Guests - Joel Strabala, Joe Finn, Jay Tolkoff
The primary is certified in all but name, and Kathleen Winn spent the last Monday of July setting the table for the hundred days ahead. The message she kept circling was turnout — Pima County Republicans came in at nearly 42 percent, above the state average, while Democratic turnout collapsed to 28 — and the argument that the county long treated as a lost cause is now the state's swing. Around that spine, the show made room for a subject with no party attached: a former big-city fire commissioner making the case that the country can track an Amazon package but not a firefighter inside a burning building. And it closed on the ballot measure Winn intends to fight all fall, a Pima County spending cap she wants voters to reject.
Joel Strabala: The Post Office, the Rolls, and a New Lever on Mail Ballots
Joel Strabala — LD17 chair and a member of Pima County's Election Integrity Commission — opened on a change he considers the most consequential development of the cycle. On July 17, just before the primary, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously halted a lower-court order that had blocked the Postal Service from restricting delivery of mail-in and absentee ballots in jurisdictions that won't share eligible-voter lists with the federal government.
Strabala called it "a very, very good thing," because it finally supplies "a mechanism to clean up our voter rolls and make sure that ballots only get delivered to U.S. citizens and Arizona citizens." His framing was about waste and verification rather than intent: the Postal Service isn't trying to interfere with elections, he argued, but to stop delivering mail it knows will bounce back. With access to voter rolls, undeliverable ballots could be flagged and addresses corrected.
The number he brought made the stakes concrete. As of the close of business the Friday after the primary, Arizona had 8,676 undeliverable ballots for this one election. "That can make a difference in pretty much every election," Winn said. Strabala noted the party can request which ballots were undeliverable and to what addresses, and investigate — cautioning that a significant share may simply be University of Arizona students who moved. The canvass report, due in a couple of weeks, should break down the recorder's determination of why.
The mechanism's teeth show up before November. Strabala's understanding: if a state or database-holder fails to provide voter rolls to the federal elections authority 60 days out, the Postal Service will neither deliver that jurisdiction's mail-in ballots to voters nor return voted ballots to election officials — "effectively, the post office is removed from supporting the mail-in ballot process." In a state where Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is currently fighting release of the rolls, the practical consequence, Winn spelled out, is that a jurisdiction refusing to share its rolls could find itself with no mail-in ballots at all.
Winn's own version of the concern came from the doors. Canvassing, she said, you routinely meet voters at apartment complexes holding seven, ten, a dozen ballots for people who've moved. "If we don't have the voter rolls, how do we know they're not being voted?" She was careful to add she was alleging nothing — only that people who no longer live where they're registered should be off the rolls.
Joel Strabala: Why the Verification System Slowed the Count
Strabala walked through the Pima County Recorder's explanation that a new mail-ballot verification system had actually delayed Tuesday's processing by adding steps — an irony Winn couldn't let pass, since the ID-verified drop-off system was designed to speed tabulation.
The tool works like this: a voter who keeps an early ballot at home can bring it in on Election Day, show ID, and skip the standard signature verification. Strabala said there were "two flavors." On Election Day, the elections department used a separate box for ID-verified ballots. Before Election Day, at early-voting sites and drop-offs, the recorder did not — mixing ID-verified ballots in the same box as ordinary drop-offs, which then forced staff to separate them by hand. "That was an extra step for the recorder," he said. They could have run it the streamlined way from the start. "They elected not to."
The payoff, where the process was allowed to work, was real: on Election Day the department verified about 50 percent of roughly 12,000 dropped-off early ballots on the spot. Results came quickly — a majority counted by Thursday night, another 450 Friday, roughly 200 expected on the final tabulation day, which was Monday.
Joel Strabala: Inside the Hand-Count Audit
Winn had spent Saturday working the hand-count audit and asked Strabala to explain it for listeners. Required by state law, the audit verifies 3 percent of ballots in a statewide or federal election by counting selected races by hand and matching the totals to the machines. Observers select the bags during tabulation; on Saturday morning, Winn and her Democratic and Green Party counterparts also selected three ballot boxes from the vote centers.
