Journalists’ Roundtable on Prop 140 fight, voter news and more

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. This week, we were joined by Camryn Sanchez of KJZZ, Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services and Laurie Roberts of “The Arizona Republic” and azcentral.com.

This week’s Journalists’ Roundtable topics included:

• Claim: Fontes biased on Prop 140
• NC voter OK’d for legislative run
• Wendy Rogers’s “Über Alles” tweet
• Musk vs. AZ Elections
• Flat Earthers and vouchers
• New laws take effect

Claim: Fontes biased on Prop 140

Howie Fischer: “The problem becomes, he wasn’t asked to comment by the Supreme Court, he doesn’t have a status and there was no reason for him to get involved. The issue had been properly briefed by both sides…There was no reason for him to get involved. There was no reason for him to pick a fight and he had to know that once he sided with somebody, somebody else was going to be unhappy.”

Camryn Sanchez: “The Free Enterprise Club is saying he has political motivations and that there is a possibility at all that these signatures are invalid, and if that is the case there is no reason it should have made it in the first place. You shouldn’t have allowed it to go forward and the only thing you can do from here on out is to not count it.”

Laurie Roberts: “I don’t know that he is really supporting it so much as trying to get some clarifications as to what his job is. Again, there is an inconsistency with the Michael Way case. I think the Supreme Court has already spoken on this and whether or not it counts depends on if there are enough signatures here. The bigger public policy question is why are we bumping up to the end on all of these things? It seems pretty clear that the deadlines for some of these things need to be moved up, given the number of challenges to everything.”