Arizona Independent Party governor hopeful submits 3 times the number of required signatures

PHOENIX — Entrepreneur Hugh Lytle submitted more than 6,000 signatures on his nominating petitions Monday to run to become Arizona’s next governor.

He’s running under the Arizona Independent Party, formerly the No Labels Party.

Lytle believes his campaign is gaining momentum because it gathered more than three times the number of required signatures to qualify for the ballot, although those signatures will now need to be verified before he’s officially on the primary ballot.

“I’m committed to it. There’re no games that are going to stop me. Whether I’m on the ballot, not on the ballot, I’m going to organize the independents, I can promise you that,” Lytle told reporters outside the Arizona State Capitol after dropping off his petitions.

Teri Hourihan, a licensed therapist and professional counselor, also has submitted petitions as an Arizona Independent Party candidate.

Independent candidates must jump through more hoops

Partisan candidates running for governor in Arizona need to gather signatures from a quarter of 1% of the voters registered to their party. For statewide offices in 2026, the signature threshold is 1,771 for the Arizona Independent Party,  7,588 for Republicans, 6,761 for Democrats, 3,789 for Libertarians and 1,771 for the Green Party.

Meanwhile, candidates who are unaffiliated — lowercase independents — need to collect 3% of voters who are not registered with a recognized party, although if they do so, they pass through the primaries and qualify directly for the general election ballot. The unaffiliated threshold is 44,539 signatures for statewide office this year.

Although being part of the Arizona Independent Party allows Lytle to make the ballot with a much lower signature total, he believes nontraditional candidates face unfair disadvantages in the state.

On top of that, Lytle said the deadline in which he had to turn in his signatures to get on the ballot was moved up by weeks when the Legislature changed the date of the primary election from Aug. 4 to July 21 this year.

There is also a measure at the Arizona Legislature, SB 1609, that would prevent the word “independent” from being used in the name of a new political party to avoid confusion. If passed, the Arizona Independent Party would have to change its name again.

“Whether they’re independent and join a party or they’re party not determined, that’s fine. I mean they’re still independents. They’re not a member of either party, right?” Lytle said.

Where Hugh Lytle stands on the issues

Lytle, the founder and CEO of Equality Health, said his three areas of focus are the economy, education and health care. He wants to make life more affordable for Arizonans and bring back partner entrepreneurialism to development, similar to the policies of former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

As for education, he’d like to see comprehensive education reform and fix the system as a whole, including guardrails on the Empowerment Scholarship Account program.

“Calling for accountability in the program, calling for means testing, calling for citizen oversight of the program and calling for electronic processing so we don’t just let $2,000 go without accountability,” Lytle said.

When it comes to health care, Lytle said the state is going to be hit hard by uncompensated health care due to subsidy reductions letting many go uninsured. He noted the state budget needs to reflect what that’s going to look like.

“Focus on insurance, focus on rural health as well within that. There’s dollars available. We got the short end of the stick on those dollars for rural health,” Lytle said.

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