The Daily Signal - 'It Hurts Voters of Arizona,' Lawmaker Says of Election Bill Failing

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Election integrity legislation sponsored by Arizona state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who represents eastern Maricopa County, failed Thursday after state Sen. Kelly Townsend, who represents portions of Maricopa and Pinal counties, a fellow Republican, changed her vote to no during the final reading. Ugenti-Rita joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the bill, how its defeat hurts Arizonans, and whether another vote will be held on the legislation. We also cover these stories: The Supreme Court will argue a Second Amendment case in the coming months.   Conservative justices on the Supreme Court are signaling their support towards two non-profits in their challenge against California legislation requiring them to disclose the identities of large donors, Reuters reported.  The Supreme Court announced Monday that they have declined to hear arguments in a case between the states of Texas and California.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. On today's show, Rachel Del Judas talks with Arizona State Senator Michelle Ugenti Rita about the newest slate of election integrity bills in her state and what it takes to preserve our democracy. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now on our top news. A major second amendment case will be heard before the Supreme Court later this year or next year. The justices announced Monday that they will hear arguments in a case debating New York's concealed carry law.

Two New York gun owners were denied a concealed carry permit because they failed to show a special need for the permit. New York gun laws only grant concealed carry permits to those who can show that they have a special need for one. Now, the two gun owners, along with the New York affiliate of the National Rifle Association, have filed a lawsuit saying that they have been denied their Second Amendment rights. The justices say the case before the Supreme Court will seek to determine whether or not the state's denial of petitioner's application for concealed carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment. Arguments for the case will be heard in the next term, which begins in October.

Conservative justices at the Supreme Court seem to signal their support towards two non-profits in their challenge against California legislation requiring them to disclose the identities of large donors, Reuters reported. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center asserted during oral arguments that the policy goes against their First Amendment rights and that if donor information were to become public, it could lead to threats and harassment against their donors. California has countered back against the groups saying that the law allows the state to more effectively prevent fraud in charitable giving. Currently, California law requires charitable organizations to provide identification for donors who give more than $200,000 or more in a given year. While theoretically this information is kept private, there have been leaks in the past. In a statement, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Council John Birch said, quote, every American should be free to peacefully support causes that they believe in without fear of harassment or intimidation. Public advocacy is for everyone, not just those able to weather abuse.

Forced donor disclosure is a threat to everyone and discourages both charitable giving and participation in the marketplace of ideas. The justices carefully listened to the arguments, and we hope that the court will decide in favor of the First Amendment's promise of the freedom to associate with like-minded groups, which includes the right to citizen privacy. The Supreme Court announced Monday that they have declined to hear arguments in a case between the states of Texas and California. The rejected case focuses on arguments over gay rights and religious freedom. In 2016, California passed a law, banning taxpayer-funded travel to states that apparently allow for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Texas allows foster and adoption agencies to decline working with LGBTQ. individuals for religious reasons. Thus, Texas makes California's list of taxpayer travel ban states. Texas filed a suit against California arguing that California's travel law was a constitutional

violation of freedom of religion. Since the case is between two states, it rose directly to the level of the Supreme Court, but the High Court has declined to hear arguments for the case. Both justices Samuel Lito and Clarence Thomas said they would, would have liked the case to proceed. The Justice Department announced it planned to launch an investigation into the Louisville Jefferson County Metro Government and the Louisville Police Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the Department of Justice would be investigating whether the government and police department engaged in unconstitutional patterns and practices

and discriminatory conduct on the basis of race that may have led to the death of Brianna Taylor in Louisville last year. Here's Garland announcing the probe via Fox News. Today, the Justice Department is opening a civil investigation into the Louisville Jefferson County Metro Government and the Louisville Metro Police Department to determine whether LMPD engages in a pattern or practice of violations of the Constitution or federal law. This new probe comes on the heels of a similar investigation Garland announced last Wednesday into the Minneapolis Police Department after the death of George Floyd, in May 2020. For some time, the Daily Signal has been following a court case between four high school track athletes and the Connecticut Association of Schools.

