You could view the effort as inspiring or as pitiful.
Supporters of another effort to change Tucson’s election system are at it again, collecting signatures outside in the early July heat. They’re doing so despite the fact that, if history is any guide, the effort is likely to be fruitless.
And they are doing so with no support from any of the big local institutions or powerful officials. The Democratic Party and Republican Party aren’t helping. City Council members are opposed. The power structure isn’t interested.
But a handful of second-tier local political personages are at it anyway, trying to scare up 14,832 valid signatures from Tucson voters. If they succeed in getting the signatures, and then succeed at surviving any challenges to the petitions, they’ll have to convince Tucson voters again that it would be better if we selected council members only from within our six wards.
As it stands, of course, we have a weird “hybrid” system in which voters in the wards select the candidates in the primary election, but then the whole city’s voters cast ballots for the council members from every ward.
I’ve never liked the system, though I understand its theoretical benefits, because I don’t think any ward’s voters should ever be overruled by the city’s voters as to who should represent the ward. This has happened occasionally, especially in Wards 4 and 2 on the city’s east side, where Republican voters are more concentrated.
I caught up with two supporters gathering signatures at the corner of North Craycroft Road and East 5th Street on Monday morning. Bill Beard, a former GOP candidate and local party chair, and Dru Heaton, the Libertarian Party chair, had set up a shade tent and tables. It was still hot.
They think the idea of ward-only elections is popular enough in Tucson to pass if it can get on the ballot, but getting there has taken a tough effort.
“Everybody wants this, but nobody wants to play with the people they don’t like,” Heaton said.
She was shading herself with a sign, standing outside the chiropractic office of her husband, David Heaton. They’ll be there for the last time before petitions must be turned in, from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Wednesday July 5.
She is one of four co-chairs of the Tucson Election Equality Act effort. She’s the one Libertarian. Then there is a Republican, former supervisor candidate Fernando Gonzales; an independent, former state legislator Ted Downing; and a Democrat, former legislator and Pima Community College board member Luis Gonzales .
As of the last filing in May, the committee supporting the effort had raise all of $1,325. Roman Campuzano, the committee’s treasurer, acknowledged fundraising was light but thinks that will change.
“We’ll have tons of support after it’s already on the ballot,” he said. “A lot of people are for it, they just want to see it on the ballot before they start pushing money our way.”
That’s a risky prospect. Voters rejected efforts to convert to some form of ward-only elections in 1975, 1991, and 1993. After that, more efforts were made but failed to gather enough signatures.
Court challenges to Tucson’s “hybrid” election system also failed, as the system was ruled constitutional in September 2016.
But that hasn’t robbed the idea of its appeal to some of us. That same year, in early 2016, the city’s charter review committee made recommendations for reforming the election system.
Among the ideas they proposed to the City Council: Ask voters to consider either a ward-only system, or a ward-only system with two at-large council members who represent the whole city.
This latter idea was a compromise intended to address the concerns of those who think a ward-only system will make council members focus parochially on the good of their wards, not the city as a whole. But once the 9th Circuit found the hybrid system constitutional, the idea of change was dropped.
The concern that ward-only elections will lead to tunnel vision remains the fundamental defense of the system we have now.
“Probably 75 percent of the decisions we make have region-wide importance,” Ward 6 council member Steve Kozachik told me. “A minority of the decisions we make are ward-centric. I think the way we are elected, even if it is novel, reflects the way we govern.”
It’s a fair point, even if I disagree with the resulting system. I would probably prefer the option of ward-only elections with at-large seats that the charter-review committee proposed.
But at least the authors of the current proposal kept this effort extremely simple. Their proposal removes references to “councilmen” and changes them to “council members.” And it makes the city’s system ward-only. Nothing complicated.
But that doesn’t mean it will get on the ballot, let alone pass. Most of the city’s political institutions and leaders are opposed to this move that would shake up the status quo.