The room, by both accounts, was a model of the cross-party cooperation the whole fight is supposed to protect. Eight tables of four, staffed by Republicans, Democrats, and Green Party members — "the Libertarians weren't represented," Strabala noted — worked through re-verification of the LD17 Senate race, state treasurer, secretary of state, and one other. Winn confessed she "did a terrible job" at the counting itself, being more accustomed to talking and greeting people, but relished watching the parties work together. "A lot of the people that have been doing it have been doing it for years."
Strabala's honest assessment cut against the grain of his own side's rhetoric. Hand counts are slower and, in his experience, less accurate than machines: three silver boxes and eight blue ones, roughly 3,000 to 3,300 ballots, took two and a half hours for a subset of races — work the tabulators do in about eight minutes. There were disagreements, all eventually resolved, several traced to write-ins and to Republicans who had cast federal-only ballots, which wouldn't include the LD17 Senate race and threw the count until the ballots were correctly categorized. "It went perfect and it went smoothly," he said. Winn's point in doing it at all was trust: "No one trusts the machines — both sides. So when we do this, it ensures that the integrity is in the vote count."
She made a point of crediting the department. "We criticize when things go badly, but I'm happy to say this part of the process works, and it worked well." A longtime staffer newly promoted to assistant elections director had spent the morning with her and worked hard, she said, under elections director Constance Hargrove — who oversees this in-person part of the process rather than the all-mail elections.
Joel Strabala: The Turnout Story, and the Math That Follows
The turnout comparison was the morning's centerpiece, and Strabala had the figures from Hargrove. In the 2022 midterm primary, Republicans turned out at 57 percent and Democrats at 51. In 2024, Democrats hit 46 and Republicans 49.9. This cycle: Democrats 28 percent, Republicans 41.5, nearly 42.
"The Dems are going down," Strabala said, though he fairly noted their candidates were largely preselected, and uncontested races depress turnout. Winn's read was that Republicans are "getting halfway there" — the flip side of 42 percent is that most registered voters still didn't participate. "If we could get to 60 percent, we win everything. It's that simple."
The district breakdown drove a friendly rivalry. LD19, the Green Valley-anchored district, edged Winn's own LD17 for the top turnout percentage: 46.57 percent of 20,800 registered voters, against LD17's 45.95 percent of 63,600. "We lost by half a percent," Winn said, "but we had three times as many voters." She joked they might owe LD19 a pizza. LD18 came third at 42.1 percent of 41,500 voters, organized geographically into color-coded teams — enough, Winn argued, that "you could actually shock the state if you guys get it together," with Doug Everett running for Senate and Bob Dosey for the House.
Her structural point was about the base. Republicans hold a registration advantage statewide and in sections of Pima County, "so we can turn out our base, we can actually make substantial changes." The obstacle is information. "Many still didn't know there was a primary," she said — door after door met with "thank you for reminding us." Her fix list for the fall: chase down voters who went on vacation expecting a mail ballot that never came, and correct registrations for anyone reclassified after a DMV interaction. Her recurring metaphor: check your registration the way you see a dentist twice a year, at recorder.pima.gov, and check it for late parents too, so no one is voting from the grave.
That last point was personal. Strabala's father, gone since 2012, voted at least two years after his death; Strabala reported it at the time to then-Maricopa recorder Stephen Richer, who initially called it a mistake until shown the record. Richer's response, Strabala said, was that cleaning the rolls was "too big a job." His rejoinder framed the whole segment: "We're not New Jersey. We're not Minnesota. We're not Chicago. We are Pima County, Arizona. And I believe that we have a right to have accurate voter rolls" — maintenance that takes work "all the time," not just in season.
Joel Strabala: Green Valley, Prop 425, and the Case Against a Spending Cap Lift
Two policy fights closed Strabala's time. The first was Green Valley, cut from 13 polling places to three. He said it can be reversed, but only if residents press the Green Valley city council, since his understanding is that the parks and recreation department — under the council's purview — withdrew the sites.
