(riveting uplifting music) - Coming up next on this special hour-long edition of "Arizona Horizon," a look at some of the major propositions on November's ballot.

It's a proposition special, and it's next on "Arizona Horizon."

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- Good evening, and welcome to this hour-long special edition of "Arizona Horizon."

I'm Ted Simons.

Tonight we look at a number of the more notable propositions on November's ballot.

We start with Proposition 128, a ballot measure that would allow lawmakers to amend or repeal voter measures under certain situations.

We got both sides of the issue from Scot Mussi, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, and Roy Tatem, Jr. of the East Valley NAACP.

Good to have you both here.

Thank you so much for joining.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for having me.

- Scot, we'll start with you, I should say.

Why is this a good thing?

- Well, Prop 128 is designed to deal with narrow circumstances where voter approved measures or initiatives are found to contain illegal or unconstitutional language.

Right now, there's no mechanism in place if a measure is found to contain illegal or unconstitutional language, absent trying to perhaps maybe go back to the voters, which could cost a lot of money, and also isn't a way to additionally address it on a more immediate fashion.

It could be years before potentially doing that.

And so, given the current situation where a measure goes before the Arizona or United States Supreme Court, and those are the only two instances in which this would come into effect, in those instances, if the court finds that there is language that is illegal or unconstitutional, then there'd be at least a mechanism in place to address that.

- Okay, why is this not such a great idea?

- This isn't a great idea because as a ballot measure allows the people, there are two ways to make a law here in Arizona, and one is for a legislator to propose a bill.

The bill goes to committee, is voted up or down, signed by the governor.

Another way to make a law is the introduction of the ballot measure, which means we're gonna take a issue to the people.

And so the people in Arizona have the ability to say they want this particular issue to be a law of the land, and so it's pretty much, to me, it's democracy, a huge apparatus of democracy and a pure execution of democracy because it's a people-driven initiative.

- Okay.

How do you respond to that?

- Well, I don't think this is an attack on the initiative process as well.

In fact, our organization has been active participants in the initiative process.

This is about dealing with those situations where something's illegal or unconstitutional as found by the Arizona or United States Supreme Court.

And I think in those, what we're talking about as far as, you know, making sure people are being heard, I think most voters, you know, a lot of times in often cases don't know or unaware that the language could be illegal or unconstitutional, and it could impact their thinking on the measure itself.

However, there's no mechanism to deal with that because prior to something passing, voters simply wouldn't know that it contains illegal or unconstitutional language.

- Is it limited specifically and narrowly to illegal or unconstitutional language?

- To the measures themselves?

- Yes.

- So the initiative itself, if it contains illegal or unconstitutional language, and those are be the only measures it would apply to.

- Okay, but the measure as a whole, let's say this is the illegal part, but the rest of this is not, this is the only thing affected, or is the entire measure affected?

- The entire measure would be encapsulated in that because it's difficult to say, "Well, this one portion over here doesn't apply to all of it."

I mean, it's usually measures don't operate that way.

If it's statutory language, a lot of it's going to be interrelated.

So in those situations, again, with those type of measures, that's what it would deal with.

- If something is unconstitutional, if something was illegal or just clumsily written, it's headed for the courts and the whole ballot measure's gonna be held up anyway, why shouldn't the legislature be allowed to go in there and tinker and get it right?

- This is where things get tricky, because as we talk about the state legislature, just this past legislative session, we've witnessed over 100 pieces of voter suppression legislation, and some of them are even addressing the existence of a ballot measure, and therefore, measures such as the Arizona Fair Elections Act ballot initiative was created to address the attempts to curb people from voting.

And, I mean, to go back even further, let's talk about the 2020 election and where we're talking about the Stop the Steal rally cry.

Unfortunately, I believe that this is a measure to give the power to the legislators to overturn the will of the people.

And so if a ballot measure passes, they can, you know, nitpick or try to overturn the ballot measure just because of a sentence, because of a word, and that is truly undermining the will of the voters.

