For at least 48 years, people have been challenging the way the Tucson conducts its elections.
Ballot initiatives, legislation, court challenges — they’ve all failed. But while our unique system has persisted, barely, so have the challenges. The City Council ought to consider moving toward a change now before someone else finally succeeds at making us do it.
GOP state Sen. Justine Wadsack is trying two different ways to force Tucson to change its “hybrid” election system, which many Republicans think disenfranchises them as a political minority in the city. (They’re not wrong.)
One effort is a sort of nuclear attack on big cities: It would eliminate Arizona “charter city” status for cities over 500,000 population — Phoenix and Tucson now, and Mesa soon, if state voters approve. The other would give all the state’s voters a chance to require that Tucson change its voting system by only allowing certain ways of electing city councils.
Both measures are overreaches.
But even now, some Tucsonans are attempting a different sort of challenge: A new initiative campaign. Longtime local politician Luis Gonzales and three co-chairs have taken out petitions to change Tucson’s election system from “hybrid” to ward-only.
As it stands, Tucson council members are elected like this: In the primary, voters within each ward choose a candidate from each party to run in the general election. Then in the general election, voters from all over the city can vote for the council member in all the wards.
In recent years, the complaints have centered on the idea that this system prevents Republicans in the more conservative East Side wards 2 and 4 from electing a council member or two of their own, because they’re outnumbered on a city-wide basis. That may be true, depending on the candidates.
The initiative Gonzales is supporting would only allow voters in each ward to cast ballots for the council members in their own ward. It would be, to use the phrase tossed around for decades, “ward-only.”
This is one of the options that has been bandied about for years. Tucson voters rejected some form of ward-only elections in 1975, 1991 and 1993. Since then, people have taken out petitions repeatedly to try to change to ward-only elections, but have failed to get enough signatures to make the ballot.
Court challenges were the preferred method used in the 2010s.
In Nov. 2015, a three-judge panel at the 9th circuit ruled the system unconstitutionally favors Democrats, but the city appealed that ruling to a broader panel. In September 2016, an 11-member panel overturned that ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case, leaving Tucson’s system intact.
So, the system is constitutional, but there’s a reason it rankles. It means that whatever the political majority may be in Tucson, at any given time, the majority voters can overrule the voters in a given ward who may want something different.
Yes, we elected Republican council members under this system in recent decades, but after the Trump presidency, we’re in a different, more polarized time. I don’t see it happening again soon.
Gonzales explained his reasoning this way: “The voters have a right to choose their own representatives.”
To me, it really is as simple as that. But Tucson voters have not tended to agree. They’ve rejected efforts to change the city’s voting system to ward-only and repeated efforts have failed to make the ballot.
“We have voted on this again and again — with the same result,” Mayor Regina Romero said in a written statement. “I will always stand up for the rights of Tucsonans to choose their own election system AND the rights of all Arizonans to keep their City Charters, the very foundation of local control.”
As to Wadsack’s efforts, she said: “I will raise money and campaign against these absurd measures. This is government overreach.”
I agree they are overreach — bad ways to get a good result.
In fact, it was pretty embarrassing how Wadsack won a party-line Senate majority on Tuesday. Two Republicans, Sen. Ken Bennett and Sen. T.J. Shope, who voted against the initial effort to end home rule for the state’s 19 charter cities, changed their votes on the promise that their local cities will be exempted by a minimum population rule.
In other words, when the bill is amended to include only cities over 500,000 population, the resolution will no longer apply to Casa Grande and Prescott. The two apparently don’t care much about the principle of protecting home rule, as long as it’s protected in their own provinces.
By giving the voters from Many Farms to Tacna a voice in how Tucson runs its elections, Wadsack’s bills should fail. But Tucson shouldn’t count on successfully defending its system forever. Some day it may lose.
Back in 2015 and 2016, two charter review committees met and discussed changes, a few of which voters passed. Among the recommendations made in the final commission report in April 2016, was that the city consider alterations to how council members are elected.
I think one of them could satisfy everybody. After long consultation with experts one of the ideas that the charter-review committee thought feasible was to change the hybrid system to ward-only elections for the six council members, but then add two at-large members who represent no specific ward.
This idea would help negate the concern that nobody on the council would look out for the city as a whole if they are only elected by their ward’s residents. And it would like satisfy those who worry that wards 2 and 4 will never have a chance to elect a Republican.
But the City Council would have to hurry up and vote soon to put it on a ballot in order to dissuade all the outside efforts underway. Better to choose our own changes than have them imposed by outsiders.
Longtime Tucson bar sold, to be redeveloped