Female athletes, Selena Sol, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith, and Ashley Nicoletti sued the Connecticut Association of Schools for allowing biological men to compete with them in track events, costing them opportunities to compete in advanced competitions and win track events. A federal judge has now dismissed the lawsuit, declaring it moot since both the transgender athletes have graduated. The judge says there appears to be no threat of a biological male competing against Smith and Nicoletti, who are still in high school and running track. The judge says the case will be expedited if another biological male athlete competes against the girls in the future. In a statement released by the Alliance defending Freedom, the legal group representing, the female track athletes. Alana Smith said today's decision is disheartening for athletes like me

who train hard every day to be our physical and mental best at the starting block. Now stay tuned for Rachel Del Judas's conversation with Arizona State Senator Michelle Ugenti Rita as they discuss election integrity. If you're tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger and bigger government, it's time to partner with the most impactful conservative organization in America. We're the Heritage Foundation, and we're committed to solving the issues America faces. Together, we'll fight back against the rising tide of homegrown socialism, and we'll fight for conservative solutions that are making families more free and more prosperous, but we can't do it without you. Please join us at heritage.org. We're joined today on the Daily

Signal podcast by Arizona State Senator Michelle Eugenty Rita. Senator Egenti Rita, it's great to have you on the Daily Signal podcast. Happy to be here. Thank you. Well, thanks for making the time. We appreciate it. So Arizona's election bill failed in the Arizona Senate on Thursday after one Republican changed her vote. Can you start off, I want to get to what happened, but can you start off just by telling us about this election bill? Absolutely. I love this bill, so happy to. So this is a,

I would say a modest but significance reform. It addresses our what's currently called Peeval. That's the acronym, the permanent early voting list. It's the list voters need to be on if they want to receive their ballot by mail. So if you want to vote by mail in Arizona, it's a voluntary program that we offer. You have to elect to put your name and request that your name be put on the early voting list. we don't send out ballots automatically. But once you're on that list in Arizona, in very, very few circumstances can you ever be removed?

So what my bill was doing, it was going to say, if you miss any election over the course of two election cycles, so that's one election cycle, which is a two-year period, primary general, and then another election cycle, if you miss those elections in a row, so consecutive in two election cycles, we're going to send you a notice. The county's going to send you a notice and say, hey, non-voter, non-mail-in voter. Are you there? Do you still want to participate via mail? Let us know, please sign this form so we know that you're there and then we'll continue to send out ballots to your home. If you sign it, great. You'll continue to be reauthorized in the program. You'll get a ballot by mail. If you don't sign it, you will be removed.

And then, of course, if you wanted to sign up later, you can always go vote in person, but you would be removed for that mail-in list. That's what the bill does. Cleans up our voter rolls, our mail-in voter rolls. Real simple, but important. And yes, what you said earlier is true. The bill did die on final read in the Senate by one vote. And then, of course, so that it failed to reach a majority vote

and has not advanced to the governor's desk. Well, can you close us more into what happened? This was a Republican state senator, Senator Kelly Townsend, who last minute changed her vote. Can you kind of tell us what happened, what the situation is? Did you feel like there was going to be opposition? I mean, it seemed like, you know, since it was going to be close, but can you kind of yet tell us what happened and why the last minute change?

