On Friday, attorney Tom Ryan called for the impeachment of Secretary of State Michele Reagan and the dismissal of her director of elections, Eric Spencer, for the failure to ensure that Arizona voters had the information to which they were entitled in the voters’ publicity pamphlets for Tuesday’s Special Election. Reagan’s office failed to send the pamphlets to approximately 200,000 as required by law.
During her short tenure, Reagan has been surrounded by controversy and incompetence. From failing to protect voters from fraudulent websites to massive voter disenfranchisement during the Presidential Preference Election last month, Reagan and her right-hand-man Spencer have appeared to run interference for powerful cronies and thwarted fair elections.
In the case of the Prop 123 and Prop 124 Special Election Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich called for an investigation in response to a complaint filed by Ryan alleging that Reagan “failed in her duty to timely issue statutorily required Publicity Pamphlets dealing with Propositions 123 and 124.”
Ryan had called for Reagan to either delay the Special Election and combined it with either the Primary Election scheduled for August 30, 2016, or the General Election scheduled for November 8, 2016 due to the fact that Reagan admitted to the failures.
In Brnovich’s response he noted, “Even if the Secretary of State’s failure was the result of mere neglect, one thing is certain – the Secretary violated Arizona law. Questions abound; not only as to how the Secretary of State failed to fulfill her duties in connection with this election, but also as to why there was no public disclosure regarding the failure to timely mail the publicity pamphlets until mere days before the initial counting of early ballots.”
Yet Brnovich denied voters a remedy.
“The first remedy is, the director of elections, Eric Spencer, must resign effective immediately, and absent that, the secretary of state must fire him, if he does not resign,” Ryan said on Friday. “The other remedy that should happen is we have to have a Legislature that has the moral courage and the ethical spine to start the impeachment proceedings of a Secretary of State who has screwed up.”
However, Reagan has done more than just screw up. She has been a proponent of Prop 123 and many question whether the failure to provide voters of information was in service of that agenda.
“We have a Secretary of State who does not fundamentally understand her job. She has been out campaigning in favor of Prop 123. I have documents in support of that fact. She is not supposed to be campaigning. She is not supposed to be putting her thumb on the scales and that is effectively what she has done. It is like having an umpire standing on the plate, but betting on the opposing team.”
Ryan alleges that when the failure was discovered, “instead of going to the Attorney General’s Office and the governor, she covered it up,” stated Ryan. “She knows full well that the opponents of Prop 123 have collected less than $10,000. The only way they could effectively get out their arguments to all voters was to make sure that make sure the publicity pamphlet got out before the voting started. She put her thumb on the scale and deprived hundreds of thousands of Arizona citizens on one of the most important issues of the day.”
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