecting the federal money, there isn’t currently enough support to sign off on the Operation Stonegarden program even if the winner of the sheriff’s race applied for the grants, said Grijalva, the board chair. Democrats currently have a four-to-one majority on the board.

Still, all seats on the board are up for election this year, so the board’s position may change depending on the outcomes in November. A new sheriff who makes it a mission to ramp up immigration enforcement could also put more pressure on other county officials, especially if it coincides with changeover in the federal administration. 

The winner of next week’s Democratic primary between Nanos and Rosenthal will face one of three GOP candidates—Bill Phillips, Heather Lappin, Terry Frederick—in November. All three Republicans have expressed support for harsher practices on immigration. The Democratic nominee will be favored in the general election in this county that typically votes blue, but Republicans have had local success—including winning the sheriff’s office as recently as 2016.

Groups are also already gearing up for a fight to convince voters to reject Proposition 314, a measure that was put on the November ballot by Republican lawmakers that would empower state and local law enforcement to arrest people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. (Opponents of the measure are trying to knock the measure off the ballot, and litigation is ongoing as of publication.) Both Nanos and Rosenthal oppose the ballot measure.

Grijalva is confident that, in Pima County at least, voters will want to keep in place officials who oppose scaling up enforcement. 

“The positions on Stonegarden, for a lot of people, that’s been their deciding factor on who they are going to vote for,” she told Bolts. “Pima county continues to be a place that is humanitarian, that wants justice, and wants our community to be safe.”

Correction (July 26): An earlier version of this story misstated that Grijalva has endorsed Nanos’ reelection bid; she has not. 

The post In an Arizona Border County, Rifts Over How Much to Help the Feds Patrol the Border appeared first on Bolts.

Getting a measure on the ballot is expensive and onerous, says Dawn Penich, a spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access, the organization behind this year’s measure. But her group is determined to champion it to restore abortion rights and overcome restrictions put in place by Arizona Republicans. They’ve raised over $12 million to recruit hundreds of volunteers, train them, and send them out to canvas in high-traffic areas under the blazing desert sun. Their goal: get at least 383,923 Arizonans who are registered to vote to sign a petition so it qualifies for the ballot. 

“It is grueling work,” Penich said. “I’m out in the field, on the streets, at trailheads with our volunteers many days a week.” 

“It’s folks who are oftentimes retired,” she added of the canvassers who are securing signatures. “It’s folks who are fitting this in before or after their full-time jobs. None of this is easy.”

The GOP is now pushing a separate constitutional amendment that would multiply those hurdles, and make future citizen-led initiatives prohibitively difficult.

Republican lawmakers have placed a measure on the November ballot that would severely restrict direct democracy in Arizona by imposing strict geographic requirements on where organizers must gather signatures. Arizonans will vote on it this fall, likely alongside the abortion measure. 

Penich warns that the amendment would make organizing like hers tougher going forward. “This is an effort to make it harder for regular people to engage in the process,” she told Bolts. 

Right now, petitioners need to pass just one statewide test to qualify a measure: They need to gather more signatures than a minimum number defined in the state constitution, regardless of where the signatures come from. (The threshold is 10 or 15 percent of all votes cast in the most recent governor’s race, depending on whether the proposal would amend the constitution.) 

If the new measure passes, it would create 30 separate tests instead: Initiatives would need to meet that same threshold of signatures in each and every one of Arizona’s 30 legislative districts.

This would require tremendous logistical feats from any citizen-led effort. Canvassers would need to dramatically scale up their presence in the most remote parts of Arizona, unable to rely on high-traffic areas and denser population centers. 

Arizonans who have experience working on signature-gathering told Bolts that this requirement could prove insurmountable to them given the resources and capacity it would call for.

“This is nothing but a backdoor way to shut down the initiative process,” said Jim Barton, an election law attorney who has been involved in numerous legal fights over the rules of initiatives in Arizona. 

Proponents of this change say it is necessary to ensure rural Arizonans have a voice in the process; they say citizen-led initiatives are typically pushed by voters in Maricopa and Pima Counties, the state’s two most populous.

“It shows up on the ballot with very little buy-in from other parts of the state,” Republican state Senator J.D. Mesnard, who sponsored the amendment, Senate Concurrent Resolution 1015, told Bolts.

SCR 1015 passed both chambers of the legislature on party-line votes, with Republicans in support.

