Guests - Joel Strabala, Betsy Smith, Charles Heller, Dave Smith, Gary Benoit
Joel Strabala: Ballots, Purges, and a Mobile Voting Center That Skips Green Valley
Joel Strabala, LD17 Republican chairman and Pima County Election Integrity Commission member, opened the week with a voter registration and ballot alert that he and Winn both treated as urgent. Ballots went out June 24th. If you haven't received one and believe you should have, the window to fix it is now — not next week. The first step: go to recorder.pima.gov, click Voter Information, then New Voter Dashboard, and enter your name, date of birth, and either your last four Social Security digits or driver's license number. Under "My Information," look for the Active Early Voting List notation. If it says yes, a ballot should have been mailed to you. If it says no, you were never on the list and you'll need to act. The same page includes an online ballot request button. The alternative is calling the recorder directly at 520-724-4330. The deadline to request a mail ballot is Friday, July 10th at 5 p.m. — non-negotiable.
Winn noted a pattern of voter roll irregularities she'd heard about over the holiday weekend: some people showing up as "P&D" (pending and deleted) when they believed themselves to be active Republicans, others finding their party affiliation had shifted to independent without their knowledge. "We know that they purged eight thousand Republicans," she said, quickly noting that Democrats and independents were also removed — the purge wasn't targeted by party — but the practical effect in a Republican primary is the same regardless. "If you haven't received your ballot, please check it out today. Fix it today."
On key dates: July 10th is the last day to request a mail ballot. July 15th is the last day to mail your ballot back with confidence it will arrive by election day. All ballots must be received at the elections department by 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 21st. Ballots can be dropped at six drop boxes across Pima County, at early voting centers, or at the recorder's office. A new early voting center has opened at the Oro Valley Library, offering 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. hours for in-person voting or ballot drop-off — welcome news for Oro Valley and Marana voters.
On the mobile voting center: its schedule serves Ajo on July 14th, Three Points at the Robles Ranch Community Center on July 16th, Sells at Tohono Plaza on July 17th and 18th, and Marana Recreation Center on July 20th — the day before the primary. All sites are open 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., a five-hour window compared to the eight-hour day at fixed voting sites. No mobile visit to Green Valley, which lost 10 of its 13 polling places this cycle despite an 86% Republican voter turnout rate in past elections. Strabala traced the polling-place reduction to homeowners associations in the area declining to serve as host sites, with the elections department unable to find sufficient qualifying replacements. Winn's observation: the mobile center goes where turnout is historically low while the community that actually shows up to vote gets fewer options. "Color me suspicious once again."
Observer slots remain open across the county, particularly at early voting sites in Tucson and at the mobile voting center — where, as of the broadcast, not a single observer had signed up. Strabala said he would go out himself but urged anyone concerned about election transparency to register at PimaGOP.org, noting that the observer sign-up deadline requires a minimum of one week's advance notice to the recorder's office.
Strabala walked through the legislative district races on Pima County Republican ballots for listeners mapping out their choices. LD16 has three incumbents running: TJ Shope for Senate, Chris Lopez and Teresa Martinez for the House. LD17 features Anthony Dunham vs. Chris King for the Senate seat, with Rachel Keshel and John Winchester running for the two House seats. LD18 has Doug Everett for Senate and Bob Dossey for House. LD19 features Gail Griffin for Senate and Sheryl Caswell, Lupe Diaz, and David Gowan for the House (pick two). LD20 has a write-in House candidate, Catherine Weasel. LD21 has Esteban Flores for State Senate. LD23 has Michelle Altair for State Senate and Michelle Peña and Gary Schneider for the House. "Get out and vote and your families and friends to vote," Strabala said, "because your vote really, really counts."
Betsy Brantner Smith: Teen Takeovers, the Charlie Kirk Preliminary Hearing, and an Officer Disarmed at the Polls
Betsy Brantner Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association, rejoined the show fresh off an Iceland and Greenland cruise — her first absence in recent memory — and immediately hit the week's two most urgent law enforcement stories.
The first: a preliminary hearing underway on the murder of Charlie Kirk. Smith had been monitoring testimony as it came in, noting that law enforcement officers were being called to the stand to walk through the evidentiary connection between the accused, Tyler Robinson, the weapon, and the killing. She described the preliminary hearing's purpose clearly — it's not the trial, it's not a full evidentiary proceeding, it's simply the prosecution's opportunity to clear the low bar of demonstrating the case is worth the court's time — and noted that defendants often waive preliminary hearings. In this case the defense did not, giving them an early look at prosecution strategy. "Charlie Kirk is Arizona's own," Smith said. "He's our friend and a member of all of our families here in Arizona and the Republican Party." Winn noted that she knew Kirk from the very beginning of Turning Point USA, when it was a hole-in-the-wall operation in Mesa before most people had heard of him, and credited the organization with building something miraculous in terms of engaging young people politically.
