With 34 days left to register voters for the midterm election, let’s take a moment to reflect on everything that Democrats have achieved over the last few months, and the work that we still have to do.
President Biden’s administration has had several wins over the last few weeks. After passing the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden announced up to $20,000 in school debt cancellation for federal borrowers making under $125,000 a year. Both of these moves drummed up a lot of excitement for our younger population, who are facing a climate crisis and rising cost of living in their immediate future. Make sure to talk with any high schoolers that you know about these issues and why it is so important for them to vote. National High School Voter Registration Week starts on September 19th, and that would be a great time to get their registration up to date if they will be 18 before or on November 8th, 2022.
The office of Pima County District Attorney Laura Conovor and Planned Parenthood have worked together to file an injunction in Pima County to make Arizona’s near total ban on abortion unenforceable. Keep an eye out for the final Pima Superior Court ruling that will be released later this month.
Unfortunately, the Arizona GOP-stacked Court ruled that the Free and Fair Elections (FE) campaign fell about 1,458 signatures short, despite the fact that FE spent months collecting over 475,000 signatures which was more than twice the amount needed to qualify.
Leading the effort to throw out signatures was the Free Enterprise Club (a dark money group determined to throw out initiatives that return power to the people), the Honest Elections Project and RITE (Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections), an organization headed by former Trump White House counsel Derek Lyons; RITE was founded by former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, and its board includes former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.
FE is asking voters to vote NO on Propositions 128, 129 and 132, all of which if passed would make the initiative petition process even more difficult to maneuver than it is now.
Our community in Pima County was devastated by the news of Constable Deborah Martinez-Garibay who was killed while serving an eviction notice in early September. The Pima County Democrats officially moved not to appoint a replacement for her on the November ballot. It is very likely that soon the position of Constable will no longer be Elected and instead appointed by a body like the Pima County Board of Supervisors.
Although I only met her a couple of times, to me Deborah was a positive force of energy who inspired me to get more involved in my own community. I hope we can all learn from the passion she had for life.
Please remember to get your petitions for the Stop Universal Vouchers campaign signed, notarized, and returned to PCDP headquarters by 4pm on September 16th. If you turn it in afterwards, we cannot guarantee that your signatures will make it to Phoenix on time!
Can you believe we are already halfway through 2022? With less than six months until the midterms, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for the work you have done this year.
Through our office’s efforts, we have not only ensured that Pima County will have 425 elected Democratic Precinct Committee members for the ‘22-’24 cycle, but we are leading the charge in regards to fighting for reproductive rights by being the center of petition activity in Pima County.
Our volunteers who staff the office are our civically-minded librarians who greet visitors and answer their questions using a wide variety of resources. Keeping all of our volunteers organized can be tricky, but our new Team Leader volunteer program is making it a lot easier!
Team Leaders will help to train new volunteers, learn our office opening and closing procedures, assume a managerial role during their shifts, be the main point of contact for volunteers, and will have special access to PCDP data systems.
Because of this extra help, I have been able to work on launching our Discussion for Democracy forum series with Democratic candidates running for offices up and down the ballot. You can check our D4D page here, where we have posted all of our recordings of these forums. Our last forum will be in person this Saturday, June 11 at 1pm at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. You can go herefor more information.
In addition to candidate forums and volunteer leadership, I’ve also been working with our fundraising team to launch our First Wednesday fundraisers, and to prepare for our Fall Udall dinner on September 17th at the Desert Diamond Casino.
June is expected to be one of our busiest months here at the office because of the ballot initiative deadlines; people will be relying on our office to get their petitions notarized and to turn in their signatures. Right now we have five different ballot initiatives, all of which will need hundreds of thousands of signatures to qualify for the ballot. If you haven’t already done so, please consider circulating these petitions among your friends and family. You can either stop by our office or check out our website for more information.
I’m so glad to be serving as your Director, and I’m looking forward to the excitement of such an important election year!
I wanted to take a moment here, as we head into the summer of 2021, to give you an update on what’s been going on here at the office. I am planning to write more of these monthly blog posts so you can see how PCDP is working every day to elect Democrats up and down the ballot here in Southern Arizona!
As you may already know, we onboarded a new PCDP administration in January of this year. Since then, there have been a few changes, but we are now fully staffed with a Chair, First Vice Chair, Second Vice Chair, Corresponding Secretary, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, Operations Coordinator, Social Media Strategist, Website and Graphic Designer, and Director. In addition, we also have some new interns in the office who are helping with everything from our communications to fundraising.
PCDP is cautiously optimistic that we may soon host an office re-opening event where people can come in to meet our new folks!
In the meantime we have started to open our office again to volunteers, who have dedicated their time to make sure our office operations continue to run smoothly. We’re also planning hybrid events, where people can join either in person or via Zoom.
Of course, we have continued to build our strategy for how we are going to contact the 18,000+ Democrats in Pima County who are now at risk of being removed from the AEVL list. We also monitor #fraudit and redistricting, both of which threaten the integrity of the elections process. Every day as restrictive abortion and voting rights laws continue to pass in the Arizona state legislature we are reminded of what is at stake if we do not act.
The 2022 campaign season has already begun, and we need your help to make sure we are ready to fight for the next 17 months so we can keep Arizona blue.
On election night of 2022, as the results start coming in from all over the state, I do not want to be asking myself if I could have done more; I know I will have done all that I can to ensure that Democrats win up and down the ticket.
If you haven’t already this year, please take a moment to think about all you are doing to help elect Democrats, and ask yourself if there is any room to take on more. Whether it is increasing a donation, committing to volunteer, or writing to your representatives, every act of political engagement will enable PCDP to fight for your Democratic values.
I am incredibly grateful to be working with such a wonderful community, and I’m excited to see where we will take PCDP next!