Mesnard added that he wants to reel in out-of-state groups that have zeroed in on Arizona as a key battleground state. “We’ve been seeing an increased use of the initiative process by outside organizations that don’t even exist in Arizona coming in and planting themselves in Maricopa County and gathering all the signatures they need,” Mesnard said.

Sarah Gonski, an Arizona-based lawyer who has represented Democrats in election litigation, predicts that the changes will have the opposite effect. Between the operational expenses of recruiting and training canvassers across every part of the state, and the legal expenses needed to defend the signatures in court, she told Bolts that only those with deep pockets could qualify a ballot initiative.

“Initiatives are going to be even more expensive. That means as a tool, it is even more inaccessible to actual citizens of Arizona,” said Gonski, who also teaches election law at ASU and works as a policy advisor for the Institute for Responsive Government. “It pretty much boxes out grassroots Arizona groups and ensures only well-monied special interests can come in and campaign.”

The geographic requirements in SCR 1015 would force organizers to deploy extensive resources to find thousands of supporters in regions that may be politically hostile to their agenda; while Arizona overall is closely divided, some areas skew very blue or red. (Joe Biden and Donald Trump each received more than 70 percent in at least one legislative district in the last presidential election.)

Even when organizers believe they’ve collected enough signatures, their opponents would simply have to show that they missed the mark in just one of the state’s 30 districts for the entire initiative to be scrapped. This would open more opportunities for legal mischief, and multiply courtroom battles. 

Pinny Sheoran, president of the League of Women’s Voters of Arizona, which opposes the proposed changes to the initiative process, agrees that these changes would lock out most Arizonans from a process in which they’ve grown used to participating.

“The ruling minority doesn’t want to share the power with the public,” Sheoran said.

The left doesn’t have a monopoly on popular initiatives, but in Arizona, where the state government has been run by Republicans for much of the last few decades, the direct democracy process has been a rare tool progressives can use to champion some of their most popular priorities. 

Voters approved a minimum wage increase in 2016, they legalized recreational marijuana in 2020, and they approved a hike in teachers’ salaries and education funding through raising taxes on top earners in 2020. (That last measure was eventually struck down by state courts.)

All these measures were initiated by Arizona organizations looking to circumvent the legislature. Other citizen-led initiatives have fueled reforms to the political system. A 1998 initiative set up public campaign funding with an eye to diminishing the power of special interests. A ballot measure in 2000 stopped gerrymandering by setting up an independent redistricting commission. A 2022 measure required groups making independent expenditures to disclose the identity of major donors.

Facing this string of victorious progressive campaigns, Republican politicians began chipping away at Arizonans’ right to put measures on the ballot.

In 2017, a law adopted by the GOP over Democratic objections made it easier for signatures to be challenged in court. The law set a higher standard of “strict compliance” that a voter’s signature must meet when compared to voter registration files. This has made it more likely for signatures to be tossed or declared invalid based on technicalities like a voter using an shortened version of their name. 

Republicans said the requirement would protect against fraud, but Penich says the law unleashed a deluge of pricey legal battles to strike signatures on formatting issues, misspellings, illegible characters and other minor details on petitions. “What most people would consider a really ridiculous detail could invalidate rows of signatures,” Penich said. “For instance, if somebody’s signature… touches the signature below it, that could be grounds to invalidate both signatures.”

As a result of the tightened standards, campaigns have to set aside more funds to defend the petitions in court, and they also have to invest more time in training circulators to minimize the number of signatures that may end up being tossed.

“Not only is it 110 degrees, not only is it after a full day of work while their families are at home,” Penich said, “we also have to be watching like a hawk while they sign that they stay inside the box, that they don’t leave out the date.”

Mesnard, the state senator behind SCR 1015, also supported the strict compliance law back in 2017.  

“If you are bypassing the normal process, it should be pretty strict,” he told Bolts this month. “If that means there should be fewer things on the ballot, then it might mean a healthier situation than what we had before.”

Another change that has made it harder to qualify initiatives is a provision tucked into a broad law that passed in 2014 with wide bipartisan support. It allows groups suing to challenge a petition to subpoena individual canvassers who sought out signatures for it; if a circulator does not show up to testify in court, all the signatures they collected are tossed out. 

In 2018, a group opposed to a clean energy initiative filed a string of subpoenas against roughly 1,400 canvassers as part of a lawsuit alleging that the petition violated Arizona’s strict compliance standards. The petition’s organizers have said it cost them over $1.3 million to bring all these circulators to court, including costs of flights, lodging, and missed wages. 

