(bright music) (bright music continues) - Welcome to our AZ Votes Forum, Elections and Evolution.

I'm Ted Simons.

This special program is a collaboration with ASU's Mechanics of Democracy Lab for a deep dive into the ever-evolving elections process and how that evolution could impact our democracy.

Let's introduce our panel.

We welcome Bill Gates, the Director of the ASU Mechanics of Democracy Lab.

Also joining us is Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, the Pima County Recorder.

Sasha Hupka is a Reporter for Votebeat a nonprofit newsroom covering voting and election issues.

And we welcome John Fees, Phoenix area CEO and Co-Chair of Leadership Now Arizona.

Panel, good to have you all here.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Let's start with where we are right now.

Gabriella, I'm going to start with you.

What has changed in the way that voters vote and ballots are processed?

- I think one of the biggest things that I can say is there used to be a predictability to elections in a way that people never really thought about them before.

And now they seem to be front and center.

And the number of changes that we're seeing during active election cycles is preposterous.

We have seen date changes in the middle of active elections, identification requirements changed in the middle of active elections.

It's created a lot of upheaval.

- New law designed to speed up votes, that's a change, is it not?

- [Gabriella] Yes.

- How's that affected you?

- It's been interesting to see what the real world impact of that is.

Actual complaints from voters or people making comments about that and how people feel reassured.

I don't think in Pima County we've seen too much of a drastic change.

You know, it's maybe saved us three hours, probably taken us about three hours to do.

But we'll see.

We'll see in a larger election whether or not that has made a significant difference.

- Yeah, we talked about a new law there designed to speed up votes and I guess it could be a little bit of a wash there, but the intention was to speed up.

Bill, there's a proposed new law on the ballot.

It's Prop 144.

And this is kind of a unique proposition in terms of the nuts and bolts of elections.

Talk to us about this.

- Yeah, so it's got a lot of elements to it.

Number one is that it's a constitutional amendment.

So this constitutional amendment would do several things.

First of all, it would require voter ID for mail-in voting.

Now it doesn't say exactly how we're going to do it, but that would be constitutionally required.

Also requires that the elections officials across the state of Arizona give voters the opportunity to have their vote tabulated at the voting location.

It would also prohibit foreign money being donated into our campaigns and then also reaffirms the requirement and the prohibition on non-citizens voting.

- What do you see as the practical consequences of that particular ballot measure?

- Well, if this does pass, then it will be up to the legislature and the governor to put the provisions exactly into practice.

But I think it will certainly increase the cost of elections because all of these counties, the majority of counties right now do not give people the opportunity to tabulate, have their vote tabulated at the voting location.

Gonna have to buy new tabulators, figure out where to put those in the warehouse.

Additional costs also for however we're going to establish voter ID on mail-in voting.

So it's going to have a price tag, but that's part of it.

It says that the legislature will pay to implement this new constitutional amendment.

- [Ted] Those concerns sound about right, Gabriella?

- Not only that, but if we were to buy more equipment, we'd need bigger buildings to house them in.

And that's something that we're struggling with across the state.

Every single elections officer in the state is complaining about a lack of space.

- Yeah, oh, interesting.

Sasha, obviously we're hearing about changes affecting the Pima County recorder and all other recorder potential changes with Prop 144.

What are the biggest changes that you think voters should be paying attention to?

- Well, certainly, you know, Prop 144 is one of those, and we'll see how voters weigh in on that in November.

But to Recorder Cazares-Kelly's point earlier about these changes coming in the middle of election cycles, what we're seeing is that because of litigation, there are election changes, new laws that were passed back when former Governor Doug Ducey was still in office that he signed that are only just now coming to bear.

I think a really good example of that is recently a lot of voters across the state and particularly in Maricopa County received a letter that was sort of titled, "Have You Moved?"

And that was really confusing for a lot of them, but that came out of a law that was signed by Ducey that requires the Secretary of State's office to compare on a monthly basis the state driver's license list to the state voter registration list.

