Deciphering those ballot measures

Arizonans are being asked to do double duty as both voters and lawmakers.

Last month, we highlighted the education measures you might see on your ballot in November. Those are the result of the Republican lawmakers who control the Legislature trying to get around Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, who keeps setting records with her veto stamp.

It’s a trend with no end in sight. Every year, Republican lawmakers send more measures to the ballot. If Hobbs wins re-election this fall and Republicans keep control of the Legislature, then you can bet on seeing even more measures over the next four years.

While knowing the basics of those measures is important, you also need to understand what those measures would do and the motivations behind them.

You’re going to need some tools to do that. Ballot measures are notoriously hard to read. Not only because legal language is often nearly indecipherable, but also because sometimes backers of ballot measures are trying to trick you.

Is it a simple, straightforward fix to a problem? Is it a dressed-up version of bills aimed at a particular group, like trans students or immigrants? Is it identical to a bill that Hobbs vetoed, which you think should be dealt with through the legislative process?

You’re going to get bombarded by mailers and TV ads about ballot measures as the November elections approach. You’ll hear far less about what lawmakers said when they debated those bills and which arguments might resonate with you.

In other words, every Arizona voter needs to get a lot savvier.

That’s why we created our legislative intelligence service, Skywolf, which we’ve mentioned several times in the Agenda.

It took a lot of time, effort and money to pull off, which means the full Skywolf experience still costs some money.

But we don’t want it to only by used by lobbyists and institutions. We want it to be a ray of sunshine through the clouds for regular Arizonans who are trying to understand what their lawmakers are doing, but don’t have the time or the training to do it themselves.

Even more than that, we want you to feel confident that you didn’t get tricked when you fill in those bubbles on your ballot in November.

That’s why we created a free tool that anybody can use. Our tracking lists give you all the basic information about bills, like summaries, who sponsored the bills and where they’re at in the legislative process.

And this week, we fleshed them out with links to news coverage, juicy quotes from the power players, an overview of public comments and videos from legislative hearings (Curt loves tinkering with civic-minded tools, so you can expect even more additions in the coming weeks.)

You can either dive right into the tracking list we made for education-related ballot measures, or you can check out the guide we put together below.

At its most basic, the tracking list shows you a collection of bills that we’ve organized around a specific topic or theme.

Today, we’re talking about ballot measures that could shape the future of education in Arizona, but we also made tracking lists for the normal bills that deal with education, or data centers or any number of other issues we find interesting (if you have an idea for a tracking list, leave a comment!)

You’ll notice the list of education-related ballot measures is a lot shorter than when we wrote about ballot measures a few weeks ago.

A dozen ballot measures didn’t make it past committee, so their future is really shaky. But at least five ballot measures are barreling ahead (and another one, dealing with Proposition 123, is caught in legislative limbo).

Now that you have your list, you can read a plain-language summary of each ballot measure.

At least, as close to plain-language as we can make them. The wording in bills is so dense and convoluted that it’s nearly impossible to decipher. It takes a lot of work to wrangle it into a comprehensible form.

You can also see which lawmaker sponsored the measure and which party they belong to. As you might imagine, you can often tell a lot about the motivation behind a bill by the lawmaker who introduced it.

You can also see where the bill is in the legislative process. This is key for policy analysts and lobbyists who want to know when the pressure really starts building.

But it’s also useful for regular people. Once you start understanding the rhythm of the Legislature, you can read the tea leaves a little and see which bills have a future.

Famously, former Speaker Rusty Bowers assigned a bonkers election bill to every committee in the House, virtually ensuring it would get stuck somewhere and never advance.

Most of us don’t want to read technical information about legislation, even if it’s been translated to everyday language.

We tend to understand things through storytelling. “This person did this thing and now other people are mad” is much easier to follow.

So, we gathered up news stories about the ballot measures in our tracking list, which show the drama playing out at the Capitol.

You can click on the links and read the original stories, or you can skim the quotes we pulled from those stories.

For example, this headline about a bill from Republican Rep. Selina Bliss is one of the best we’ve seen in quite some time:

Even when we try to pay attention, it’s easy to miss the big picture. That’s why political endorsements are so valuable to candidates.

If an official you trust endorses a candidate, then that’s a good indicator that the candidate’s values line up with yours (not always, of course).

It’s similar with legislation. If an organization you trust supports a bill, then that gives you a good indication of what the bill is really all about.

We included some of the big-name organizations that registered to speak about each ballot measure in our tracking list.

We also added the total number of people who registered to speak, so you get an idea of the public sentiment about the measure. If you see hundreds of people requesting to speak, that means it’s a big deal.

The paid version of Skywolf has an enormous archive of videos and transcripts from legislative hearings and floor debates.

Not to mention, some really cool new features that let you whip up a whip sheet to tally votes on bills, compare the language in different versions of bills and run AI-powered analyses on different aspects of the legislation.

If you’re a policy pro, it really is worth checking out.

Not all of those features are available for our free tracking lists.

But never fear, we dug up links to the relevant videos from the Legislature’s website so you can quickly watch your lawmakers and officials in action.

For now, those are the tools we’ve put together for you. There will surely be more as we move through the year.

In the meantime, we’ll keep updating our tracking lists and doing whatever we can to help Arizonans shoulder the burden of voting, as well as serving as de facto lawmakers come November.