Citizen crusader’s efforts drive 3 recall-reform bills
His mission started with a recall drive in his hometown of Fountain Hills.
It stalled in the wake of the red-hot political climate surrounding the November 2011 recall of state Senate president Russell Pearce.
But with a new recall drive seemingly being announced every week during the current legislative session, Paul Ryan has found his obsession with updating Arizona’s century-old recall and petition process a rather timely topic.
It doesn’t hurt that the semiretired real-estate appraiser has the ear of his state senator, who happens to chair the influential Senate Elections Committee. Now, a trio of bills inspired in large part by his interest in tightening controls on petition-gathering and recall elections is slowly advancing through the Legislature.
Not bad for a rookie at the sausagemaking process of creating state law.
Ryan is not your typical operative at the state Capitol. He’s an open-collared citizen advocate in a sea of suited lobbyists. He’s a one-man research machine, digging through statute books and persistently calling and e-mailing key players in the election world until they reply to his questions.
Troubled by problems he noted with the recall of two Fountain Hills City Council members targeted in 2011, Ryan dove into research and fired up his computer.
The result, nearly two years later, is three bills that attempt to add more transparency and accountability to the petition-gathering process for a recall election, apply campaign-finance limits to recall elections and define a recall campaign as beginning when a group files paperwork to start a recall drive.
For example, Senate Bill 1263 requires paid petition-circulators to register with the secretary of state. It makes the company or campaign that pays the circulators attest to the secretary of state that the paid workers have been trained in the petition-gathering process. And it establishes penalties for both paid circulators and the company or campaign that hires them if they do not provide correct information on the circulators’ background checks or if they lie on the affidavit sent to the secretary of state.
Ryan argues the moves are needed because of abuses he found when checking out circulators who worked on the Fountain Hills recalls in 2011. One man listed a Phoenix shopping center as his home address; another gave a Seligman address that didn’t check out. About 40 percent of the signatures gathered on petitions are tossed because of inaccuracies created by the circulators, Ryan said, citing his own research.
Paying circulators to gather signatures creates an incentive to flout the rules, Ryan argues; it rewards volume, not accuracy. State laws need to catch up with this practice, he said, because Arizona recalls are rarely home-grown but instead are financed by interests outside an elected official’s home turf.
“It was people-driven,” Ryan said of the recall process created in the state Constitution a century ago. “What’s happened over 100 years is it’s petitiondriven.” He said he can’t turn back the clock but believes the process can include more transparency and accountability.
“Someone’s got to stand up for what’s right and wrong,” he said, adding that leaving all the work to lawmakers and paid lobbyists omits the voice of the average citizen.
Legislative officials were initially cool to the idea of diving into recall reform so soon after Pearce was recalled.
But Ryan’s mission gathered steam late last spring when his state senator, Michele Reagan, R-Scottsdale, showed interest and talked to then-Senate President Steve Pierce about creating a recall review committee. A formal legislative committee didn’t materialize, but Reagan did persuade working groups to focus on election matters.
Many of the resulting recommendations went far beyond Ryan’s focus on recall and have become political lightning rods, such as a bill that would drop people from the permanent early-voting list or limit who can return a voter’s ballot.
Reagan said she’s been impressed by Ryan’s persistence.
“He wasn’t driven by pure partisan politics,” she said, adding that she never asked him his party registration. (He’s an independent.) “It was all policy.”
It’s not every day that an average citizen devotes so much time and research to an issue, she said, adding that he regularly called her with updates on new information he’d dug up. Now his calls have become more anxious as he wonders what’s happening with the bills he helped shape. All three are awaiting action by the full House of Representatives after passing the Senate. The bills are SB 1263, SB 1262 and SB 1264.
And Ryan said he’s not done. He has already reached out to other lawmakers.
Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, calls him the “dark-money guy” because Ryan contacted him about Farley’s bill to force disclosure of donors to non-profit corporations that increasingly are playing key roles in campaigns. The bill failed to get traction, but Ryan said he wants to work with lawmakers on reviving some version of it next year.
Likewise, he wants to work with Sen. Bob Worsley, R-Mesa, to create a system in which voters can sign petitions online. That would significantly cut down on the paid petition-circulators that first piqued his interest in the election process.
One thing Ryan said he won’t do is run for office.
Better to work the system from the outside, he concluded.