- That kind of a thing, what does it do?

What are you hearing that it's doing regarding trust?

- I think that it's really confusing for voters and they don't understand where is this coming from and in the current environment it's leading to panic in a way that's not very productive.

- John, the business community, what are you hearing regarding trust in the entire elections process?

Changes here, changes there, even no changes.

- I feel, first of all, really badly for the officials that have to carry out these elections.

You know, our first and foremost concern I think is for safe, accessible, and accurate elections.

Safety is first and foremost.

There's a group of CEOs in Arizona and mostly business owners and business founders that really want to stand by you and the other election officials who are doing their very best to interpret sometimes very confusing laws.

This initiative is only going to make it more confusing in my opinion.

I think the key is from a business side, we've been pretty complacent.

We've taken for granted our elections are going to be safe and accessible and accurate and we're seeing all around the country lots of these changes.

I think we have a lot of confidence in Arizona, but we need a lot our election officials do their work.

- I was going to say that we've been hearing this kind of talk for a number of years now.

This is not new and it's been... Where's the business community been?

Is it just laissez-faire and... - Laissez-faire is the right word for it.

But you know, I've been busy raising five kids and trying to build two businesses and they're national businesses and I think it's difficult for business leaders to know how to weigh in.

We're not partisans.

We're trying to do our best.

The best example for leadership now is many of our members give our employees paid time off to go volunteer for elections.

I think the best way for you to understand the elections is to go tour the facilities, witness them, and giving your employees time to participate is actually a really important first step.

- Did you want to bring... - Yeah, well, and I wanted to add, I think John is being very humble because when I was on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, there was a lot of criticism coming towards the recorder's office's supervisor.

It was John, it was Adam Goodman and others in leadership now that were standing up.

We heard their voices, maybe not everyone's, but I think he's not giving himself enough credit.

- Well, are there other voices coming to the fore?

Are you seeing a change here?

- Yeah, nationally I think there is.

Leadership Now is a national group of CEOs.

We're involved to really support these you know, predictable elections.

You can't expect business to invest in an unpredictable market.

And you know, when you have chaos around your election system, it's really a big problem.

I think confidence is real, but frankly, Sybil Francis spoke earlier about the Center for the Future of America or of Arizona that, you know, 65% of people still have confidence in our elections.

A majority still have confidence and they want them to be accurate and we all do.

I think that we have to worry about our adversaries, some of whom are not in Arizona, who want to promote this chaos.

And I think that that's not good for Arizona, and so we should look at our neighbors and say, "Do we trust each other?"

And I think the truth is we do.

We trust election officials.

I called many of the board of supervisors who I knew were being doxxed.

They need support.

And I think the business community, we've just sat back too long.

- Yeah, yeah.

And we've talked again about changes planned and affected and all that.

But Bill, I know you got an idea for a change regarding the winner take all legislature as opposed to represent more representation at the legislature.

Is this more of a, what do I do it?

Balance voting, jungle primaries, these kinds of things?

- Yeah, so I don't think it's fair for me to take credit for it, but we've been working with Vitalist Health Foundation who wants to look at, you know, again, there are these concerns about trust and possibly with a different system work better for Arizonans.

So the basic standard we have here is winner take all.

So if I win an election by one vote over John, I get, and my party gets all the seats.

He gets nothing, I get them all.

A different approach is proportional representation.

So to take an easy example, let's say we have a hundred seats in the Arizona House.

Republicans get 60% of the votes, they get 60 of the seats.

Democrats get 30% of the votes, they get 30 of the seats, and independents get 10%, they get 10 of the seats.

The advantage of this type of a system is that our representatives more accurately reflect our wishes, but it's a new system, it would be complicated and it's not what our recorders and boards of supervisors are used to running in Arizona.

- I was going to say, Gabriella, are the mechanics, if you will, then place for something like this?

