By Howard Fischer
Mail | X: @azcapmedia

PHOENIX — A Scottsdale Republican lawmaker has concluded that Democrats were right all along: It’s not fair to have ballot order determined by who won the last governor’s race.

But Rep. Alexander Kolodin said the fact there’s now a Democrat in the top office — and a prior GOP advantage has disappeared — has at least something to do with his legislation to alter the system.

His House Bill 2045 would require that the order of candidates for each race on the general election ballot be rotated among voting precincts in each county so each party gets an equal chance of being in that first position.

The current system — the one based on who won the last governor’s race — meant that in the 2022 election Republicans were listed ahead of Democrats in all races in 11 of the state’s 15 counties where Doug Ducey outpolled Democrat David Garcia. That included Maricopa, which has more voters than the other 14 counties combined.

The Democratic National Committee and its allies thought that system is so unfair that they filed suit in 2019 asking a federal judge to rule the system illegal.

To back their arguments, they cited research from a political science professor who estimated that first-listed candidates get an average advantage of 2.2 percentage points. And the margin, according to Jonathan Rodden, can reach 5.6 percentage points.

All that, argued attorney Sarah Gonski, explains why Arizona law requires rotation of names on primary election ballots. And she urged U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa to extend that rotation to general elections.
The judge refused, and the Democrats had no better luck going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, however, Kolodin says they have a point.

“It provides statistical advantage to the group of candidates listed first,” he said — exactly what Democrats were arguing in court.

So what’s changed?

One thing is that Democrat Katie Hobbs beat Republican Kari Lake in the 2022 gubernatorial race. That meant Democrats got top billing in the just-completed election in five counties, including Maricopa and Pima, where three out of every four registered voters reside.

That would be repealed if the Republican-controlled Legislature approves his plan and the governor signs it, replaced by the system of random rotation.
]Kolodin also conceded there is some politics behind his move to have the Legislature revamp the law versus having it decided by a federal judge.

“The Democrats were suing to try to change the law to suit their purposes,” he said. But Kolodin said Humetewa was right in concluding it was not the role of the courts to make such decisions.

Instead, he said, that’s the role of the Legislature which then — and now — has been controlled by Republicans.

“The Legislature saw fit to, fairly in my view, provide that advantage to the party that had won the governor’s office,” he said of the law in place when Ducey had won his races for governor.

Put another way, Kolodin said, Republican lawmakers had every right to set up a system designed to benefit their candidates.

“It’s not fair to take that advantage away from a political party in the middle of a gubernatorial term,” he said, saying the GOP, having won 11 counties in 2018, including Maricopa, was entitled to “get the prize” of first position in future elections.

“And you get to keep that prize for the four years,” Kolodin said.

Anyway, he said, it’s not like he’s trying to take away the current Democratic advantage — at least not right away.

“It doesn’t take effect until 2027,” Kolodin he said.

What that means, he said, is that even if his measure becomes law, the Democratic candidates still will be listed first in the five affected counties for the upcoming election That’s the one in which Hobbs herself will seek a new term.

But it will make irrelevant beyond that, at least for ballot order, whether she wins or loses.