Monday, April 18, 2011

Undermining Clean Elections in Arizona

Today, the Arizona Senate concurred with changes approved last week to SCR1025, the Undermining Clean Elections referendum.

Democratic Sen. Linda Lopez voted with the Republicans.  Senate Democratic Leader David Schapira for some reason did not vote on this bill. Last week, Arizona state Reps. Ben Arredondo (D-LD17), Richard Miranda (D-LD13), Eric Meyer (D-LD11) and Ruben Gallego (D-LD16) voted with the Republican majority to allow this effort to undermine what Arizona voters already decided.

This action sends the measure to the 2012 general election ballot.

The bill is deceptively titled "Stop Public Money for Political Candidates' Campaigns."  The strategy will be to confuse voters.  If they told the truth, which is to allow more unfettered influence of corporate lobbyists on the Arizona legislature, they know Arizona voters would defeat the measure in a heartbeat. The bottom line is that if approved, this would completely kill Clean Elections in our state.

Today, Public Campaign released polling data showing that: 
Voters in Arizona strongly support the Citizens Clean Elections Act, and even more so when they hear basic information about the law – with super strong majorities of support across party lines.
The report also states that a majority of these likely voters would be less likely to vote for a legislative candidate that supported repeal of Clean Elections.

2 comments:

  1. The good thing about this: when voters are confused, they vote no. That doesn't mean we won't have to run a campaign, but it means we have a structural fact on our side. It's an important issue to watch.

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  2. @RGuillory,

    Structural facts have been against those on the far right for decades, yet the voters prefer their bumper sticker rhetoric.

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