- But if it keeps that ballot measure from being struck down, is that not a good thing?

- No, I don't think it's a good thing.

I don't think it's a good thing at all because, once again, I believe this is you give an inch, they'll take a mile.

- Well, and that's, again, the question of how much is affected.

From what I understand, the measure could be entirely rewritten by lawmakers if this were to go through, correct?

- Well, under the measure itself, yeah, what you're describing there, If it's found to contain illegal or unconstitutional language, they could look to amend it.

The extent of that amending would be up to the elected representatives, you are correct on that.

But again, I don't think this is an attack on the initiative process.

In fact, I think that it ensures that it's upheld because right now, there is no mechanism in place to deal with these situations.

- It's too ambiguous to say the language is illegal or unconstitutional.

I mean, now we're dealing with the situation where women's rights to choose are being deemed unconstitutional.

Certain books now are being banned in schools and being deemed illegal.

And so to use the language illegal and unconstitutional is, I think, is a code word.

I don't believe that that is the true nature of this initiative.

- Yeah, well, and what's being described there, it wouldn't be us saying that it's illegal or unconstitutional or you.

It would be the United States Supreme Court or the Arizona Supreme Court making that determination.

- Okay, if the court does make that determination, whichever court it might be, why not let the courts do what they gotta do as opposed to sending it back to the legislature who could rewrite and redirect the entire process?

- Well, because in a lot of those situations, you might see a situation where they do try to go in and they strike down a certain provision, but it could render the rest of the initiative dysfunctional or inoperative.

The court may or may not know how to fix or remedy that situation.

- If the patient dies because it has to go to court and get fixed, I mean, is it not better to have at least some surgery done by the legislature?

- Well, if that legislature was trustworthy.

Once again, I stated we've seen the legislature introduce or members of the legislature introduce over 100 pieces of voter suppression legislation, one legislator specifically saying that he wanted to take voting back to 1958 which sent alarms through the community because many people that look like me, many women were not even eligible to vote in 1958.

So that sends a alarming message about the attitude towards we the people and allowing everyone to participate in the electoral process.

- It sounds like Arizona and California are really the only states that prohibit this kind of alteration by state legislatures.

They've got like 11 or 21 states have, you know, no such restrictions, and you see this happening around the country in other states.

Again, a bad thing for Arizona?

- Bad thing for Arizona because of the nature of the legislature.

Once again, I just believe that as we're talking, we're seeing legislators say that they were willing to overturn the will of the voters during the 2020 election as the electoral votes, as we talk about the electoral college, Joe Biden won Arizona's electoral votes.

There were legislators saying that they were willing to overturn the will of the people if the legislature had that power to do so.

- Good debate, Good discussion.

Thank you both for being here.

We appreciate it.

- All right.

- Thank you.

- You bet.

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- Proposition 129 calls for limiting a citizen's initiative measure to a single subject and would require that the subject be expressed in the title of the ballot measure.

We took a look at both sides of this issue with Mike Bailey, General counsel of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, and Pinny Sheoran, President of the League of Women Voters of Arizona.

It's good to have you both here.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you, Ted.

- Mike, we'll start with you.

Why is Prop 129 a good thing for Arizona?

- Ted, single subject rule is a general principle of legislation that applies across the board.

It applies to our legislature, it applies to any constitutional amendments we might wanna make, and what it says is that if you're gonna legislate on something, if you're gonna pass a law on something, you can't hide things that aren't related to this topic.

The principle applies in almost all state legislatures and even those states that have citizens' initiative systems like we do, most of those states require the single subject rule.

So recently we've been seeing here a lot of special interests coming in and trying to hide things, and we think the single subject rule is an excellent antidote to hidden special interests in legislation.

- Okay.

Pinny, why is this not such a good idea?

- Well, I'll start by saying that, you know, the Constitution says that we reserve the right for the citizens to enact laws independent of the legislature.

So we don't think that this, you know, notion that it applies to everybody applies to the citizens.

