Tue. Nov 26th, 2024

Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror

Preliminary election night results show that both Proposition 133, which would keep Arizona’s status quo with closed, partisan primaries, and Proposition 140, which would open up the state’s primaries, are headed to defeat. 

As of 10 p.m. on Tuesday, with roughly half of expected votes counted, about 60% of voters opposed both Prop. 133 and Prop. 140, also known as the Make Elections Fair Act, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. 

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The Associated Press has not yet called the race, but the campaign against Prop. 140 had declared victory. 

“We are so grateful for the Arizonans who stood up to oppose this radical transformation of our elections systems,” Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb and former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Andrew Gould, co-chairs of the No on Prop 140 Committee, said in a written statement. “Voters of all political persuasions wisely concluded that Prop 140 would do irreparable harm to our state if enacted. Arizona elections must be free, fair, and transparent, and that is what our system remains after this just result.”

The Make Elections Fair Act was a citizen initiative amending the state constitution to create open primary elections in which all candidates for an office would appear on the primary election ballot, regardless of political party affiliation or non-affiliation. All voters, regardless of their own party affiliation, would then vote for any candidate or candidates. 

Proponents of Prop.140 said that it would make the election process more equitable for independent candidates and voters and aimed to fix the issue of extreme divisiveness in politics by forcing candidates to attempt to hear from and appeal to voters outside of their party. 

Arizona law currently requires partisan primary elections for any elected office that isn’t explicitly nonpartisan, and those elections are mostly limited to voters registered in that party. 

Voters not registered with a party can vote in a partisan primary election, but must request to cast either a Democratic or Republican ballot. Partisan voters who are on the Automatic Early Voting List will receive mail-in ballots every primary election, while voters not registered with a party who are on the Automatic Early Voting List must request an early ballot in the primary.

In 2023, Republicans in the Arizona Legislature voted to put Prop. 133 on the ballot to counter a proposed ranked-choice voting initiative. Prop.133 would have amended the state constitution to forbid open primaries and outlaw ranked-choice voting.

In a ranked-choice system, voters rank the candidates from their favorite to least favorite. A process of elimination takes place once voting ends. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Those voters’ second choices are then counted, and the process continues until someone crosses the 50% threshold.

The ranked-choice voting measure that Republican lawmakers feared never materialized, at least not directly. Its backers reworked their proposal to transform Arizona’s partisan primaries into nonpartisan elections, with a path to ranked-choice voting — but only if legislators or the Arizona Secretary of State authorize it. The resulting initiative, known as the Make Elections Fair Act, qualified for the ballot as Prop. 140.

While Prop. 140 would have opened the state’s primary elections to all voters and all candidates, regardless of their party, it would give the state legislature the power to decide how many candidates for each office move on from the primary to the general election. And if the legislature decides that more than two candidates should move on to the general election in a race for one seat, ranked-choice voting would be required. 

If the state legislature failed to decide how many candidates would move to the general election by Nov. 1, 2025, that decision would be handed to the secretary of state, a point of contention for the proposition’s opponents.

The Secretary of State’s Office is currently occupied by Democrat Adrian Fontes, and will be at least through January 2027, depending on who voters elect for the post in 2026.

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