Journalists’ Roundtable: 5-28-21: State Budget, Senate’s Review of Maricopa County Results

Time now for the Journalists’ Roundtable, and joining us this week for a look at where the state budget stands, along with the latest on the Senate’s review of the Maricopa County’s election results, Howie Fischer from Capitol Media Services and Luige del Puerto from Arizona Capitol Times.

This week’s journalists’ roundtable covered:

• Update on State Budget
• House Votes Down Mail-In Ballot Bill
• State Senate Review of Election
• Ducey Touts Pandemic Response on Fox

Update on State Budget

Governor Ducey is currently at 22 vetoes and stated there are more to come if he does not receive the state budget soon.

Leadership in the House say that we can’t get a budget out with a flat tax proposal, and they decided to reconvene on June 10. Fischer makes the comment that pushing the date only allows extra time for more problems to arise. Del Puerto states that this process makes them more resistant, and consequently harder to get the state budget out.

State Senate Review of Election

On the Senate’s review of the Maricopa County’s election results, Del Puerto mentions that there is word of a second audit coming up. He says this is going to make the process much longer as this first audit is being done by hand  and must be completed by June 30, and there would be a longer process on top of that date. ” I’m not really that confident that with this recount by hand, they can be done by June 30th, ” Del Puerto said.

The second audit is planned to be processed digitally which brings up the issue of having to feed the ballots into a company’s machine. Del Puerto stated that this is historical as the process of an audit has never been done in this way.

Fischer mentions that he doesn’t understand the benefit that will come from putting the votes back through a machine and that it all comes back to the people who insist that Trump really won the election and won’t accept a different answer. ” I think they’re going to keep throwing stuff at it until they get the answer they want,” he said.