“The court let them do it, even though you could never get testimony from so many witnesses,” said Barton, the attorney who litigated the case. The clean energy initiative eventually did get enough signatures verified to qualify for the ballot, though it ultimately lost that year. Another petition drive didn’t even make it that far: Organizers of an initiative to outlaw dark money were hit by mass subpoenas, and thousands of signatures were tossed because circulators did not show up in court. 

The Arizona supreme court blessed this subpoena rule in a 2018 ruling. 

Terry Goddard, a former Democratic attorney general who was behind the dark money initiative, warned that the ruling created a very high barrier of entry for direct democracy. “You not only have to get valid signatures but then you have to keep the circulator around and have them appear at a hearing or all their signatures are going to be determined invalid,” he said at the time. 

Critics of this system filed a federal lawsuit, but they eventually withdrew their claims after losing in court. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who at the time served as secretary of state, defended the subpoena system in a court filing, saying it did not pose an undue burden.

These restrictions on direct democracy—the strict compliance test, the subpoena rules—are still in place. And Barton warns they will get even harder to overcome if SCR 1015 passes this fall. 

A ballot petition is virtually certain to have less room for error in some individual districts than it does statewide, and opponents would target canvassers in the district where a petition gathered the fewest supporters. Organizers would need to invest in collecting extra signatures in each district, going far beyond the minimum threshold to create buffers in all 30 without exceptions.

“They don’t need to knock off hundreds of thousands of signatures,” Barton said. “They just need to knock off a few thousand in one district.”

Arizona Republicans have also sought to close off other threats to their hold on power. In 2016, they expanded the Arizona supreme court, granting then-Governor Doug Ducey additional appointments that cemented a conservative majority. The maneuver helped lock in the right-wing majority that ruled in favor of abortion restrictions earlier this year.

The bill to expand the court was sponsored by Mesnard, who at the time was in the state House.

Democrats have gained power in recent years in Arizona. Hobbs narrowly flipped the governor’s mansion in 2022, breaking the GOP’s trifecta. This year, Democrats are also aiming to flip control of the state legislature for the first time since 1966. 

In such a scenario, Gonski predicts, Republicans may end up regretting making it so hard to pass initiatives. “In the not-too-distant future, conservative groups could be the ones turning to direct democracy measures,” she said. “And they would have made it very difficult and expensive for them.” 

“The political context is going to change probably in a way that makes this a boomerang they’re throwing into the wind that will come back and hit them in the face a couple years from now,” she added.

Arizona Republicans’ push to curtail direct democracy mirrors the party’s current efforts in a string of other states to set up additional hurdles for citizen-led initiatives. 

This includes reforms in several states to create or toughen geographic requirements for signatures. Last year, Arkansas Republicans passed a law that required organizers to gather signatures in at least 50 of the state’s 75 counties—up from 15. Voters had rejected such a change when it was proposed to them as a referendum in 2022, but the legislature passed it through a regular bill anyway.

“The grassroots people are going to be screwed,” David Crouch, an Arkansas attorney who had helped spearhead a medical marijuana referendum in the state, told Bolts at the time. 

In total, sixteen states impose some geographic requirements on petitions, but the scheme proposed in Arizona would be the strictest in the country, according to research compiled by Ballotpedia, a digital resource for elections information. In nearly all states with geographic mandates, the requirement is that signatures be gathered from some portion of counties or districts—not from every single one. The only state that allows no exception, Colorado, applies that rule only for constitutional amendments; Arizona’s would apply it to any initiative, including statutory changes.

“It is a minority veto,” Gonski said of the proposed change in Arizona. “It’s allowing people from one part of the state to veto something the majority of the state cares enough about to put on the ballot.”

Arizona for Abortion Access says their abortion rights measure had collected more than 500,000 signatures as of early April, already far more than what it’d need to qualify the item under current rules, and they were continuing to seek supporters. But if something goes wrong with their proposal this year while the GOP succeeds at restricting popular initiatives, abortion rights’ proponents warn that a redo would be exceedingly difficult.

“It has always been a very heavy lift, very hard work with ballot initiatives,” said Sheoran of the League of Women Voters. “But this is precisely why the Arizona Abortion Access campaign is so critical to have passed now.” 

