Many Arizona county officials lack competition on the ballot
PHOENIX — Cochise County Assessor Philip Leiendecker was first elected in 1992. He hasn’t had an opponent since 1996. This year, he’s running for reelection unopposed — again.
There just isn’t much competition.
“No one ever grows up with the goal of being county assessor,” Leiendecker said.
In fact, there will be only a single candidate on the ballot for county assessor in at least nine of Arizona’s 15 counties. In eight of those, the incumbent is running unopposed.
For all the money, sweat and vitriol that will go into the races for president and U.S. Senate in Arizona, many local officials in this battleground state will skate to reelection.
Most of the state’s incumbent county attorneys, treasurers, recorders and school superintendents also are running for reelection without any challengers, according to an analysis of county election filings by The Arizona Republic.
Despite a surge of new candidates for seats in the Legislature and other offices in recent elections, relatively few new candidates are stepping forward to seek local posts.
Some local officials wield tremendous power over taxation, the criminal justice system and elections. And as officials directly elected by the public, county leaders often can operate with little oversight.
Initial county election filings show:
• Of 15 county attorneys, at least nine incumbents are running for reelection unopposed and there is only a single candidate in one race for an open seat;
• Twelve of the state’s incumbent county treasurers and school superintendents are running unopposed;
• Eight incumbent county recorders are running unopposed. There is a single candidate for one open seat, too.
Leiendecker almost faced an opponent in Cochise County this year.
Christine O’Hara, a Benson resident, said she was interested in running for the office after several other county residents raised concerns about property tax issues.
“People were showing me their tax bills. It was black-and-white in front of my eyes,” she said, describing disagreements over agricultural exemptions and other facets of property tax assessment.
Her platform called for improved customer service and new free educational sessions for taxpayers, among other things.
Leiendecker, however, said O’Hara was not really a serious candidate (she had only run for office once before — an unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Benson City Council) and he challenged her nominating petitions in court. He argued the petitions were not properly labeled with the date of the primary election. And he argued some of the people who signed were not eligible.
A judge ultimately invalidated several signatures O’Hara had collected. She landed a few signatures short of the 550 needed to qualify for a spot in the Republican primary.
O’Hara did not appeal. She represented herself in court but still had to pay several fees as part of all the legal wrangling.
“I had to pay all this money to get to this point,” she said.
The race for Cochise County assessor is local politics at its most local, all of it hinging on the signatures of a few voters.
But the issues at play show how elected county officials touch the daily lives of Arizonans.
This year, voters across Arizona will choose members of their county boards of supervisors along with sheriffs, attorneys, assessors, treasurers, recorders and superintendents of public schools.
While many of these races will get little attention due to the presidential election, some have sought to connect county politics to the bigger picture of issues such as criminal justice.
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have sought to bring more attention to races for posts like county attorney in recent years.
Frustrated by persistent opposition from legislators, longtime critics of the war on drugs and police oversight are increasingly taking their fight to local prosecutor races, arguing that electing progressive prosecutors could be just as effective in changing the justice system as passing bills at the state Capitol.
After all, county attorneys decide which crimes to prosecute and what sentences to pursue. They have grand juries at their disposal to investigate crimes and just about anything else they want.
But most county attorneys in Arizona will face no opposition in this year’s election.
At least nine of 15 incumbent county attorneys are running for reelection unopposed.
Greenlee County has not published a complete list of all candidates who have filed to run in the general election. And office seekers can still attempt to run as write-in candidates.
Maricopa County, by far the state’s largest county, has a real race on its hands with three Democrats running for their party’s nomination to take on appointed incumbent Allister Adel, a Republican.
In Pima County, Barbara LaWall is retiring as county attorney, an office she has held since 1996, giving rise to a three-way Democratic primary to nominate a successor.
However, there are no Republicans or independents running for county attorney in Tucson and, as in nearly every county besides Maricopa, the race for county attorney will be decided in the primary.
A growing body of research shows the lack of competition for some county offices, particularly county attorney, is not unique to Arizona.
Incumbent prosecutors faced challengers in only 15% of general elections scrutinized by a forthcoming study from the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Whether an incumbent ran or not, only 30% of races included more than one candidate in either the primary or general elections, the same study found.
Voters in most districts across the country got only one choice to serve as their local prosecutor.
Prosecutors are even far less likely to face competition in counties or districts with fewer than 100,000 residents, the study found.
The dearth of competition for county offices may be blamed on a few factors.
In some areas, there may simply be a shortage of candidates. After all, candidates for county attorney must be lawyers and must live in the county where they reside.
The study found three Arizona counties — Graham, Greenlee and La Paz — are each home to fewer than 25 attorneys. In Maricopa County, there are about 12,000.
A separate study by Ronald Wright, professor of criminal law at Wake Forest University, found that about 20% of the challengers running against incumbent county attorneys already worked inside the incumbent’s office.
This hints at a predicament that might apply to other offices: The people most qualified to run for an office might have to risk upsetting professional relationships to seek the post.
Local politics can come down to who you know and who you can afford to anger.
“It’s a popularity contest,” former Navajo County Sheriff K.C. Clark said of many races for county government offices.
Clark said he supports adding qualifications for the post of sheriff. While this might limit the number of candidates who can run, he suggested that it could help diminish the role of partisan politics in electing the office holder.
O’Hara, the would-be candidate for Cochise County assessor, said she believes offices like assessor should at least be nonpartisan.
“What does it matter if the assessor’s a Republican or a Democrat?” she said.
To give voters more choices, the study from the University of North Carolina suggests states might expand the jurisdictions of some officials such as by creating district attorneys who represent several smaller counties. Or, given the concentration of lawyers in cities, states might eliminate requirements that a county attorney live in the area where they are running. But not every county elects a top prosecutor. In some states, county and district attorneys are appointed, either by an attorney general or by a county board of supervisors.
There has also been an on-again, off-again discussion in Arizona of appointing certain county officials instead of electing them.
Leiendecker, the Cochise County assessor, said he opposes the idea of appointing officials to posts like his.
“If you make all of these positions under the board of supervisors, you create the possibility of more corruption, not less,” Leiendecker argued. “If I work for the board of supervisors, I don’t care about the public, I only care about the board of supervisors.”
The idea gained new traction last year when authorities arrested thenMaricopa County Assessor Paul Petersen on suspicion of defrauding Medicaid and running a human trafficking operation through his adoption business.
Petersen denies wrongdoing. But as he sat in jail awaiting hearings on the charges, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors sought ways to remove him from office. They were mostly powerless to do so. The supervisors suspended Petersen, but only temporarily, and he fought that process before eventually resigning.
The case highlighted that county officials are, in many respects, accountable to no one but the voters. That Petersen was running an adoption business on top of his day-to-day duties helping administer one of the biggest counties in the country also underscored that elected county officials are under no obligation to work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Plenty of officials put in more hours, but their only direct supervisors are the voters.
The idea of appointing county officials and making elected posts nonpartisan was part of the home rule debate in Maricopa County during the 1990s, for example, which would have created a sort of manager-and-council form of government similar to that of Phoenix. But opponents argued it would lead to tax increases. And county officials opposed the idea of appointing bureaucrats to run their offices.
Then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio suggested the county would have canned him not long after his election in 1992 if he was appointed and not elected directly by the public.
“I think I would have been fired three years ago if I were appointed,” Arpaio told The Republic in 1996. He would go on to win reelection every four years until 2016.