The second was Proposition 425, a Pima County measure Winn will oppose all fall. Strabala explained that a cap set decades ago limits how much the county can grow expenditures each year, and the supervisors want voters to lift it — seeking, he said, authority to raise 2027 spending by something on the order of half a billion dollars, against a current annual budget around $810 million (with bond initiatives, actual 2025 spending closer to $1.8 billion). "Where are they going to get the money?" Winn asked. The answer, Strabala said, is that three supervisors can raise taxes to cover it. Her objection was that more money hasn't solved crime, homelessness, drugs, cartels, or the roads, and that the burden "comes from us. We're already overtaxed with a degradation of services."
Winn tied it to the RTA roads plan — which she supported — and asked for a progress report every six months against a 20-year schedule, warning that residents are leaving Tucson over mismanagement. When she said "we" mismanaged the city, Strabala corrected her: "our elected representatives have mismanaged it." She accepted the correction gladly, and pivoted to the remedy she keeps naming — Jeff Rhodes, now officially on the November ballot in Supervisor District 5, the seat once held by Adelita Grijalva and now filled by appointee Andrés Cano. Rhodes and Grijalva, she noted with amusement, live on the same street. The goal is to give Supervisor Steve Christy someone to second his motions "so we can have dialogue about the things that matter to the entirety of Pima County."
Joel Strabala: Party Unity, and the Seat That Could Flip the Senate
Winn put the sorest subject on the table directly: LD17's contested Senate primary, where Chris King beat Anthony Dunham, and some Dunham supporters now say they won't back King. Her answer was blunt. "Republicans who don't vote elect Democrats." You can hold any opinion, express it, even dislike the winner, "but ultimately when you go in that polling place, it is your vote" — and an under-vote helps the other side. She recommended taking concerns straight to the candidate, whose sign, she noted, is in her own yard.
Her framing of the party was generous to both wings: "We have the MAGA conservatives and we have the more moderates — I would call them the McCain moderates — but we coexist in this party." The stakes made coexistence non-optional. Republicans hold only a very small Senate majority, and losing the LD17 seat could turn the chamber blue — which, even with Andy Biggs as governor and a red House, could impede the whole agenda. "Hold your nose and vote Republican," she said, quoting her mother, "but we've got to keep that seat red." The House offers an offensive opportunity in the same district, where John Winchester and Rachel Keshel finished the weekend about 30 votes apart, though Winn noted she still needs Pinal County's slice of LD17 to turn out.
She extended the plea across old primary lines: if you backed Gina Swoboda over Alex Kolodin, or Rodney Glassman over Warren Petersen, "we need you." Her one enforcement threat was aimed at the infighting itself: "I'm going to start to put people in time out if they call to tell me how mean someone's being. Get off Facebook, walk away from the computer. We've got so many real things that need to be done."
On the marquee down-ballot race, Winn made her case against Fontes on conduct rather than slogans. "He says he's going to protect your vote. He is not complying nor cooperating with federal mandates, with laws, with court orders." She cited the recent uniformed-voting fight, where she argued the intent was to bar ICE agents but the rule was written to sweep in all uniformed officers — a policy a court blocked in time for sworn officers to vote in uniform on Election Day. "Anybody that we can empower to vote, we want to do that."
Joe Finn: 'We Can Track a Package, But Not a Firefighter'
Joe Finn spent 36 years with the Boston Fire Department, the last six as fire commissioner and chief of department. Winn brought him on against a backdrop of wildfires in Canada and France and Arizona's own long fire history, and he made a single, focused argument: the technology to locate firefighters in real time exists, and its absence costs lives.
Asked whether there are truly more fires or just more awareness, Finn said both — the wildland-urban interface has grown dramatically over the last 10 to 15 years, and while early detection gets crews there faster, it doesn't stop ignitions. His central frustration was one of priorities. "We can track a package from Amazon or Walmart," he said, "and yet we can't track firefighters on a fire ground. To me, that is honestly unacceptable." For an incident commander, knowing exactly where firefighters are operating inside structures, high-rises, or subways — and where they are when a mayday comes in — is paramount to deploying a rapid intervention team and getting them out.
