YOU JUST CAN’T PLEASE SOME FOLKS
Democratic and Latino activists picketed outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in 2012, protesting that the long period it took to count votes was somehow disenfranchising them.
A few months later, when county election officials from around the state rolled out proposals to fix the conditions that led to the lengthy vote count, those activists again objected.
Correcting the problems also disenfranchised them, they insisted, not worrying about logic. Taking people who don’t mail in ballots off the permanent early-voting list — but not election rolls — was discriminatory, they said. So was banning the fraughtwith-peril practice of letting anyone collect multiple ballots.
When the Legislature passed the bill anyway, the activists launched a petition drive to refer the measure to the ballot. They easily surpassed the required number, putting the election bill on the November ballot and immediately halting its implementation.
So last week, the Legislature voted to repeal the bill, eliminating the need for an expensive political campaign.
And again, the activists objected. They’re still being disenfranchised.
The Legislature, by bowing to the will of those who signed the petitions, was denying the voters their say.
You just can’t please some people.
Pull back the curtains. What really angers Democrats isn’t that voters will have one less item to mark, but that their party won’t have an issue to whip passions and get sympathetic voters to the polls.
Too bad. Ballot issues have too long been misused for this purpose.
But Republicans shouldn’t get cocky and try to revive aspects of the election bill piece by piece. Arizona election law needs to be fixed, but only with input from all interests. Put that on the to-do list for 2015.