- Well, immediately my knee jerk response to that is we don't have an independent party in Arizona.

And that has been, that has created some confusion of what it means to be no party designated versus affiliated with a political party.

That small change in last year, I mean, we spent so much time trying to communicate what that meant to the voters and so many people were accidentally registering for a party when they really were meaning to say, "We're no party designated.

We don't affiliate with any of those."

And so I think in every single space in Arizona, I think we're like one third, one third, one third.

And I think we've seen a growing number of no party designated voters because people are less willing to be a part of a political party that they feel doesn't represent them.

And so I think, you know, my office deals specifically with voter registration, and so that's what comes to mind first.

- But real quickly, proportional representation.

If that were tomorrow, magically, becomes the law, how much of a change in what you do would be involved?

- That would be a big change for the elections department.

And the elections department who we work very closely with, they're responsible for tabulation and for the results of the canvas.

- Okay, all right.

John, what do you think of this idea?

- Well, I like a lot of things that will get government to work better and more efficiently.

I mean, I'd like to see government be boring again.

That requires less our time and attention.

In, you know, when you have a stable environment that's less adversarial, I think that's better for our affordability, for the types of things that we all care about as neighbors, our neighborhood safety.

Arizona's got so many advantages.

You know, this Leadership Now group is a national organization but what we're doing in Arizona is actually pioneering.

We have strong local elections.

When you see the federal overreach trying to manipulate and come into our state, violating our laws, I think, we're thankful in the business community to see people stand up against federal overreach.

Local elections are good, and we have great people like you and many others that really respect the law.

And rule of law is something businesses depend on.

We depend on contracts to enforce and collect money and collect our contracts and do whatever works.

The rule of law applies to government as well.

And we need to see that happen.

- And Sasha, the idea of these election changes, obviously this would be debated politically.

How are election changes being debated right now politically?

Loaded question.

And are those... (panelists laughing) Are they getting more spirited?

- So I think that the big thing I see when I look at how these changes are being discussed politically, and to be clear, when I say that, I mean at the legislature, right?

But I also mean policy at the federal level.

I mean policy at the individual county level from time to time.

We see this in some of our counties.

One of the big through lines I see is a lot of times these discussions are not being based in fact.

A lot of times these discussions are being based in sort of this conspiracy around widespread voter fraud that just quite frankly is not true.

And to be clear, I think we can have a discussion about voter fraud, but I think it has to be based in fact, and the fact is that that is very, very rare.

I will also say though, I see examples of some counties and some elected officials doing this really well, I think.

Recently in Yavapai County, they did an analysis using the safe system.

So the one that has been splashed all over the headlines for providing false positives.

They did this really interesting analysis where they used it and they were very careful and responsible, I think, in how they used it to look at, can we use this to clear dead voters off the rolls?

Can we use this to identify any very small number of non-citizens who may be registered to vote on our rolls?

And I think that examples like that are a good way of sort of furthering this conversation.

- I was going to say kind of little steps that might lead to bigger cooperation possibly.

- I mean, I think the question voters need to be asking their elected officials when they're proposing changes is where's the facts on this and can you point me to them?

- [Ted] Yeah.

- What's the problem here and can you point me to facts that show it's true?

- And Bill, real quickly, I want to go to you because facts were flying all over the place that were supposed to be back when you were chair of the board of supervisors.

Are we starting to become more amenable to facts?

- I think that the elections officials in the state of Arizona are doing everything they can to get the facts out there.

I think that reporters like Sasha and others who, this is what she does.

She gets up every day and reports the facts on elections.

I think having that information, especially in this age of AI, we need the facts out there, not only that we hear it, but we need it on the internet.

That's what the AI labs, they use that information.

So the more that we can do, the better.

But as we know from the surveys that we've been involved in, that other organizations have done, there are still a fair number of people, unfortunately, who continue to have those concerns.

That's why we all have some work to do still.

- I think the business community has a role to play here in that truth is expensive.