He grounded it in Arizona's worst fire memory. On June 30, 2013, the state lost 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots at the Yarnell Hill Fire, when the blaze shifted and circled them. Real-time location, Finn argued, could have let a commander miles away order them to move before the wind brought the fire down, and pinpoint them once they were in trouble. "Absolutely" it would save lives.
He also drew on his own hardest day. In March 2014, a wind-driven fire trapped two Boston firefighters in a basement; maydays came in, rapid-intervention operations launched, and both men died of their injuries, with 17 others hurt. He was careful not to overclaim — "I'm not going to sit here and say the outcome would have been better" — but said precise location data would at least have gotten crews to them faster. "There's no greater anxiety-driving event," he said, "than a mayday — that one of your personnel is trapped, running out of air, and you don't know where they are."
The technology, Finn explained, hinges on the fact that GPS navigates roadways but doesn't penetrate buildings; 5G can, allowing a location device embedded in a firefighter's breathing apparatus or radio. A company called NextNav holds the technology, and the matter is before the FCC, which must issue a notice of proposed rulemaking and determine whether the signals would interfere with other corporate users of the spectrum. Finn credited FCC Chairman Brendan Carr with signaling real interest, and noted the applications extend to law enforcement — hostage situations, SWAT operations — anywhere knowing an officer's precise position matters.
Winn connected it to Tucson's recent mass shooting, where police and firefighters stabilized nine victims, and to the longer arc of first-responder safety, including the cancer that Finn identified as the leading cause of firefighter death outside the fire ground itself — a risk reduced by any technology that shortens exposure to toxic byproducts. Her analogy was to bulletproof vests, citing her work with Mike Letts and his effort to get vests to first responders: a safety tool you simply provide. The two closed on a note of New England kinship — Finn recognized Winn as a Marblehead native, her father having worked for GE in Lynn. "We owe it to the first responder community," he said, "the men and women who put their lives on the line daily, that they have the best technology to make sure they go home at the end of their shift."
Jay Tolkoff: Just Say No to 425
Jay Tolkoff, a former city council candidate, joined to sound the alarm on Proposition 425 — the measure he's been working hardest to defeat.
He conceded up front that it's built to be hard to follow. "It's intentionally very complicated, because it involves the Arizona constitution." Cutting through it: Pima County residents pay among the highest property taxes in the state, and rather than lower them, the county wants voters to lift a constitutional spending limit set in 1980. The ballot language, Tolkoff explained, describes a $70 million increase to the base spending limit — technically true, but those are 1979 dollars. Run through the state's own formulas, that figure becomes more than $610 million the county would be permitted to spend next year, on top of a current budget around $800 million.
His objection was to unchecked discretion. The 1980 cap existed so that big projects went to voters as bonds or special taxes; Prop 425, he argued, would instead let "a mere three people" decide to spend over half a billion dollars "on anything they choose" — a monument, an indoor soccer stadium downtown, whatever — without another vote. He flagged the measure's own FAQ, which asks whether it will raise taxes and answers no. His translation: "It won't raise your taxes on this. It'll raise your taxes in two years, when we've spent all the money and have nothing to show for it."
Both reached for the county's spending habits as evidence. Winn noted that when Supervisor Jen Allen took over as chair, she spent more than $20,000 on office furnishings, including an $1,800 end table — "we don't have funds for all the things that we want to do because they're busy remodeling their offices." Tolkoff's read on affordable-housing spending matched Winn's from earlier segments: the county overpays to "help ten people at great expense," enriching the builder while the taxpayer absorbs the cost. His prescription echoed the 414 fight: get the same business leaders who came out against that measure to come out against this one. "It has to be a no."
