What to expect from Katie Hobbs as secretary of state
A good deal of what Arizona’s next secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, will do in office isn’t difficult to divine.
This is partly because the office is largely an administrative one, most visibly in carrying out elections in Arizona. And this is partly because of what Hobbs the candidate has said on the campaign trail and what she has done as a state lawmaker.
Unlike her Republican challenger — the enigmatic businessman Steve Gaynor — the four-term lawmaker boasts experience with elections-related legislation. Hobbs was the ranking Democrat on the Senate elections committee. She has clear ideas of how she would approach the job.
Hobbs — Gaynor, too, for that matter — said she would run a tighter ship than Michele Reagan and would restore consistency and integrity to the office. What exactly does that mean? For starters, I suspect she will again regularly issue a procedures manual for county recorders to help guide election workers and communicate better with the recorders.
Reagan’s failure to do that for the 2016 election was overly dramatized; a complaint made to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office was dismissed, but it was one of a series of early gaffes from which Reagan’s office didn’t fully recover.
Hobbs likely will be vigilant in reviewing elections plans, including the number and the locations of polling places. Those decisions are the purview of county recorders and county supervisors who must sign off on them, but Hobbs held Reagan highly responsible for the miscalculations of Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell in the 2016 presidential preference elections.
Plus, as a Democrat, Hobbs holds the view that election decisions often disenfranchise the poor and the vulnerable, a disproportionate number of them minorities and the elderly. I imagine when she talked about granting greater access to the voting process, she partly means that.
On voter registration, Hobbs will
keep an eye on a coordination effort between Reagan and the state Department of Transportation to automatically tie voter registration updates with change-of-address requests on driver’s licenses.
The ACLU and other voting-rights advocates sued over the summer to force Reagan to immediately update the addresses of some 500,000 people in hopes of ensuring they could vote in the general election earlier this month. A judge refused the emergency request.
The automatic updates are expected to take place next year, during the watch of the next secretary of state.
Some things Hobbs will simply inherit from her own tenure at the Legislature, among them the law Hobbs voted against as a senator that forbids most people from gathering and turning in election ballots other than their own.
Hobbs and other Democrats see the so-called “ballot harvesting” law as unnecessary and one that hurt Native Americans, Latinos and the infirm, who either live far from polling places or have difficulty with transportation — unlike Republicans, who view the law as a way to combat voting fraud.
More interesting will be what Hobbs will do with a campaign spending website that Reagan spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on but that remains far from fully functional. As envisioned by Reagan, the data would be updated in real time by candidates and be sortable and include lobbyist contributions. Hobbs, as did Gaynor, called the site “SeetheMoney.com” a waste of money. Will she junk it outright, or find a way to fully realize the attempt at public transparency in campaign spending?
Now that she has won the close race, Hobbs will not have to wait long to prove her mettle, with the 2020 election lurking not too far in the distance.