Voices
8 essays from Arizona Talks Voices exploring this thread. Back to all Voices →
Blake Sacha, president of Voter Choice Arizona, looks at a July primary where fewer than 27 percent of registered voters turned out and concludes the problem is structural. He makes the case for equal signature requirements, open primaries, and a top-five instant runoff.
Andrew Simek, district community manager for Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, argues that voters who blamed government failure in 2024 diagnosed the wrong problem. After hundreds of community events and dozens of town halls, he writes, the pattern is capacity: constituents who qualify for help but cannot reach it. The real choice is not a big government or a small one, but one that can deliver.
Rudy Cota III argues that ranked choice voting and jungle primaries are a seductive but false fix for Arizona's political frustration, and that the real work of better politics happens inside the parties, not by rewriting the rules of the ballot.
An Arizona entrepreneur and community-development leader argues that mail-in voting and accessible polling places are how working parents, seniors, and tribal and rural voters actually get to participate.
Former state senator Steve Kaiser argues that the most powerful influence on a politician is an informed constituent. He walks through how voters can build real civic relationships with the people who represent them.
As Republicans push to end the filibuster, a former GOP congressman urges restraint — and offers a lesson from history.
I’ve spent more than three decades in Arizona’s public life — most of it in media, where the job is to observe, analyze, and, at times, amplify the noise. For a long time, that felt like enough. You cover the story. You move on to the next one. But something changed. In recent years, especially around our elections, I found myself less interested in the daily headlines and more drawn to what was happening underneath them. The arguments were getting louder, the lines sharper, the trust thinner.
We're launching Arizona Talks Voices: a new platform for the kind of writing that civic life has been calling for.
