One great Minneapolis show down, one to go. Bill and the gang had a great time meeting folks in Minnesota last night; Andrew stewed sadly in his FOMO back east. See another chunk of you out there tonight. Happy Thursday.

Don’t Call It Intimidation

by Andrew Egger

In 2022, Democrat Katie Hobbs beat Republican Kari Lake in the race for Arizona governor. As a result, Arizonans will not have to walk past ICE agents posted at polling stations to vote in this year’s midterm elections.

Maybe that overstates things a hair. Let’s back up.

This week, two Republican Arizona state senators, Jake Hoffman and Wendy Rogers, introduced legislation that would require county election officials to coordinate with “a federal immigration law enforcement agency” to ensure “a federal immigration law enforcement presence at each location within this state where ballots are cast and deposited.”

In simpler terms: inviting ICE to the polls. The legislation is scheduled to be heard tomorrow in the Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee, which Rogers chairs.

“Arizonans deserve to know that election laws are not just written in statute but actually enforced in practice,” Hoffman said in a statement. “For too long, confusion, inconsistency, and a lack of visible accountability have fueled doubts about how elections are administered. . . . The intent is to deter violations before they happen, ensure existing laws are followed, and protect the rights of every lawful voter.”

Hoffman and Rogers have claimed that their proposal would not interfere with legal voting since it would not allow ICE “to question, detain, or arrest a voter solely for the purpose of determining voter eligibility, except as otherwise allowed under state or federal law.” Because if there’s one law enforcement body with a great track record of refraining from pretextual stops over things like skin color and accent, it’s ICE.

If the goal is just to get more law-enforcement eyeballs on voting precincts, why tap in immigration enforcement in particular? I emailed Hoffman and Rogers yesterday to ask this; neither responded.

Not all state Republicans are thrilled by the proposal. “This is no doubt an attempt at pure intimidation of the Latino voting community,” Arizona GOP strategist Barrett Marson told The Bulwark, adding sarcastically: “From a political standpoint, nothing says ‘We are trying to attract more Latinos into voting for Republicans’ like showing how we can suppress the Latino vote.”

And at least one GOP statewide candidate, secretary of state hopeful Gina Swoboda, has forcefully denounced it: “When the Black Panthers stationed outside Philly polling places the GOP objected—some voters may have felt intimidated,” she said in a statement, referring to an incident during the 2008 general election. “This is no different. The SECOND a voter hesitates to enter a polling place because they are afraid, they have been, by definition, intimidated. That is WRONG.”

Maybe Hoffman’s and Rogers’s proposal will go down in committee tomorrow. Or maybe, like dozens of other election bills over the past few years, it will sail through the GOP-controlled Arizona legislature before running into the brick wall that is Gov. Hobbs’s veto pen.

But even the notion of inviting ICE to the polls is a grim reminder of just how thoroughly Donald Trump’s election-stealing ethos has contaminated the groundwater of state-level GOP politics. Both Hoffman and Rogers are emblematic of the wave of MAGA zealots who hold a growing presence in Arizona and other states around the country. Hoffman, a former Turning Point USA staffer, was indicted for serving as a fake Trump elector in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Rogers built a national reputation in 2020 as one of the loudest proponents of the idea that Arizona’s election had been stolen from Trump and a driving force behind the endless GOP efforts to audit and re-audit the results. For her pains, she now sits atop a key state legislative committee for election-related matters.

One other thing is odd about Hoffman’s and Rogers’s proposal. Rumors have swirled this week in Arizona that the bill could be an early hint at the White House’s midterms strategy—after all, what would be the point of a law ordering county officials to coordinate with ICE for polling-place surveillance if you had no reason to believe ICE would cooperate?

Earlier this month, the White House pushed back on this possibility. “That’s not something I’ve ever heard the president consider,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on February 5. “I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November—I mean, that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question—but what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations.”

Still, one thing’s for sure: Trump’s got election administration on the mind lately. In recent days, he’s been posting a blizzard of pudding-brained election-conspiracy content to Truth Social, including claims that “in the 2020 election, states using Dominion voting machines allegedly switched 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden and deleted 2.7 MILLION Trump votes, including 1 MILLION in Pennsylvania alone.” (You might recall that the right-wing media outlets that did the alleging have been forced to pay Dominion hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, on account of the fact that the allegations were lies; somehow we doubt that the president will be getting into similar legal trouble.)

And he’s got something cooking. “The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship,” he posted last week. “They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for