Photo Credit: ABC 15
You almost certainly have seen asks from political candidates around Arizona to sign their online petition to get them on the ballot. It’s easy for voters to sign, it’s less fuss and muss for candidates (and allows them to avoid 100 degree signature collections and COVID), and those signatures are pre-qualified, and as such are immune from legal challenges from opponents. In short, it’s a huge positive. Yet Scottsdale city candidates couldn’t gather signatures electronically…until now.
Thankfully, Scottsdale recently announced that it had caught up with the state and now allows for digital signature collection. The E-Qual system will now be in effect for the August city council elections. Candidates need to collect 1,000 signatures, so having another channel for them to collect them will be hugely helpful.
So why did it take so long? In all fairness, it took a long time for any cities to get on board. Phoenix was amongst the first to do so, and they announced it only two months before the signature deadline for the 2020 election. Kudos to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs for getting done something which shouldn’t have taken so long.
There is a potential downside however, and this also pertains to Katie Hobbs. This will be the first election after redistricting, a process that is always problematic for candidates. How can you collect signatures for a district that you don’t even know of yet? Candidates prefer to have a long runway for their race, but in reality, the new districts were just recently approved, forcing candidates to push off their signature collection efforts if they are running for legislative or congressional races.
So what does this have to do with E-Qual? Well implementation of the new districts into the system can only start after the districts are officially ok’ed and codified, but that process is also complicated and wrought with potential issues. As such, Secretary Hobbs announced that they expect to shut down the entire E-qual system for around a month in March. That announcement followed with it the expected barbs from political opponents, and also gives candidates a significant issue that they must work around, even if they are not subject to shifting lines like Scottsdale council candidates aren’t.
While we don’t doubt the intricacies involved, we have also heard of issues in the campaign finance reporting tool that were significant for standing candidate committees and only resolved just before the recent January 15th reporting deadline. Perhaps the Secretary is a bit too busy running for Governor to worry about excelling at her current job.
So congrats, candidates: collecting signatures just got a lot easier, except for one month. It’s not ideal, and it does look like the SoS office is having issues with the fundamentals of the role. But you should also be asking why municipal candidates just now got this option, and Secretary Hobbs deserves credit for that.