Sure. So all election bills, sadly, are partisan. Not all. I should let me rephrase that. Most of the significant election bills are partisan. There are some bills that do get out with bipartisan support, however. But the ones that kind of are viewed as a little needy do have partisan votes. And we have a one vote majority in the Senate. Dory, you have 30 members, so you need to get 16 votes to pass something in the Arizona Senate. Yes, Ms. Townsend voted against it, which was not in line with her other votes. She had voted for this bill twice before, and actually twice in committee and off the floor, maybe even three or four times, actually, if you count committee votes, had supported the bill. But then she did change her mind at the last part, the last part, last stage of this bill last week. To me, it seems to stem from some of her bills not advancing out of my committee. I chair the government committee where the election bills are heard. Some of

her bills did make it through. Some did not. To me, that decision seemed to stem from some of her bills, like I said, not advancing out of my committee earlier on in session. I did make a procedural motion to bring it back for reconsideration, which is something that we can do with the legislature. So we'll see. At this point, it's dead. Unless you switches her vote, the bill will die. Well, as someone who's worked on this bill and spent a lot of time over it and I'm sure done a lot of research, like, I guess what was your immediate reaction and going forward?

Like, was it frustrating? What kind of way forward do you see? I know you said for right now it's dead. And, you know, you might take another, you know, another swing at it. But I guess on a more personal level, as someone who's put time and effort into it, like what was your kind of reaction when all of this happened? Yeah, I was disappointed. I've been very disappointed.

So I've been doing election-related bills and policy for the better part of seven, eight years now. This is something that I care a lot about. And, you know, I also did this particularly. bill back in 2019 and put a lot of effort into it. So this has been something that I've been trying to get passed for a few years now and to see kind of all of that effort melt away for a reason that was very difficult to comprehend, was deflating. And but at the end that, you know, what hurts the most really is while it stings for me and I have put a tremendous amount of effort into the bill and the language.

talking with members and the public and the governor's office. I mean, it really hurts the public. You know, it hurts the voters of Arizona because this is a, like I said, it's a meaningful, but reform, it's not a big overhaul of our system, but these are the kind of things that add up, and they do reinforce integrity in our vote-by-mail system. You have to remember, most states who have what many call absentee voting, so they send you or no excuse ballot, they send you a ballot in the mail.

You don't have to have a reason. Most states have that. But they require you to re-sign up, if you will, to request that ballot every election cycle. That's different in Arizona. We do not ask you to do that. Once you were signed up, you are signed permanently up. So this was an important safe guard and one that I think was going to go a long way to reaffirm to the public that you can trust our elections. Your legislature is working hard to make sure that we limit or eliminate if we can opportunities for abuse or fraud or, you know, things to go wrong.

And a lot can go wrong when you're sending out tens of thousands of ballots to people who aren't voting by mail. Lots can go wrong in that scenario. And this was addressing that and would have gone a long way to reduce those opportunities. So like the public, they're the ones that are hurt. I mean, and it's hard. It's hard to sit there and be a part of these efforts and then see them just fall off a cliff like that for, like I said, a reason that was difficult to kind of understand and follow. And I think it's really really set us back.

I'm going to do what I can, but, you know, I can't make any promises. Well, speaking of things going wrong and just the opportunity for fraud, I know that Arizona is reportedly going through a big audit of its election from 2020. Can you tell us at all what's happening with the audit for the 2020 election? Yeah, so we're in the process of going through the audit right now. It's hit a little snag last week when the Democrats sued, saying that we weren't following certain procedures that we needed to, that were conditioned on the judge granting our permission to do the audit in the first place. The judge in that case said, okay, we can pause, but you're going to need to put up a bond. The Democrats didn't put up the million dollar bond, so we resumed, and that's currently where we are.

so we're in the process of moving forward with the audit. You know, again, this is another area where it is very important to, you know, look at procedures and processes and make sure that the law was followed, that the county board of supervisors were running, and the recorders offers were running elections per Title 16, per the election procedural manual. And that's what the Senate has been committed to doing, making sure that equipment, technology, the ballots, all of that, we're running appropriately,

following the law, and we want to reinforce that our elections are run well. But the only way to do that is kind of to open it up and to look at everything and have an audit. We use audits all the time. This is nothing new, right? Federal government, IRS, audits or tax returns. You know, we audit things. This is not a new concept. And we have mandatory recounts that have to be followed, but those take a very small percent of the ballots.

