Journalists’ Roundtable: 1-22-21: Inauguration, Election Audit, Redistricting Commission

President Biden was inaugurated this week and a county election audit was released. These topics and more are covered on the Journalists’ Roundtable with Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services and Jeremy Duda of the Arizona Mirror.

This week’s Journalists’ Roundtable covered:

• Biden Inauguration
• Ducey running for Senate
• Report: Biggs, Gosar Sought Pardons
• Maricopa County Election Audit
• Permanent Early Voting List
• Redistricting Commission

What does the Biden Administration mean for Arizona?

Jeremy Duda: “Obviously we’ll have some changes coming for immigration law. Construction of the wall is being halted. New policies on face masks, COVID testing, and vaccinations. Just in the first few days, we’ve seen a lot of stuff that will directly affect Arizona and much of the rest of the country.”

Howie Fischer: “More importantly, it makes the Arizona Democratic delegation a lot more powerful. Now, that we have Biden, we now have a 50/50 Senate with the Vice President as a tiebreaker. So, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema are certainly going to have a lot more power in terms of the stuff they want to do. The Arizona delegates in the House are going to have a lot more power, a lot more ability to do things.”

Maricopa County Election Audit

Howie Fischer: “Originally, they even admit that part of the reason they started this was to see if they could come up with some evidence they could send off to Congress ahead of that January 6th meeting and convince the members of Congress to say ‘No, we’re not going to give Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to Joe Biden.’ Clearly, that became moot. I do believe there’s an honest belief that they do need to reassure voters that the election was okay.”

Jeremy Duda: “The folks that were that committed to pushing that falsehood that the election was rigged; I don’t think anything is really going to knock them off that perch at this point.”