Clean Elections director explains lawsuit over Arizona Independent Party name

PHOENIX – The nonpartisan state commission tasked with voter education thinks it will sow confusion if the newly rechristened Arizona Independent Party is allowed to keep that name.

In fact, the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission is willing to go to court over the issue, filing a lawsuit this week against Secretary of State Adrian Fontes after he approved the former No Labels Party’s name change.

Clean Elections Executive Director Tom Collins said using the word “independent” for a party name when it already has a different election-related meaning is bound to leave voters scratching their heads.

“It directly, essentially, overrides both the Clean Elections Act language and overrides the commission’s authority to do communication with voters in terms that they’re actually going to use and understand,” he told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News on Friday.

Why does Clean Elections oppose Arizona Independent Party name?

Collins is concerned that voters who don’t want to be affiliated with a party — aka lowercase “i” independents, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate – might inadvertently register with the Arizona Independent Party.

“The implementation of this change, if it happens, means that when you go onto the MVD’s website to change your voter registration … you’re going to see maybe this Arizona Independent Party thing, you’re not going to see the word independent, and that’s going to cause confusion,” he said.

Collins noted that when a similar situation occurred in California, 73% of voters who registered with an independent party said they did so by mistake.

“And if you listen to the folks who are running the No Labels Party, they keep talking about how we’re going to be the people who are going to give voice to independents. That’s not clarifying the confusion. That seems to me to be trying to leverage the confusion to … get their registration numbers up,” he said.

Lawsuit questions Sec. Adrian Fontes’ authority to approve name change

In addition to the confusion issue, the lawsuit argues that Fontes doesn’t have the authority to approve the name change.

“There’s a petition process by which No Labels picked this name. That’s what counts. There’s no other avenue for them. … He’s just wrong about that, unfortunately,” Collins said.

Fontes acknowledged that the name change could cause confusion, but said it will have “zero impact” on current unaffiliated voters. He also thinks his decision is consistent with Arizona law.

“I’m looking to the law and I’m looking to this group of people who have freely assembled and they want to change the name of their party and they said, ‘We’ve followed all of our rules. We want you to recognize this officially.’ So I said OK,” Fontes told KTAR News’s Outspoken with Bruce and Gaydos on Thursday.

What does Arizona Independent Party think about lawsuit?

Meanwhile, members of the Arizona Independent Party, including attorney Anthony Ramirez, are vowing to fight the Clean Elections lawsuit.

“The Clean Elections Commission has now stepped directly into a Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection controversy and a First Amendment freedom-of-association controversy, and we intend to see this fight through, all the way to the United States Supreme Court, if necessary,” Ramirez said in a statement last week.

Ramirez believes it’s the latest example of how the Arizona election system discriminates against unaffiliated voters.

“Independent candidates in Arizona, ordinary people who simply want to serve, are still forced to collect six to eight times more signatures than Democrats or Republicans just to appear on the ballot. That burden is so extreme that, for many, ballot access is effectively impossible,” he said. “That isn’t democracy. That’s exclusion.”

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