This is, again, everything, the 2.1 million ballots. So my one concern or my one issue with what's going on right now is that we continue, that Senate president continues to maintain complete control with the vendors and is in common. constant communication telling them what's expected, making sure that we don't farm out too much to people that we don't know or we're not familiar with. I think it's very, very, very critical that we run this audit professionally and have complete control so that when it's all said and done, we can feel comfortable and confident that the process that we're initiating hasn't been compromised in any kind of way so that when the results

are there and we share them with the public, they're meaningful. When will we have the results and when can people start expecting to learn things from it and to see those? Well, the communication from the Senate president and break in file senators have been a little limited. So on the last communication regarding time frame I think we're looking at a few weeks to complete the actual audit and then another two weeks to gather it up put it in a format that can be shared with the with the public so probably you know you're looking at maybe maybe a month and a half that could change you know if it could change if the courts get involved and if we're slowed down for other reasons

So that's obviously tentative. Well, as you mentioned, there has been a lot of pushback on this Arizona election bill on celebrities like LeBron James, for example, he's come out saying this election bill is about voter registration or voter, I'm sorry, this election reform bill is about voter suppression, rather. What is your perspective on, I guess, arguments that are made like that? And I guess what is your response to people like LeBron James making those claims about voter suppression? Well, celebrities, overpaid athletes, executives and CEOs, I think that they should stay in their lanes, frankly. I think that they're experts in their respective field. And I don't go in and tell someone how to run their sports team or how to play a particular

sport or run a company. And I don't appreciate being told how to advance election reform and policy that I've been doing for many years. I spoke to thousands and thousands of voters. This is exactly what they want. I campaign on these on these very issues and furthermore their criticism seems incongruent with the actual bill. So I question whether anyone that's criticized it has really read the bill. I'm serious, really read the language of the bill. What line, what page number. I want someone to point to where it treats one group separately than the other or that it will suppress someone's right to vote because it doesn't. It removes you from a list that you clearly have demonstrated you don't want to be

on because you're not voting, but you can still vote in person earlier, person or in-person day of. So it's hard to believe that those individuals criticizing this piece of legislation want to engage in a fruitful, respectful, merit-based conversation. They just throw out a lot of inflammatory words. They do a lot of name-calling and not a lot of listening and trying to understand what the bill does and what it's trying to address. Because when you have that conversation,

I think what you're going to find out is the public, after hearing it, tends to be like, Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. I can follow that logic. Oh, all right. The context with other states and what they're doing with Arizona. I mean, the public will be with you. They'll say, like, I got it. And look, even at the end of the day, if someone says, I still don't like it, that's fine. But it's inappropriate to try to tie this to motivations that are just, outrageous and offensive, like wanting to suppress someone's vote, wanting to disenfranchise someone, born out of race, and those are not justifiable. No one has been able to point to anything that demonstrates that's the case. And frankly, it's the same old playbook. Again, I've done these bills so many times over the years. It's the exact, literally word for word. Sometimes I wonder if they just Google past articles and cut and paste their criticism because it's like the exact same

when I did consolidated elections. It's the exact same when I did ballot harvest. It's the exact same when I did an ID bill. It's the exact same criticism. So you're left to be like, are you even really engaged in this issue? Because nothing is specific to this bill. I'm always open to talk about this stuff.

