Lawyers for Tucson are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to spurn a bid by Republican interests to kill the city’s unique system of electing council members.
In new legal briefs, City Attorney Mike Rankin said there’s nothing inherently unconstitutional about having the six council members nominated by ward but then having a citywide general election.
He said it ensures that each area of Tucson is represented and yet requires council members to pay attention to voters in the other five wards.
“The city’s election system allows both ward and citywide electorates a voice, and also provides benefits to both,” he argued.
In a ruling last year, the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the practice.
Rankin’s filing comes in response to a request by the Public Integrity Alliance, represented by Kory Langhofer, to persuade the nation’s high court to overturn the appellate ruling.
Langhofer said the system illegally disenfranchises residents of any five particular wards who have no voice on who advances from the other ward to a citywide general election.
Langhofer contends leaving the 9th Circuit ruling intact “would vest in states and municipalities a nearly unfettered ability to deny the right to vote in the primary election.”
But there is partisan interest in trying to scrap the system.
Republicans hold a voter-registration edge in one of the wards. But all six council members are Democrats, the result of the fact that they outnumber Republicans on a citywide basis.
If the system is voided and council members have to be elected by ward at the general election, that could give Republicans a better chance of getting one or more members on the city’s governing body.
Rankin, in his filing to the high court, did not address the political implications. Instead, he told the justices there is precedent for concluding that the same rules and same procedures need not apply for primary and general elections.
“The city is free to set different residency qualifications in these two separate elections,” he wrote.
The case before the Supreme Court isn’t the first bid by Republican interests to undermine the voting system.
In 2009, Sen. Jonathan Paton, then a Republican senator from Tucson, pushed through legislation barring cities from conducting an election where the candidates’ political affiliations are listed on the ballot. Tucson is the only city in Arizona that has partisan elections.
That same measure voided Tucson’s modified ward election system.
Langhofer acknowledged that the lawsuit by the Public Integrity Alliance is on behalf of several Tucson Republicans. And he said it would be GOP voters in Tucson who are the beneficiaries.
But he said the litigation is not a partisan move, saying the alliance gets involved in all kinds of cases and elections where it believes there is impropriety.
He said in 2014 it paid for commercials during the Republican primary attacking Tom Horne, then the state’s attorney general. That helped Mark Brnovich win the Republican primary before going on to defeat Democrat Felecia Rotellini in the general election.