He closed on a First Amendment concern about the process itself. The portal to submit ballot-pamphlet arguments — thanks, he said, to Brenda Martz — is open until August 6, and a county argument costs $25. But two city measures will share the November ballot: an extension of the one-tenth-of-one-percent zoo tax and the TEP franchise agreement. Arguments on those must go through the city portal, which charges $240 apiece. "All those people having a tough time deciding whether they're going to put food on the table or gas in the tank," Tolkoff said, "are not going to be able to afford to tell people what their opinion is. It's a real infringement on the First Amendment." Winn agreed completely — and noted the county "could start charging for the bus service and have money."
Her closing image for the whole turnout problem was a greeting card she'd spotted while shopping for grandkids' birthdays: Noah's Ark lifting off, two unicorns left on the shore asking, "Oh, was that today?" That, she said, is exactly how people react after an election — "Oh, was there a primary?" Her hope is that the supervisors, "whether they realize it or not, are giving us a gift, so we can say no."
The Ballot, Top to Bottom
With Tolkoff, Winn ran the full slate voters will see in November, and used it to answer the excuse she says she heard most on the trail — a young mining engineer, newly in his career and about to be married, who told her he didn't vote because "my vote doesn't matter."
Her reply: one vote doesn't, but 20,000 votes from his age bracket do, and staying home is "just lazy." Tolkoff added the second thing he heard constantly while running: donors who wanted to support him but couldn't, because campaign donations are public record and they did business with the city and feared retaliation. "That's not how government should operate at all," he said. "But when you have socialism and communism, it's exactly how it operates — you get punished for who you align yourself with, for your opinion, for your vote."
The statewide ticket, as they laid it out: Andy Biggs for governor, Warren Petersen for attorney general, Alex Kolodin for secretary of state, Elijah Norton for treasurer, Kimberly Yee for superintendent of public instruction, Walter "Les" Presmyk for mine inspector, and Ralph Heap and Kevin Thompson for the Corporation Commission. In Congressional District 6, Juan Ciscomani; in District 7, the Republican challenger to the Democratic incumbent. In LD19, Gail Griffin for Senate with David Gowan and Lupe Diaz for the House; in LD18, Doug Everett for Senate and Bob Dosey for the House; in LD17, Chris King for Senate with John Winchester and Rachel Keshel for the House; in LD21, Esteban Flores for Senate and Chris Kibbe for the House. Ray Carroll is running for justice of the peace in precinct seven, and Jeff Rhodes for Supervisor in District 5.
Tolkoff singled out Rhodes as "not a politician — a smart guy with a lot of experience" who would be "a definite breath of fresh air," and gave him credit for running at all in a heavily Democratic district. His theory of such races: ignore them and "you're going to just continue to lose ground," but keep putting candidates out there and "it moves the needle, and sooner or later we'll get rid of this dynasty that's been running this community into the ground for decades." The downtown shooting, he argued, is "very exemplary of the problems that this dynasty has created."
He pointed to a local account, 857 Tucson, which recently posted that the city's failures are the direct result of current and past locally elected officials, not national politics — a corrective, both agreed, to the reflex of blaming Washington for potholes and crime. Winn ran the counterfactual with heavy sarcasm: the notion that under the prior administration "all the roads were fixed perfectly in Tucson and crime pretty much didn't exist," set against an airport she recalled so congested with travelers that she was one of only a few English speakers on her plane. Her serious point was the one underneath: "The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging you have a problem. And when our mayor can come out and say downtown Tucson is safe, literally three days after nine people were shot there, that's classic denial."
Tolkoff's last argument answered the claim that state and federal lawmakers just need to pass better laws. The downtown shooter, he noted, was already breaking the law the moment he showed up armed as a prohibited possessor — "he didn't even have to pull the trigger and he was already breaking the law. Which law is the state or the feds going to pass that he was going to pay attention to?"
Winn sent listeners into the week with the promise she makes and keeps: the reminders will not stop. "We're going to bug you. We're going to be like your crazy uncle, like your overbearing mom. We're going to make sure you show up, because we need you. If you've registered to vote, don't take that for granted. It may go away, and then you'll really have no control over what happens."