The second story was Raleigh, North Carolina, where approximately 8,000 teenagers descended on the city over the July 4th weekend in what Smith described as a full-scale teen takeover. Nine people were shot. A police officer had his arm sliced open by someone in the crowd. Multiple shooters are now being sought through surveillance footage. "They're so emboldened and so violent, so dangerous," she said, while deliberately contextualizing the event: "This is life in a very tiny portion of America. I want to remind everybody of that." She noted that the cruise she returned from — spent with passengers from dozens of countries — produced the same observation she hears repeatedly at FIFA matches and from international visitors: people from other countries love America. They don't hate it. The hatred, she argued, is a manufactured product of a specific ideological project, and it accounts for a fraction of the country's lived reality.
On the Tucson Police Department memo directing officers to give 24 hours notice before voting and to store their duty firearms before entering a polling place — the direct fallout from testimony in Winn's federal lawsuit — Smith was withering. She had circulated it to law enforcement contacts nationwide. Their uniform reaction: "This is a joke, right?" She walked through the operational absurdity point by point. Police officers work 8, 10, 12-hour shifts on election day. They vote when they can. They cannot predict their schedule five minutes from now, let alone 24 hours in advance. Removing a duty weapon creates a security gap in any environment, but particularly in a public civic space where the officer's presence is supposed to be protective. "What could possibly go wrong," she said, "given all the love of their hearts that people have for ICE agents."
She raised the additional legal and practical inconsistency: deputies in uniform, carrying weapons, are routinely used to transport ballots from polling places to the warehouse after polls close. That's acceptable. But those same deputies must reportedly disarm to vote. "That guy got to keep his gun. I'm sure he guarded those ballot boxes overnight because that was legal." Smith also flagged a pattern she's documented in years of police research: uniformed officers at polling places historically make voters feel safer, not threatened. The argument that a uniformed, armed officer disenfranchises other voters by their mere presence, she said, contradicts both research and common sense. "The presence of a uniform law enforcement officer makes people feel safer. It makes them feel more secure."
Smith closed with two police deaths already recorded in July's first six days. Pennsylvania State Trooper Michael Pahira was struck and killed by an illegal alien truck driver during a vehicle stop on July 1st. The driver, who held a commercial driver's license issued by Massachusetts despite being in the country illegally and already subject to a removal order, fled the scene and has since been apprehended. A sergeant from the Martins Ferry, Ohio Police Department was murdered the night before the broadcast, with four officers shot in the same incident. "Your vote really does protect our cops," she said, connecting the two deaths directly to the enforcement failures and sanctuary-state policies that allowed dangerous individuals to remain in the country.
Charles Heller: The 21st Annual Declaration Reading and the Act of Consanguinity
Charles Heller, host of Liberty Watch on KVOI and Winn's co-organizer for the annual Declaration of Independence reading, stopped by the studio to recap a milestone weekend. The reading at Udall Park on the morning of July 4th drew what Heller estimated at well over 100 attendees — Winn thought it might have been closer to 200 — making it the 21st consecutive year he's organized the event. Turning Point USA participated this year, printing a reformatted version of the Declaration with larger type and a cleaner layout that Heller said was better than his 20-year approach. "The Lord sent you a gift. You ought to listen," he said, noting with good humor that he took their advice and it worked. The event was repeated Saturday evening at what was separately described as involving fireworks and refreshments, a different gathering than the Friday morning reading.
Heller described the reading's purpose in a single word he deployed with evident care: consanguinity. Not just unity, but literally "a gathering of the blood" — the act of standing together as Americans of disparate origins, accents, and backgrounds, hearing the founding document read aloud in different voices. "It increases our stickiness together," he said. "It increases our desire to do things together as a country." He noted that in past years he's had immigrants read sections of the Declaration in Polish accents, in English accents, representing the irony and the beauty of people who came from the very nations the Declaration was arguing against. John Winchester, who is running for the LD17 House seat, sang the fourth verse of the national anthem at the event — a verse Heller noted most Americans don't know exists. He recited it on air, a verse that begins "Oh, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand / Tween their loved home and the war's desolation" and ends with the original version of what became the national motto: "In God is our trust."
Heller reported giving participants printed copies of the segmented Declaration and explicitly encouraging them to take it home and organize their own readings — in neighborhoods, churches, backyards, anywhere. The goal, he said, is not a single annual event but a replicable tradition. The event at Udall Park had its origins in a conversation between Heller and longtime friend Amal Franzi, who originally proposed showing a patriotic film at the Loft Cinema. They showed The Patriot the first year, then COVID eliminated all indoor venues and they migrated to the park. The Udall Park location — shaded, spacious, on the east side — was suggested by D. Simone and has been the site ever since.
