Journalists’ Roundtable: 09-02-22: Maricopa County Election Audit and more

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for another journalists’ roundtable. Here to look into the week’s top stories are Mary Jo Pitzl of the Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, Jeremy Duda of the Axios and Jim Small of the Arizona Mirror.

This week’s topics include:

• The Release of Election Audit Records
• Tom Horne Disavowing David Stringer
• Hobbs’s Border Campaign
• Kelly Ward’s Phone Records
• School Vouchers

Which Audit Records Need to be Released?

Mary Jo Pitzl: “This all revolved around the legislature, specifically the State Senate’s contention that some documents are just off limits.”

A unanimous Supreme Court agreed that some documents that were created during the audit preparation cannot be shared with the public.

Jim Small: “Essentially, this lawsuit was revolved around about a thousand documents that the Senate said had legislative privilege that they didn’t have to release.”

The descriptors for the documents the Senate decided to withhold were fairly vague. The Supreme Court said that the trial court needed to reassess the documents, but it is required by the Senate to add more detail following the withholding.

Tom Horne & David Stringer

Tom Horne, candidate for superintendent, has had his campaign weighed down by David Stringer, who has made racist comments and resigned from his House of Rep. position due to an investigation into old child sex crimes he faced in Maryland. Horne is now disavowing Stringer.

Jim Small: “He might disagree with the openly racist things that David Stringer has said, but that doesn’t dissuade him from being friends with him. He essentially accused the police and prosecutors in Baltimore in the 1980s of being corrupt” but has since changed his attitude toward Stringer’s behavior.

Mary Jo Pitzl: After the negative comments surfaced, “Horne does a 180 and drops the guy from any involvement from his campaign, says he will refund whatever this service is that was provided, so he reversed course.”