Journalists’ Roundtable: Fontes sued over election manual, election timing concerns, Leezah Sun resigns and more

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. To discuss this week’s top stories, we were joined by Laurie Roberts of The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, Camryn Sanchez of KJZZ, and Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services.

This week’s Journalists’ Roundtable covered:

• Fontes sued over election manual
• Election timing concerns
• Fallout from killing rental tax
• Leezah Sun resigns
• Hammadeh vs. Masters
• Horne pushes “woke-free” resources

Fontes sued over election manual

Howie Fischer: “In general, state law trumps the procedures manual. When you get into issues there, one of the complaints has to do with how quickly county supervisors have to canvas the election. What makes this particularly crucial this year is you’ve got this new deadline set by the federal government for when we have to get our electors sent to Washington and if we don’t get them sent there by December 11, guess what, Arizona doesn’t count.”

Election timing concerns

Camryn Sanchez: “The legislature has not done anything to fix it and now we’re coming up on all of these time crunches because this is an election year, we’ve got the primary coming up and the first order of business is to get it fix because the UOCAVA voters could be affected.”

Laurie Roberts: “If they don’t do something and make up those 19 days, however they want to make them up, they’re not going to have time to send out those ballots to members of the military and voters who are overseas, automatically disenfranchising those people from being able to even vote for president.”

Fallout from killing rental tax

Howie Fischer: “There are other ways for them to raise money this is a politically popular tax among some of them because they figure the renters aren’t turning out to vote.”

Leezah Sun resigns

Laurie Roberts: “She seems to think that her election to the legislature gave her the authority to do things like open investigations and make threats and interfere in court orders involving child custody arrangments, all kinds of things. She thinks she’s got this weight to throw around which she really doesn’t.”