Dave Smith: Socialism, Envy, and the Tucson Media Problem
Dave Smith, Winn's predecessor as Pima County Republican Party chair, returned from the same Iceland and Greenland cruise as Betsy Brantner Smith and rejoined the show to weigh in on the broader political moment. His central argument: the socialist drift in American cities is not accidental, and it is not inevitable — but it requires a level of intellectual engagement that the Republican base has not consistently delivered.
Smith expressed cautious optimism about the Tucson-area trajectory, arguing that most self-identified Democrats in Arizona do not actually want socialism, they want to be old-fashioned Democrats — and the two are increasingly incompatible. "I don't think you can be both," he said. But he argued that mainstream media, and particularly Tucson's local media, has created a near-blackout of critical coverage of left-wing candidates, making it almost impossible for voters to get factual context. He cited his own experience debating on-air with local media figures who appeared rational in conversation but became apocalyptic in print, seemingly unable to process contrary information once removed from a direct exchange.
His sharper critique targeted the intellectual consistency of socialist ideology. He described the playbook being followed — in New York City, in Arizona, and nationally — as openly documented. Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, he argued, lays out the strategy explicitly, and Republicans who don't read it can't counter it. Envy, he said, has become the animating emotion of the current Democratic left, and he drew a clean distinction between envy and jealousy: the jealous man wants what his neighbor has; the envious man simply doesn't want his neighbor to have it. "That's the Democrat platform today. If somebody is successful, hate them." He connected that emotional posture directly to the practical mechanics of socialism, arguing that every time socialist programs are installed, the ladder of upward economic mobility is pulled up for everyone except the political class that controls the distribution of resources.
Smith flagged an AI-specific frustration in passing: his own experience with AI tools — including, he noted, Claude — finding them prone to delivering left-leaning outputs, requiring him to actively push back against their framing. He credited Grok as the more reliable alternative in his own usage. He also addressed the "stolen land" framing that has become prevalent in academic and activist circles, noting that the historical record doesn't support it — Spanish conquistadors controlled what is now Arizona in the 1500s, and the notion that the land's prior use creates a perpetual ownership claim is, in his view, "not congruent with human history." His closing point: Republicans who wait to vote, or don't vote at all, are doing exactly what the opposing side is counting on. "They're counting on you not voting."
Gary Benoit: 46% of Americans Don't Know What the 250th Commemorates
Gary Benoit, editor-in-chief of The New American magazine and a representative of the John Birch Society, joined the show's final segment to provide the statistical and historical framing that connected the weekend's celebration to the week's urgent political work.
A Cato Institute survey released July 2nd found that 46% of Americans — and 61% of Gen Z specifically — do not know what America's 250th anniversary commemorates. They don't know it marks the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Benoit's reaction was not resignation but alarm: a population that doesn't know what the Declaration says cannot defend what it enshrines. "How can we survive as a nation? How can we prosper if so many people have forgotten our own heritage and don't even know about our founding documents?" He drew a direct historical parallel to Germany in the 1930s, arguing that the German people who voted the National Socialists into power — "Nazi" being shorthand for National Socialist, he noted — were not evil people. They were beguiled people. They lacked the understanding that would have allowed them to see what they were voting for. "Let's not think the same thing cannot happen here," he said.
Benoit's summary of what the Declaration actually says — and why it matters — centered on two sentences. Rights come not from government but from God. And the purpose of government is to protect those God-given rights, deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed. "If the American people really understood that basic concept — that rights come from God and the purpose of government is to protect those rights — I think that alone would solve a lot of our problems." He quoted Thomas Jefferson's corollary: "Ignorant and free in a state of civilization can never be" — arguing that moral grounding and historical literacy are not optional accessories to freedom but the preconditions for it.
Winn connected the historical thread directly to her own family lineage. The Declaration was signed by six framers of the Constitution, one of whom was James Wilson — her husband's great-great-grandfather, a founding father who started the University of Pennsylvania's law school and served on the first Supreme Court by appointment of George Washington. She read a Wilson quote on the relationship between human law and divine authority: "Human law must rest its authority ultimately upon the authority of that law which is divine. Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends and mutual assistance." She framed Wilson's formulation as the answer to a question often treated as controversial: whether faith and governance are compatible. In the founding generation's view, they were not merely compatible — they were interdependent.
Benoit closed with a prescription that mirrored the weekend's events: read the Declaration, then read the Constitution, then demand that the people you elect to office actually abide by the oath they swore to uphold. "The reason the Constitution is being disobeyed, transgressed, is because we forgot our own heritage." Fixing that, he said, happens one person at a time, the same way the Declaration was passed down: in voices, across a park, in the presence of strangers who found they had everything in common.