Your Ballot, Booby-Trapped

I’ve spent the last several months as part of Civic Engagement Beyond Voting, a nonpartisan group that follows Arizona’s legislative session and tries to head off the worst bills before they become law. We show up virtually, we speak to representatives and senators, we make the case on behalf of regular people. Whether any of it mattered, I honestly can’t tell you. But I learned a lot I didn’t want to know — and now I can’t unknow it.

Government is broken. Everything is a trick one party is trying to play over the other. The citizens are lost in the game. We have a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature.

By now, Arizona Republicans have figured out that Governor Hobbs will veto their bad bills. So they’ve stopped trying to pass laws. Instead, they’re referring measures directly to voters — bypassing the governor entirely. Smart, right? It gets worse.

The ESA mess

Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program — ESA, or what most people call the voucher program — started with a genuinely good idea: give families with disabled kids a way to fund education that works for their child. Money follows the student, not the school district. Around 100,000 students now use ESAs, and the program costs roughly $1 billion a year. It has expanded well beyond its original purpose — since the Legislature opened it to all students in 2022, any Arizona family can participate, whether their child goes to private school, Catholic school, a charter, or is homeschooled. Axios

I’m not opposed to school choice. I served on the board of an early charter school in Phoenix — a STEM school that tried to bring science and technology education to the inner city. Good people, good intentions, genuinely hard work. The idea was sound. The execution was exhausting. I know firsthand how complicated this gets.

But the ESA program as currently run is a disgrace. Families have used taxpayer money to buy diamond rings, lingerie, and gaming laptops. Audits keep returning lists of luxury and non-educational purchases, while the attorney general is currently investigating the Arizona Department of Education for public monies violations. The program has been hemorrhaging money with essentially no guardrails for three years. As Save Our Schools Arizona Director Beth Lewis put it: “The legislature hasn’t done anything to add guardrails for three entire years. They’re clearly not going to do anything about this, so we the people need to.” Chalkbeat + 2

And so voters may get the chance to fix it — except that the Legislature just made sure that if you try, you might accidentally cancel out your own vote.

Three measures, one trap

Here’s what’s heading to your November ballot, and why it matters which one you pick:

The Protect Education Act — backed by the Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools Arizona — would require unused ESA funds to be returned to public schools, mandate fingerprint clearance for voucher-funded school employees, ban the use of funds for luxury items, and bar families earning over $150,000 a year from participating. This is the teachers’ version. It has real teeth. KOLD News 13

The Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Reform and Accountability Act is a competing initiative that overlaps with the Protect Education Act on some points — fingerprint cards, banning luxury purchases — but takes a more modest approach overall. It was filed by an out-of-state group less than a week after the teachers filed theirs. Draw your own conclusions about the timing. Arizona Capitol TimesAZFamily

Then there’s the one that just came out of the Legislature in the final hours of the session: The Military Families College Savings and Scholarship Protection Act — a referred constitutional amendment that Republicans packaged as protecting military families’ ESA savings. It contains a poison pill provision stating that any law passed by the Legislature or voters that conflicts with its terms is voided entirely. That means if voters approve both this measure and the Protect Education Act, the reforms would be completely nullified. Axios

Read that again. Even if voters approve a measure to rein in the ESA program, those reforms would be completely wiped out if the Legislature’s measure passes as well. ABC15 Arizona

This is not a coincidence. This is the game.

What to do

The Arizona Education Association’s president called the situation outright voter confusion — “a tactic we’ve seen before.” She’s right. The ballot will have competing measures with similar-sounding names, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can easily vote for the one designed to cancel out the other. AZFamily

So pay attention. When November comes, know which measure is which. The Protect Education Act — backed by Arizona teachers — is the one with actual accountability built in. The constitutional amendment is the one designed to gut it.

Arizona’s schools have been underfunded and poorly managed for as long as I’ve lived here. That doesn’t mean we can’t demand better. But better requires knowing when you’re being played.

Vote accordingly.