Journalism's expensive and truth takes time.

It might take 10 days to get the counts.

That's what it's always taken.

And Arizona's not different, right?

Florida's the same way, many other states are the same way.

So I think first of all, the business community needs to step up and invest where we can to support honest candidates, but just recognize that common knowledge is evaporating right now in Arizona.

The Arizona media landscape, other than, but for PBS and KJZZ, there's not a big newspaper presence.

We have seven or eight million people live in Arizona and the Arizona Republic has a subscription rate that's in the hundreds of thousands.

We have a problem where people get their information and we need to recognize that our adversaries in other countries want us to be divided, want us to be polarized.

That's not good and it's not good for our communities.

- So with that in mind, Gabriella, and I want to touch a little bit of the same kind of idea with each of you, but the concept of a better election system, what does that mean to you?

- A better election system, I don't know.

That's hard to say because I think we do a really great job here in Arizona.

We're the leaders in the country for some of the ways that we make voting accessible.

I think I've seen, along with my colleagues statewide, constant improvement, constant building on technology, on best practices.

The amount of work that is going into your elections is very intentional, and I think we're doing a great job of that here in Arizona.

(Gabriella chuckling) As far as it being better, I think that as long as we're investing in that, we're contributing to the growth of elections as a field, as a really important component of our democracy, I think that it's going to naturally be better.

- Ease of vote, ease of administration, speed, accuracy, voter accessibility, all of these things obviously you want to see improved.

Is there room for improvement or are we doing, as you said, pretty doggone well?

- There's always room for improvement.

And I think that what I see from my colleagues across the state and in my own office, we are already working towards that.

To hear legislators who aren't familiar with our work making those recommendations of changes, sometimes that can be a little frustrating because we are the experts.

We are the ones who are interacting with the voters on a daily basis and that improvement needs to come from us.

- Bill, representation, would that be part of your metric for a better election system?

- Yeah, I think that that's something we need to look at.

I think that's at the heart of some of the loss of faith that people have.

They look at their representatives and say, "They don't represent me.

They're polarized.

They're on the extremes."

That's why we've been doing this research along with Vitalists looking at proportional representation.

Let me give you a few numbers, Ted.

Maricopa County, 35% of this county is registered Republicans.

80% of the Board of Supervisors that I used to serve on Republican.

Pinal County, 39% registered Republicans.

Their Board of Supervisors, 100% Republican.

And it goes both ways.

In Pima County, 36% of that county registered Democrats, but 80% of the Board of Supervisors are Democrats.

So when you see that, there's a misalignment, and that's why we're looking at some other options.

Again, these are decisions that would have to be made by the people of the state of Arizona, but when we're as polarized as we are, I think it's a good time to look at this.

- Sasha, as far as election reform is concerned, are voters asking for election reform?

And here's an added question.

Do they even understand what they're asking for?

- I think you have to sort of start by looking at some hard numbers, right?

And what polling has very consistently found since 2020 is that there is not the majority, but a sizable number of people in the state who do not trust elections.

They don't trust the outcomes.

They don't trust the people running it.

They don't trust.

And since 2020, a big chunk of that has largely been Republicans, but increasingly what polling is suggesting, particularly throughout this year, is that Democrats are also starting because of the environment that's sort of been created by the Trump administration.

Democrats are also beginning to not trust elections.

And so when you have that, I think the natural answer of do voters want changes?

Probably yes.

But I think where the problem is is that the changes that voters on either side of this political aisle want are vastly different from each other.

And part of that is because they're living in different realities.

And I think this is where it goes back to, we need to figure out a way to start, and this is part of why I think my work is so important, to start having a conversation based around a shared set of facts, because otherwise it's getting in the way of having important conversations about changes that might be less exciting than the idea of requiring ID to vote by mail in some nebulous form or, "Hey, we have to have universal vote by mail or universal voter registration."