“If this [geographic requirement] initiative passes, a second go-around of an abortion amendment would never happen,” she added. “Every woman knows that. We know how serious this is.”

The post Arizona Republicans Set Up a Ballot Measure to Squash Future Ballot Measures appeared first on Bolts.

Ever since the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a near-total abortion ban this month, pro-choice advocates have rushed to reverse it. They’ve pushed the GOP-run legislature to repeal the law, to no avail so far. They’ve defended the Democratic governor’s order blocking enforcement of the ban from legal pushback. And now they’re close to placing a constitutional amendment protecting abortion on the November ballot. 

If these statewide solutions fail, though, they’re at least eying Arizona’s local prosecutors as the backstop to an outcome they dread: the prospect of people facing criminal charges—and prison terms—over abortions.

“The least our county attorneys can do is commit that they would not prosecute those cases,” said State Representative Analise Ortiz, a Democrat whose district covers parts of Maricopa County. “They absolutely should do that to bring relief to the millions of people who are scared by this decision.”

Whether such a backstop materializes in Maricopa County—a giant jurisdiction home to more than four million residents in Phoenix and its surrounding areas—is going to come down to November’s prosecutor race.

Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican who is up for reelection this year, reacted to the ruling with a statement vowing that women would not be “prosecuted for receiving an abortion,” and especially calls out that she would not prosecute abortions that stem from rape, incest, or molestation. The statement did not, however, address whether she would prosecute doctors who provide abortions. Just days prior, Mitchell had said she’d enforce Arizona’s abortion law “whatever that law is.” She has also denounced as unlawful a gubernatorial order barring county attorneys like herself from prosecuting abortion. 

Mitchell’s only Democratic challenger, Tamika Wooten, promises she won’t pursue such prosecutions if she becomes county attorney. 

“I will not prosecute a woman for her personal health care decisions, nor will I prosecute the medical provider who performs that,” Wooten, a former local prosecutor and defense attorney, told Bolts. “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider, and it’s not my business.”

Mitchell’s office on Monday declined to answer questions from Bolts about whether she would prosecute doctors that provide abortion, only referring Bolts to her April 9 statement that does not mention medical providers. “That statement, in its entirety, is the information being provided at this time,” said a spokesperson for the office. 

Arizona’s revived ban, which dates back to 1864, mandates two to five years in prison for doctors who provide an abortion except when it’s to save a patient’s life.

In 2022, the GOP passed a separate law banning abortions after 15 weeks; that law also makes it a felony for doctors to violate those restrictions. 

Even if Arizona repeals the 1864 law, that would still leave in place this 15-week ban and its share of criminal penalties.

Wooten criticized Mitchell for not ruling out charges against medical professionals. “If you say you’re not going to prosecute the woman but you’re not quite sure if you’re going to prosecute the medical professional, licensed medical professionals are going to be wary of that,” Wooten said. “That’s gonna force a woman to go to a back alley. Now we’re subjecting women to all kinds of unsafe, unsanitary procedures… because our licensed professionals are afraid that they’re going to be prosecuted.” 

Wooten added, “We need to make sure that the people who are licensed and able to perform these can do it confidently without fearing felony prosecution or prison.”

In the GOP primary in August, Mitchell first faces a rematch against Gina Godbehere, a conservative who used to work as a prosecutor in the county attorney’s office; Godbehere did not reply to Bolts but has echoed Mitchell’s position on abortion in the past. 

Arizona’s 14 other counties also elect their chief prosecutor this year, but a statewide analysis by Bolts found that most of these races aren’t even contested, and among those that are, Maricopa County is unique in featuring a stark contrast on the issue of criminalizing abortion. It’s the only Arizona county where there’ll be at least one candidate on the ballot this year pledging to not prosecute abortion, and at least one candidate who hasn’t made that assurance. 

This single race, though, will have outsized resonance, since it’s playing out in the county that by itself is home to most of the state’s abortion clinics and the majority of Arizona’s population.

Mitchell was just a line prosecutor in the Maricopa County prosecutor’s office in 2018, when she was tapped by U.S. Senate Republicans to interrogate Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In 2022, the same year Kavanaugh voted to strike down federal protections for abortion in the Dobbs decision, Mitchell was appointed Maricopa county attorney after her predecessor’s surprise resignation.

Mitchell then prevailed in a 2022 special election that closely mirrored the upcoming election. In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs ruling, she defeated Godbehere in the Republican primary and then beat another pro-choice Democrat by six percentage points.

The state supreme court’s shock decision this month to trigger Arizona’s Civil War-era abortion ban has once again underscored the stakes of who occupies the local county attorney offices with a hand in enforcing it. Still, the exact role these county attorneys will play in either protecting or prosecuting abortion remains unsettled.

Statewide Democratic officials are currently trying to block county attorneys from targeting abortion. Governor Katie Hobbs issued an executive order last year that transferred all abortion cases to Attorney General Kris Mayes, who has pledged to never prosecute them. Combined with Mayes’ promise, Hobbs’ executive order moots the threat of criminal prosecutions for abortion—at least on paper.

But this guardrail is far from ironclad. Hobbs and Myers, who each won very narrow races in 2022, are both up for reelection in 2026. Were they to lose to anti-abortion Republicans in the future, their replacements could revert these cases to county attorneys or bring charges.

More urgently, many county attorneys, including Mitchell, are arguing that Hobbs’ order is invalid and say the governor lacks the legal power to give their cases to the attorney general. 

“It is a substantial overreach to suggest the governor may strip away prosecutorial discretion from local, elected officials,” Mitchell wrote in a letter to Hobbs last year. Jeanine L’Ecuyer, chief of communications for her office, reasserted Mitchell’s position this week, telling Bolts that county attorneys “are not supervised, nor do they report to, the attorney general.” (Wooten, her Democratic challenger, told Bolts she disagrees with Mitchell, and approves of Hobbs’ order.)

If a county attorney challenged or ignored Hobbs’ order, it would trigger a legal showdown—and the state supreme court may be the final arbiter, again. Aadika Singh, a senior attorney at the Public Rights Project, a national organization that was involved in the recent case against Arizona’s abortion ban, told Bolts this uncertainty will deter abortion care providers.

“The promises from the governor and her executive order, the attorney general’s statements, don’t help that doctor feel confident that she won’t be prosecuted by some rogue local prosecutor,” Singh said. 

Such a case could emerge from Yavapai County, home to Prescott and Sedona. Republican County Attorney Daniel McGrane jumped into the recent litigation to ask the state supreme court to revive the 1864 ban and has signaled his interest in prosecuting people for abortion.

When Bolts contacted the Yavapai county attorney’s office with questions about their policies, an employee told Bolts to contact the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious organization opposed to abortion that represented the office in court during the litigation over the 1864 ban. When Bolts clarified that it had questions about what McGrane would do in light of the court’s decision, and not just about the litigation, his executive assistant replied in an email, “I understand your request, and I have been directed to refer all inquires [sic] to the ADF.” 

The Alliance Defending Freedom did not answer Bolts’ question on how they were advising the Yavapai county attorney’s office, though they did share a generic statement celebrating the court’s ruling.

Asked about the Yavapai office deferring to the Alliance Defending Freedom, Singh told Bolts, “I think it’s very troubling when governments delegate their positions, their jobs, to ideological antichoice groups.” 

Singh’s organization is now fighting to get Arizona courts to delay the implementation of the 1864 ban; the attorney general said last week that the law would not be in effect until June 8 at the earliest. 

In the meantime, Democratic lawmakers made some progress toward repealing the ban altogether in the Senate last week despite Republicans’ narrow majority, but the odds of repeal are even lower in the House. Speaker Ben Toma, a Republican who controls what the chamber votes on and opposes repeal, said on the floor last week, “I would ask everyone in this chamber to respect the fact that some of us believe abortion is the murder of children.” 

Organizers are also championing a constitutional amendment that may end up on the ballot in November; in securing broader abortion rights in Arizona, the measure would overturn both the 1864 and 2022 bans.

“That is the most durable protection we can have here in our state,” said Chris Love, a spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access, the organization that’s pushing for an initiative to be voted on in November. The organization has already collected well above the required number of citizen signatures to qualify the measure, and they’re continuing to gather signatures to be safe. 

Obstacles remain, however. Proponents of the measure worry, for instance, that state courts may step in and strike down the initiative even if it passes, as happened a few years back with a state ballot measure to raise taxes to boost education funding. 

The composition of the state supreme court is not set in stone, though. Two of the justices who ruled to uphold the abortion ban this month, Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, are up for retention elections this fall; these races will decide whether they still sit on the bench next year to hear any challenge to the constitutional amendment if it passes. 