In fact, the courts have understood that the citizens have a much more difficult path to bring forward legislation.

Legislators have a very simple path to bring forward many, many laws.

Some of them are good.

Some of them are not good.

So we don't think this is a good idea.

We need to keep the legislature away from the rights of the citizens to have independently bring in laws.

- For those who say that this would clarify a ballot measure and not confuse the voter, how would you respond to that?

- (clears throat) I'll respond this way, Ted.

If, in fact, it confuses the voter, they're not gonna vote for it.

However, just in this last legislative session, we had over 100 bills that were anti-democracy bills, okay?

The citizens have only one shot at being able to address legislation that really harms them, and so, therefore, it's important to understand that citizens should have that right to bring forward what might be a complex subject.

You know, they get only one shot.

And if I might add one more piece to this, and that is who is to determine, you know, what the single subject is?

- Well, that brings up my next question.

Critics say this will invite all sorts of legal challenges as to delineate subjects here.

How do you respond to that?

- There are already single subject legal challenges all the time from both sides.

In fact, Pinny's group, just four years ago in 2018, challenged Proposition 306 on a single subject rule.

Now they were on the other side of that position, and, in fairness, it was a referendum, not a citizen's initiative.

But we don't look at this again as an argument or tension between the legislative process and the legislature, and the citizens' right we have here in Arizona to initiative process.

It's a valuable right that we all have.

You know, it's just when we are confronted with something that is so complex, this year, for example, a ballot proposition narrowly missed having enough signatures to get on the ballot, but it had impact on 44 separate statutes in our state code on 40-plus single issues that it said it did, something like 20-plus articles, chapters, and then four different titles in our state code.

It would take an expert in the area of law days to figure out the ramifications of that, and it's not realistic.

It's just too many things being hidden.

- Is it best for Arizona to have all of these things in one initiative whereas you might want X, but the rest of the alphabet you don't want any part of?

- So it is, I think, important for citizens to be able to enact ballot initiatives, and if you look at what the courts have decided, that they do not put that single subject restriction on citizens, they've applied that to the legislature, but not because they recognize that it's hard for citizens to bring forward ballot initiatives and because they get one shot.

That's the first thing.

Then to directly answer your question about, you know, should the citizens be able to bring forward multiple items?

For example, the initiative where it is if, in fact, the citizens are responding to multiple legislation that impacts one broad subject, voting rights, okay?

Or access to the ballot, then it is not unreasonable for the citizens to identify multiple items, provisions that address this fairly complex issue.

- Well, and I think it could also be argued that if it is fairly complex, and there are a number of facets to the initiative, people know about that they've already signed the petitions.

Apparently they're okay with it, are they not?

- Right, and my point again is that they've signed what they understand, and always, of course, you know, many propositions have very appealing titles, but it's what's hidden that is the problem.

And again, when you're talking about amending 44 separate statutes, there's no way to figure out how catastrophic or important it is.

I do want to add, Ted, that the citizens' initiative is very successful on the single subject approach.

We haven't had the citizens of Arizona, when they see something they want, haven't had any issues getting that across.

We recently had minimum wage in the past years, marijuana.

This year, our friend has on the ballot a dark money initiative.

These are all, you know, single subjects or certainly arguably one or two.

Again, the referendum that Pinny's group challenged four years ago only had two issues, not 44, and even then, they saw it as a problem.

- Again, the argument on the other side is that it's unfair to ask people to consider all of these things.

Does that make sense?

I mean, do you understand what that point is coming from?

You're asking someone to vote on, again, X, but they've got all this other stuff in front of them.

You're saying what?

That they will just vote no?

- I think that people make choices at the polls, and the choices they make, they often have to make choices in candidates.

Some they like, they don't like, and they make a choice and they vote yes or no.

In the same way, when, in fact, the ballot has multiple provisions, and I would beg to disagree that it's sort of a kitchen sink and everything under the kitchen sink.

The provisions are more often than not tied to one,