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Thanks for the great work. I read something in the Arizona Republic the other day about a commercial from Freedom’s Future Fund critical of Kari Lake being found to have likely violated election laws. Was it because she wasn’t an official candidate when the commercial ran? Something else?

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2022/08/25/arizona-clean-elections-board-finds-anti-kari-lake-ad-likely-violated-law/7896883001/

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I saw that one but didn't include because it was a turn of the screw update -- Clean Elections voted to investigate. We had mentioned the issue last week after Ruelas' first piece

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2022/08/16/group-behind-kari-lake-border-ad-may-have-say-who-funded/10338154002/

https://arizonaagenda.substack.com/p/the-daily-agenda-its-a-super-dry

The problem isn't about when she became a candidate. It's that the pac claims it's doing "issue advocacy" ads about the border, not election ads against Kari Lake. An issue advocacy org can play by different disclosure rules with the IRS and state.

You know how you always see those "tell Mark Kelly you hate XYZ" or "thank Mark Kelly for doing XYZ" ads? They're classified as issue advocacy ads (even though they're really just pro or anti Mark Kelly election ads). When they don't use the words "vote for/against Mark Kelly" or something similar, it's probably because they're issue advocacy ads. And they're probably doing that (instead of just saying vote for/against) to hide their donors.

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"...the questions legislative Republicans referred to the ballot are all attempting to abolish our right to direct democracy and embolden those who still believe the 2020 election was stolen."

That's a little much.

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I’ll give you abolish might be a bit much. Very seriously hamper. But if they had their druthers, do you think they wouldn’t abolish initiatives?

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Speculating about politicians’ druthers is tough because even if we were to assume many in the majority would like to abolish initiatives (i.e. a king for a day scenario), I doubt many would burn any calories attempting to do so since it’d be such a dud on the campaign trail.

Another way of looking at it: The initiative system has elements that some consider a feature, but that others consider a bug. If we’re going to maintain a system of direct democracy, we should regularly assess whether the system is working well and whether it needs changes.

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