A progressive organization on Monday launched a campaign to urge Arizonans to vote “no” on retaining Bolick and King, the Arizona Republic reported, saying it would raise money toward that goal.

Arizona voters have never ousted a supreme court justice before, and several progressive Arizonans told Bolts last week that they were still unsure of how much attention these races would get. Ortiz, the Democratic lawmaker from Maricopa County, says these judicial races could double as a referendum on abortion rights. “If voters take that power to reject these judges, they’re going to send a really strong message,” Ortiz said. “I do think that it would be a worthwhile effort.” 

If the November measure protecting the right to abortion fails or is struck down, or if a court overturns Hobbs’ order preventing prosecutions, the state’s 15 county attorneys would inherit the authority to go after abortion providers within their jurisdiction. Twelve of the 15 current officeholders joined the letter opposing the governor’s executive order last year, though many have also dodged questions about whether they’d enforce the 1864 ban since the supreme court revived it. 

And while all county offices will be on the ballot this year, in most places, voters will have little choice on offer: Just four counties besides Maricopa even drew multiple candidates for prosecutor—Coconino (Flagstaff), Pima (Tucson), Pinal, and Yavapai counties, all of which will be resolved in the August primaries. 

In Coconino and Pima counties, all four candidates are Democrats—deputy prosecutor Ammon Barker and public defender Gary Pearlmutter in Coconino, incumbent Laura Conover and former deputy prosecutor Mike Jette in Pima—and all four told Bolts they would not prosecute abortion cases against either patients or doctors.

“The threat of prosecution will have a chilling effect on the medical administration of this state unless prosecutors in this state can give women and their medical providers clear assurance that this law will not affect them,” said Barker. Pearlmutter added that he also wants to shield “organizations who perform or assist a woman in receiving an abortion,” as well as “a family member or friend who assists a woman in transporting or obtaining an abortion.”

It’s the mirror image in the other two contested races, Pinal and Yavapai counties. Those only drew GOP candidates. 

Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer and his primary challenger Brad Miller did not respond to Bolts’ questions. Volkmer’s office also dodged questions by the Arizona Republic. Miller is a staunch conservative who describes himself as pro-life on his website.

David Stringer, a Republican running in Yavapai County against McGrane, said he was “disappointed” in the court’s decision to uphold the 1864 abortion ban, sharply breaking from McGrane, who championed the ruling. Stringer, a former state lawmaker who resigned in 2019 over scrutiny into racist remarks, told Bolts that people should have access to an abortion “in the very early stage of pregnancy.” But he did not rule out prosecutions for abortion. “I would want to see how my colleagues in other county’s handle this very sensitive issue,” he said via email. 

Stringer suggested that it may breach a prosecutor’s duty to refuse to enforce a law that’s in the books, telling Bolts, “A County Attorney is sworn to uphold the law—even laws they may not like.”

Ortiz, the Democratic lawmaker, insists that it does fall within county attorneys’ purview to refuse to prosecute abortion. She points out adultery is a crime under Arizona law and yet prosecutors aren’t going around hounding cheating spouses with criminal charges. 

“Prosecutors have the full discretion to determine which cases they’re going to file charges on and which cases are going to be dismissed, and they make those decisions every single day,” Ortiz said. “It is fully within their authority to say, ‘I am not going to prosecute cases that involve abortion under this unjust law.’”

Still, abortion rights advocates also warn that this emerging patchwork of policies—with some counties open to prosecuting abortion while others are not—is insufficient to protect abortion access even in places with favorable prosecutors. What happens in one county is bound to bleed into the rest of the state, they say, which is why their priorities are amending the constitution and defending Hobbs’ statewide prohibition on enforcement.

“If a few county attorneys decide to aggressively prosecute, it could result in doctors and other providers in other counties deciding not to provide abortion services, due to the lack of statewide consistency in how reproductive health services should be provided,” said Pearlmutter, the Coconino candidate, to explain why he supports the governor’s effort to block a “fractured approach” to enforcement.

In some states led by Republican executives, the drive for statewide consistency has gone the other way. GOP officials have cracked down on prosecutors who refuse to enforce abortion bans, exposing them to heavy retaliation. In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis went so far as to remove Tampa’s elected prosecutor from his job, ostensibly over such a pledge. 

Some prosecutors working under a broader ethos of criminal justice reform have also announced they won’t file criminal charges against a larger array of behaviors than just abortion—an approach known as declination. They have said these offenses are a matter for public health professionals, rather than for courts. For instance Julie Gunnigle, Democrats’ unsuccessful nominee in Maricopa County in 2020 and 2022, had pledged to not prosecute low-level drug possession and sex work.

Maricopa Democrats’ candidate this year, Wooten, did not name any type of charge besides abortion that she would decline to prosecute during an interview with Bolts, though she said she wanted to increase alternatives to incarceration for people with addiction or mental health issues in order to “address the underlying issue, as opposed to just throwing everybody in prison.” 

But Wooten drew a line in the sand against enforcing a law that is about “taking constitutional rights away from women.” She invoked Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement’s legacy of civil disobedience.

“Sometimes you may have to bend the rules in order to make a greater good for America,” she said.

The post Arizona Will Elect County Prosecutors in Shadow of Abortion Ban appeared first on Bolts.

But Lamb has transformed himself since then. Soon after taking office he found reality television and became a fixture on the immensely popular A&E show “Live PD”, even hosting a spinoff called “Live PD: Wanted” until the series was canceled after Texas sheriff’s deputies were caught on “Live PD” cameras tasing a man to death in 2019. Lamb was also the star of the fifth season of another A&E  show, “60 Days In”, which aired in 2019 and chronicled Lamb turning volunteers into undercover informants inside his jail. In 2021, Lamb then launched his own Live PD-inspired show, called “American Sheriff”, which featured him crossing the country to chit chat with other like minded sheriffs, cut against scenes of Lamb posing in the desert sunset as a camera pans slowly over the shadows of cacti. The show aired on Lamb’s newly-created American Sheriff Network, as does his newest production, a show called “Surviving Mann” where contestants undergo “elite military training”—all viewable for a $5 monthly subscription fee. 

Early this month, Lamb, a Republican, jumped into next year’s race for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat, currently held by Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema,  having fully honed his new “American Sheriff” persona. 

In an ad announcing his campaign, Lamb declares, “It’s time for a new sheriff in Washington,” as a series of images flash across the screen zooming in on the details of his new favorite outfit—cowboy hat and boots with worn tips, a big Western belt buckle, a flak vest emblazoned with his title in large letters, and a Glock on his hip. 

Lamb, who did not respond to questions for this story, is hardly the first sheriff to try and use his role in law enforcement as a stepping stone for higher political office. His predecessor, former Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, ran two failed bids for congress. The infamous former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio twice ran losing campaigns for mayor of his hometown. But other sheriffs have had more success: Troy Nehls, a Republican Houston-area sheriff accused of racial profiling, won election to the U.S. House in 2020, and Joe Lombardo parlayed his previous job as the sheriff of Las Vegas into a successful campaign for Nevada governor last year. 

But Lamb, while always a self-professed “gun nut,” did not have a great deal of law enforcement experience when he first ran for sheriff. To compensate, he branded himself as a “constitutional conservative” with political ads calling himself  “pro-life,” “pro-gun,” and “pro-religious freedoms.” Unlike many sheriff campaigns, there was hardly a word about crime, jail conditions, or public safety. One 2016 campaign video, titled “The Progressive Are Coming,” featured Hillary Clinton talking about limiting gun sales contrasted with Lamb and his large, Mormon family in a gun store. 

When Lamb took over the sheriff’s office in 2017, he talked about wanting to deploy a “business approach,” which apparently mostly meant focusing on marketing the department through logos and revamped social media. He also generated affiliated merchandise, just as The Apprentice launched Trump Steaks,  creating “American Sheriff LLC”  to sell t-shirts, as well as a nonprofit under the same name, which was investigated for accounting irregularities. Lamb also trademarked what he calls his catchphrase: “Fear Not. Do Right.” It functions primarily as a slogan for Lamb’s t-shirts and is owned by another  LLC he created. In 2022, one of Lamb’s sons, Cade, started a podcast named after the catchphrase and using the same brand logo.

Roberto Reveles, a longtime Democratic activist in Pinal County, says that Lamb reaching for a U.S. Senate seat fits into his long history of trying to capitalize on the new tough-sheriff character he created since taking office. “There are lots of questionable activities by Sheriff Lamb that make no sense, other than exploitation of his office,” Reveles said. “He sells Bibles. He sells rifles. He sells children’s books.”

Just as Lamb courted reality television after becoming sheriff, he also courted the far-right by fixating on issues that were core to the identity of Trump voters. He became a talking head on right-wing media, appearing regularly on Fox News and Newsmax, often broadcasting from his truck as if to show how busy he was policing the streets. In 2020, Lamb created a far-right sheriff organization called “Protect America Now,” which fueled GOP fears about border security, gun confiscation, and “antifa.” 

In 2022, he partnered with leading purveyors of election fraud conspiracies like True the Vote to form something they called Protect America Vote, a fundraising website that offered a form for citizens to sign their local sheriffs up for a mailing list. This was part of a larger pattern of “constitutional sheriffs”—sheriffs who believe that they are the ultimate authority in their county—using their investigative powers to question election results. After the midterm election, the site disappeared.

Other than parroting election denialism, neither Protect America Now nor Protect America Vote appears to have done much more than provide Lamb with another opportunity to market himself. 

In fact, marketing seems to be Lamb’s forte. Devin Burghart, president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which tracks far-right sheriff movements, believes that Lamb’s campaign will rely heavily on MAGA rhetoric without any additional substance. “Expect his campaign to begin with soft-focus law-and-order imagery before unveiling viscous nativism and election denial conspiracism with a badge,” he said.

As sheriff, Lamb has pulled numerous stunts on the southern border to inflame nativist fears and dehumanize immigrants, typically inviting some unwitting city-slicker—like Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz or Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk—to trek through spiny bushes to gasp at the backpacks, shoes, and other detritus left behind by border crossers. 

In a short film Lamb made last year with Gaetz (who was investigated, but not charged, for sex trafficking), the sheriff says, with a smirk, that people “can use force … deadly force” against migrants. This year, an Arizona rancher named George Kelly shot and killed a migrant he says was on his property. Lamb has questioned the murder charges prosecutors filed against Kelly and called the rancher a “very nice guy.” “If you don’t appreciate what happened to the farmer who used self-defense…I don’t know all the facts, but I can tell you the bond seems excessive,” Lamb added. 

Gun violence is now the primary cause of death for children in America. This includes record high numbers of homicides, suicides, and accidents. This year has had the highest number of school shootings in the past two decades. Yet, Lamb continues to advocate for unlimited gun ownership and open carry. He raffles assault-style weapons and poses with guns, charging people $500 in a fundraiser “for an evening of shooting, food, and fun.” On his podcast, Lamb’s son Cade recently praised Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people and injuring one, depicting the teenager shooter as a righteous tough guy. 

While the sheriff prided himself on defying COVID regulations, he largely ignored deaths and hospitalizations, which hit Latino communities more than white ones. Instead, he argued for “personal responsibility.” “As long as I’m your sheriff, we will NEVER mandate the vaccine,” he said in a video that went viral and ended up on Fox News. He touted it as a recruitment strategy.

Lamb also declared Jan. 6 a triumph of people exercising their Second Amendment rights, and described the rioters as “very loving Christians”—ignoring the five police officers who either died from their injuries or committed suicide, as well as the over 1,000 people charged with crimes. 

In next year’s Republican primary for Senate, Lamb is expected to face other candidates with strong affiliations to the MAGA movement. Kari Lake, a close Trump ally who lost a close governor’s race in 2022 but has refused to admit defeat, is reportedly mulling a run, as is Blake Masters, another prominent election denier who lost the state’s 2022 Senate race. Meanwhile, U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego is running as a Democrat, and Sinema has yet to announce her intentions.

While Lamb still plays the tough-talking, border-trekking sheriff in his run for Senate, one of the first ads his campaign released this month uses a recent family tragedy to make a personal appeal to voters. It begins with Lamb talking about the pain of losing his son and granddaughter in a car crash just before Christmas last year, illustrated with news footage of the devastating wreckage. About 40 seconds in, the ad then pivots when Lamb mentions that his son struggled with drug addiction. “He even spent time in my jail for issues stemming from fentanyl use,” he says, “Even the sheriff’s office is being touched by this drug crisis.” 

“I know what deadly drugs and the criminals peddling them are doing to families and communities, I know what it did to my family,” Lamb says before pivoting to  this campaign promise, a declaration of war: “It’s time to declare the drug cartels terrorist organizations and use military force to wipe them out, just like we did to ISIS.”

The post Arizona’s Self-Styled “American Sheriff” Wants to Go to Washington appeared first on Bolts.