And I just want to, one last thing, because I think it's important for those individuals listening. I will talk. I'll like do an interview with CNN or the LA Times or the New York Times or the New Yorker. And I'll spend like 25, 30, 40, 45 minutes talking deeply about these bills and, you know, building context, talking about past policies and answering all these questions and having this real like robust conversation about the bill. and, you know, I'll answer all of their objections, and then, you know, they'll play devil as advocate a lot, you know, and I'll respond with meaningful comments, right? We'll do this whole thing. And then I'll see the article. And I'm like, if there's a sentence in there from our conversation,

I would be shocked. It'll be like three words. Michelle Eugenty said, this doesn't suppress your vote. And I was like, I said a lot of very meaningful things to explain. to the reporter to hopefully explain to the public. But they pick and choose, they omit a lot. And I just bring that story up because I think it really demonstrates the lack of willingness from the press's perspective to really inform the public about many of these bills. Because again, if they did, I don't think you would see the public that upset. So they have to resort to misleading the public, purpose.

not characterizing the bills the right way so that the public really doesn't know what's going on. And it's been unfortunate. Well, you mentioned it's so interesting voter ID and the pushback you received from that. And it's just, it's so interesting and incredible because with, you know, getting a suit of ed to adopting a pet to getting on a plane, you have to provide an ID for all of those things. But you can't, you know, it's now very, you know, people are extremely upset and concerned. about providing an ID for voting. And it's, yeah, it's a really interesting point you raised.

It's not logical. It's not logical. So you have to ask yourself, so why is the other side beating a drum to something that defies logic in any other realm, like to your point, and I've made this point, so as thousands of others, you have to use an ID and all these other mundane activities to function. And, you know, making sure you prove your identity in. in all of these other situations in life that we go through

without thinking about it seems to be appropriate. But then for elections, it's not. There's such a disconnect there. I mean, there's, so why, why? Why would you fight against ID laws? Especially since we do have criteria to vote. Citizenship criteria, a residency criteria, I can't get a ballot from New York.

York. I'm a citizen. But I can't get New York spell. Why not? I don't live there. That's why. You know, you've got to prove you are a resident of a particular state, you can get the right ballot. There's an age requirement. So how on earth are we supposed to make sure you've met certain requirements? Very simple, very few requirements that we have other than to prove it through some mechanism, which an ID does that. It's logical. And I think when this stuff gets, pulled as well overwhelming percent of Americans think you know an ID makes sense and sounds appropriate and I think they just they know that they that they've got to use an ID for a whole host of other activities like you said getting on a plane buying a

liquor picking up your your feet that will call for a game I mean on and on and on So why you would carve out elections is still a big mystery and has yet really to be explained by the other side that's against IDs. Well, as we wrap up, I know you mentioned that, you know, right now the bill is dead. You might, you know, try a second time. But are there other ways forward if, you know, if it's not for the specific bill? Well, there's always some other procedural things you can use to get the bill going. But it really requires in order to utilize them 16 votes. So, you know, Ms. Townsend has to decide, you know,

if she wants to support it or not. But I think the fact that this bill even, you know, died is really emblematic of a bigger problem we have right now with addressing a lot of election reform. I'm not the only member who has introduced on election-related bills. We've got Mr. Hoffman, Meznar, and others, that have introduced bills themselves. But there doesn't seem to be an agenda for the election bills,

and I think that's been particularly difficult then to advance them, because this stuff is very controversial. Not that the actual language in many of these bills are controversial, but the topic has been so politicized. And the Democrats use it as like a wedge issue, and they use it to just continue to stoke divisive, and hate, frankly. So you've got to have a majority plan and you've got to have leadership involved when you're advancing these election bills because they just come with that kind of baggage.

Hopefully, since we are still in session, this bill and some others can make it, but it's going to require every, you know, all the Republicans getting together and pushing forward. It's very difficult for just one member to solve it all. I need leadership. I need the other members. The House did an amazing job. I don't know if you were able to see it, but the House did just an amazing job at getting this out early last week.

So now it's on the Senate and Senate leadership to get it done. And, you know, contact the leadership, contact Ms. Townsend, encourage the support for the bill. Those are the tools right now. And we got to get it done before session because one session is over.

As you know, there won't be an opportunity. That means it's closed and everything that hasn't advanced is definitely dead. Well, State Senator Gentile, Rita, thank you for joining us on the Daily Signal podcast. We appreciate having you. Absolutely. Thanks for the time. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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