The Yellow Sheet reported on Friday that Governor Jan Brewer had cut a deal with democrats to stop legislation that would have increased the number of signatures required for third-party candidates to qualify for the ballot. She had designated Senator Steve Pierce as the hatchet man to kill the bill, but in the end the legislation passed.
Now Brewer is left with a dilemma, according to the Yellow Sheet. “Whether the pre-budget deal-making means Brewer will now veto H2305 is unclear, but there is certainly an expectation among Dems that the governor will do what she said,” reported the Yellow Sheet. “From a Democratic standpoint, that’s the only card they’ve got. It was made clear [to them] that the election bill would never go into effect. The phrase used [by the governor’s office] was, ‘Trust us on this. Trust on this. It will not happen,’” the source said.”
The legislation was supported by all county recorders in the state. They believed it would have prevented some of the problems that arose in the 2012 election, including:
• Imposing higher legal standards on voter-sponsored initiatives, thus making it easier to prevent an initiative from being on the ballot if they do not strictly comply with each and every provision of the law.
• Making it a crime for volunteer political workers and organizations to collect early ballots from voters and take them to polling places.
• Increasing the number of signatures that minor-party legislative and congressional candidates need to get on the ballot.
Democrats argued that it would limit individuals’ ability to vote.
In order to move the legislature to act on her Medicaid expansion plan, the Governor vetoed a number of bills including those which had been important to her party. Those included the “religious freedom” bill. Brewer’s veto outraged conservatives who condemned her “temper tantrum.”
At the time of the veto, Americans for Limited Government condemned Brewer saying that her “complicity in implementing Obamacare will not be forgotten. She is holding back legislation that passed overwhelmingly protecting religious freedoms to get her way on expanding Medicaid. To hold First Amendment rights hostage unless Obamacare is implemented is a betrayal to Arizonans who have consistently voted against politicians that support the health care law going into effect.”
The organization’s President Nathan Mehrens issued a statement in which he said, “Religious liberty is not a bargaining chip; it is the very foundation of the First Amendment.”