I think that though there are other important conversations that need to be had around basic things like voter registration groups.

How do we make it so that county recorders don't get hit with hundreds of voter registration forms on the day of the voter registration deadline and half of them are either not filled in correctly or have like Daffy Duck on them?

You know, there's conversations like that that I think, from my reporting, I know do sort of need to happen, but we have to be in a set of shared facts, I think, in order to have them.

- John, a better functioning political system, what does that mean to you?

- Well, leadership now nationally has created a business plan for asking these same questions about how we design our democracy, right?

This has become a creature of two parties, and that is really for the next hundred years, we need to reconsider this.

And as business leaders, we would do that.

You know, business people don't want to tolerate dishonest employees, right?

But we have now accepted a level of dishonesty in our political class, especially elected officials that won't even accept election results.

One of the simple litmus tests we have right now is will you accept the election results after all the appeals have been done?

That's a simple question we ask all candidates.

And if you will, that it should be revealed.

And if you won't, it should also be revealed.

And right now we have on both parties, people that don't want to accept the election results when they lose.

That's not right.

And that has been different.

In other areas in our society, we accept the losing and we need to understand and there need to be political consequences for the people that are dishonest and that won't accept the consequence.

- This is a question for all of you.

We'll go round robin here and we are running a little bit out of time, but we'll take whatever you got here.

The one question you want voters to ask regarding efforts to improve the system, what do you want voters to ask?

And this would go back to pretty much everything I've asked in a certain way.

Gabriella, we'll start with you.

- Am I ready?

Am I ready and registered to vote?

I want our voters to just be armed with the knowledge on how to access their vote and to understand where to go to ask those questions or report problems.

- [Ted] It's just engagement, if nothing else.

- It's really just engagement.

I want to make sure that voters are participating.

- John, the one question you want voters to ask, what would it be?

- How do I become involved?

Volunteer for the elections, witness the elections, get trained in the elections.

That's what we encourage our employees to do.

That's what I want other CEOs to do.

Volunteer, spend a day and witness these election officials doing a great job and you won't believe the conspiracy theories and the lies that are being promoted.

- [Ted] Are you sure about that?

Because the closer some people get, the more they think they see what they haven't seen.

- Yeah, my experience has been when you witness and you get a tour and you see how honest you are and all these folks are, you can't believe the lies.

These lies are minuscule but you know, lies travel faster than the truth many times.

- Yeah, yeah.

Bill, one question that you want voters to ask.

- I want voters to ask elections officials, "Are you ready for everything?"

Because these are uncertain times and the good thing is the answer is yes.

These people do tabletop exercises.

They're running through contingency plans, so they're ready for it.

Unfortunately, those, as John has said, are adversaries who may try and disrupt our elections.

- Are we ready?

Do we have the baseline of trust and facts for that kind of thing?

- [Bill] We do.

- All right.

Good enough.

(panelists laughing) The one question you want voters to ask just in terms of improving the election system, again, with the preface that they actually understand what they're asking for.

- Yeah, and I think that's where I would want voters to ask, right?

Do you know what's on your ballot?

And I mean, do you really know what's on your ballot?

Have you taken the time to do the research?

Have you taken the time to read articles?

You don't have to read my articles.

There's a bunch of other news organizations out there that do great work every day.

Go read theirs.

But please, just do you know what's on your ballot?

Do you know what's actually happening?

Do you know the facts around these things?

And ask your elected officials hard questions if you feel like you don't know the facts and you want to.

- Sasha Hupka, again from Votebeat, John Fees, Phoenix area CEO and Co-Chair of Leadership Now Arizona, Gabriella Cazares-Kelly, Pima County Recorder, and Bill Gates, Director of the ASU Mechanics of Democracy Lab.

Thank you, Bill, for joining us for this presentation.

- Thank you.

- We really appreciate it.

And good to have our audience here as well.

That's it for now.

I'm Ted Simons.

Thank you so much for joining us.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues)