Can you name any of Arizona’s past elections directors?
Of course not.
By the nature of their positions, if not their personalities, state elections directors have traditionally been important bureaucrats who stay behind the scenes.
No longer. Eric Spencer, the elections director under Secretary of State Michele Reagan, has been playing a leading role pushing legislation through, and — in the view of some Democrats — advancing the Republican advantages in elections.
This week, Spencer stepped into public view during debate over SB 1516, a vast bill he authored that clarifies aspects of Arizona’s campaign and election law. One part of the bill eliminates a state law requiring any organization spending most of its money on electioneering to disclose its donors.
That raised the ire of Democrats, who claimed it opened the door wide to dark-money spending. They sent out a fundraising email over the weekend, ringing alarm bells about the provision. In response, Spencer refused to reveal to Democrats before floor debate on Tuesday the content of a large amendment he planned to have introduced, an unusually political move for an elections director.
Asked by the Democratic caucus attorney for the text of the amendment, Spencer responded via email: “Unfortunately, the partisan attacks this weekend have foreclosed any concessions I’m able to offer at this point.”
Who is he, as elections director, to make such a political call, refusing even to share the text of an amendment? Well, Spencer is an Iraq War veteran who came home and became a specialist in election law. He spent eight years working mostly for Republicans at Snell and Wilmer — alongside Mike Liburdi, now Gov. Doug Ducey’s general counsel — before becoming Reagan’s election director.
He may be best known around Tucson as the attorney who represented Martha McSally during the litigation over two close races against Ron Barber, in 2012 and 2014.
He’s also, it seems to me after a half-hour interview Thursday, a true believer in the righteousness of a cause that he, Ducey and other state Republicans like to call “reform.”
Among the efforts Reagan and Spencer have pursued:
• Joining a lawsuit against the lines drawn by the Arizona Redistricting Commission — a suit Reagan’s predecessor, Republican Ken Bennett, declined to join;
• Unilaterally refusing to enforce provisions of state law that require that candidates who are the targets of attack ads be notified;
• Supporting bills to make it a felony for most people to deliver another person’s ballot — a phenomenon known in state politics as “ballot harvesting”;
• Threatening legal action against the Citizens Clean Election Commission if it tried to regulate the spending of dark money.
Spencer and Reagan’s efforts to change our election system have largely been supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats, but Spencer rejected my characterization of the efforts as partisan.
“If someone had an overly cynical view of the world, they would characterize what we do as partisanship,” Spencer said. “What we really are is reformers.”
That may be how they see themselves, but I don’t see myself as cynical — just skeptical. How am I supposed to view Reagan’s speech March 3 to the Conservative Political Action Conference in which she said, “The radical left who uses ballot harvesting has blocked our commonsense attempts to close this loophole”?
Democrats and others who’ve spent time around the Capitol assured me that Spencer’s outspokenness and the increasing partisanship of the office are unusual. When Republican Jan Brewer took office as secretary of state in 2004, for example, she deliberately hired a Democrat, Joe Kanefield, as elections director, though he later became a Republican.
“The elections director for the state needs to be 100 percent neutral when it comes to elections,” Sen. Steve Farley, a Tucson Democrat, told me. “But he’s acting as if he’s still working as a Republican elections attorney.”
Chris Herstam, a former legislator and longtime Capitol observer, told me all the secretaries of state and elections directors he’s seen have worked hard to avoid the appearance of partiality. Until now.
“Even if you’ve been politically active before, once you go into that position there’s always been the expectation that you’ll be nonpartisan,” said Herstam, a Republican when he was Gov. Fife Symington’s chief of staff who last year joined the Democrats.
While Spencer says he’s not being partisan, he acknowledges taking on bigger roles than previous election directors. He’s the general counsel, campaign-finance judge, top decision maker on litigation and also chief lobbyist, he said. It’s in that latter role that he denied the Democrats this week.
Longtime Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez, a Democrat, told me that work on updating a key election procedural manual has stalled while the Secretary of State’s Office works on its priorities.
“We started it, and then we stopped it because they were doing campaign finance reform,” Rodriguez said. “We need to do this before the August election.”
For his part, Spencer said he reached out to Democrats about this week’s bill long ago, but they didn’t work with him on it and seemed only to want to kill it.
“I’m getting my bill through the same way any other lobbyist would get their bill through,” he said. “My job is to get it through the Legislature and get the governor’s signature on it.”
True enough, if that really were his only role. But that’s a dangerous position to assume for a public official who should inspire the trust of the entire public, not just the true-believing partisans of the governing party.
BABEU now AGAINST POLITICIZATION
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu won a pretty good endorsement recently — from the National Border Patrol Council Local 2544, the union that represents agents in the Tucson Sector, in his run for the Republican nomination in Congressional District 1. That led to a classic event this week.
In a press conference with Border Patrol union leaders, Babeu lambasted the Obama administration for its alleged politicization of immigration enforcement.
“This administration literally has handcuffed them from doing their jobs,” Babeu said of the Border Patrol agents.
Of course, this is the sheriff who “literally” wrote the book on the politicization of immigration enforcement. The lowlights are too numerous to list here, but do you remember “build the dang fence” or the protest he ginned up in Oracle a couple of years ago? Same guy.
WHEELER SAYS NO
State Rep. Bruce Wheeler’s on-again off-again dalliance with running for Congress in the second district is off again. Wheeler previously said that he would likely run if Ted Cruz or Donald Trump appeared poised to win the Republican nomination for president.
They are, but he decided against challenging the Democrats in the race, Victoria Steele and Matt Heinz. Indeed, Wheeler told me this week, he was actually thinking of stepping down from his state House leadership position and running as an independent, but the plan now is off for good.
