Court says legislator can stay on ballot despite UPS address
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Monday that state Rep. Shawnna Bolick still qualifies for the Republican primary ballot despite listing a UPS store as her place of residence on nominating petitions.
A voter in Bolick’s north Phoenix district sued over the issue last month, noting that state law requires candidates to list their home addresses at the top of petition sheets.
But a Superior Court judge tossed the lawsuit, contending Bolick, a Republican, was not deceiving voters. Judge M. Scott McCoy noted that Bolick’s home address is private in voter registration records due to a court order. Her husband, Justice Clint Bolick, sits on the state Supreme Court and obtained the order in 2017.
Ultimately, McCoy said, the legislator’s eligibility to run in the district she already represents is not in dispute.
The state Supreme Court upheld that decision in large part on Monday after Justice Bolick recused himself from the case.
“The error was unlikely to have misled or confused voters about the Candidate’s ability to run as a resident of Legislative District 20,” the court said, writing that Bolick had substantially complied with the law on nominating petitions even if she did not strictly comply with it.
The court reversed part of McCoy’s decision, however, by tossing 290 signatures that Bolick had collected on her own.
Anyone circulating a nominating petition must sign an affidavit verifying that they had collected the signatures on it. The affidavit must include a home address, the high court said, but Bolick again listed a UPS store.
“The purpose of this requirement is to ensure that a circulator can be contacted and questioned about the validity of gathered signatures. Providing a private mail box address does not fulfill this purpose,” the court wrote.
Still, even after discarding those signatures, Bolick had gathered enough support through the secretary of state’s online petition system to qualify for the ballot, the court concluded.
Democrats are targeting the district as they set their sights on winning a majority in the state House of Representatives in the November election.
If Bolick had been knocked off the primary ballot, Republicans would have needed to muster a write-in campaign in the primary to get her back into the general election.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and the state’s top election official ended up splitting on the case.
Lawyers for Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, argued in court filings that the program protecting Bolick’s address only applies to voter registration records, not nominating petitions. They argued it would undermine the integrity of the candidate nominating process to let candidates list mail boxes, rather than addresses.
Brnovich, a Republican, noted the program was started as a way of protecting judges, among others. It would not make any sense, he added, for the law to keep judges’ addresses private in voter registration records but require those same judges to expose their addresses on nominating petitions when running in elections.