JULIO: Of all the surprises of 2020, perhaps the most unexpected was Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona. A Democratic presidential candidate had not won there in 24 years.
Some media outlets declared the state for Biden that same night of the election. Almost immediately, many attributed the victory to the state’s demographic changes.
CNN Archive: What pro-immigrant organizations and unions have said is that Latinos have finally made a change here in the state. Women went out to vote, young people and also people who have recently moved from other states have been voting for the Democratic Party here in Arizona.
JULIO: What is the root of that Democratic victory in 2020? And how likely will it be to be repeated in a state where a quarter of the electorate is Latina?
Well, let’s take it one step at a time. Biden got 63% of the Latino vote in this border state. This was due, in large part, to a new generation of Latino voters: adults who experienced one of the most repressive, anti-immigrant and harshest policies in the entire country as teenagers.
Audio file Noticias Telemundo: Journalist: It is because young Latinos, children of undocumented immigrants, experienced firsthand the cruelty of policies like SB1070 and now that they can speak out, they are doing so for immigration reform.
JULIO: SB1070 allowed police to demand immigration documents from any detained person based on, so to speak, “reasonable doubt.” In English, it is colloquially called the “show me your papers” law.
Yara: I am so proud that we were able to turn Arizona into a blue state.
JULIO: By the 2020 elections, the young activists who had mobilized against that law were already grown up, were interested in politics, and became the protagonists of that Democratic wave that turned the state for Biden.
Journalist: Yara has been working since she was 15 years old and her father was deported due to the policies of former Sheriff Arpaio.
Yara: All these victories that I have had in my life sometimes do not feel like victories because my dad is not here to share them with me.
JULIO: Joe Biden had won Arizona by less than 11,000 votes, or 0.3%. It was one of the closest victories of the election —only the state of Georgia saw a narrower margin. And when Trump began making false accusations of fraud, many Republicans believed that the election in Arizona was stolen.
Telemundo News Archive: Host: Many Trump supporters refuse to believe in a possible defeat. For the second consecutive night, dozens of them protested in front of the electoral authority. The tension at the site increased when it was learned that some of the protesters were armed.
JULIO: After the protests, several lawsuits challenged the count. All of these false accusations of fraud were withdrawn or dismissed in the courts, but they left an important legacy in Arizona.
It became, like Georgia, part of a key narrative of the so-called MAGA movement, for the slogan in English Make America Great Again. As we will see in today’s episode, sowing doubts about the security of the vote has been and continues to be a political strategy.
Trump: We won, we won, we did win. It was a rigged election.
JULIO: The so-called ‘big lie’ of the 2020 fraud could affect not only the presidential race —which remains hotly contested in Arizona— but also a race that could define the balance of power in the United States Senate.
This is El péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.
Today… Arizona.
MIDROLL
JULIO: We are back on El péndulo. I am Julio Vaqueiro.
What happened in Arizona four years ago —that change from red to blue— was surprising to many. But perhaps it was not so surprising to those who had paid attention to the Senate elections in recent years.
Rafael Carranza: In the last three Senate elections, in each of those three electoral contests, the Democrats won.
JULIO: This is Rafael Carranza, immigration reporter for the Arizona Republic, where he also has a podcast about state politics.
Rafael Carranza: In Arizona, unlike many other more Republican states, I think, there is more of a sense of independence here in the way that they resist pressure at the national level a little more. They are a little more libertarian in that sense.
JULIO: Rafael told us that it is more common among Arizona Republicans to do what is called “split ticket voting”. That is, to vote perhaps for Trump for president, but for a Democrat for other positions, such as senator. That tendency makes any prediction difficult.
Be careful, whoever ends up in the White House will need the support of the Senate to implement their policies and ratify their appointments. There are one hundred senators, two per state, and right now, the Democrats control the Senate by just one vote. No one can say for sure whether they will maintain that control or lose it, but it is clear that the race for Arizona Senator is crucial for both parties.
Rafael Carranza: And we know that Arizona has always played a key role in the Senate. Senators have always taken an important leadership role, especially on immigration issues.
File:
“Arizona Senator Jeff Flake”
“Arizona senator Mark Kelly”
“Arizona senator Kyrsten Cinema”
“Arizona Senator John McCain”
JULIO: Throughout this series, in each state we have visited, we have found that this issue, immigration, is on the minds of many voters, whether they are Latino or not. In Arizona, a border state, the debate about the impact of migration is not theoretical. The economy of cities like Nogales depends on a constant exchange with Mexico. At the same time, of all the regions patrolled by the authorities, the Tucson sector in Arizona saw the highest number of migrant arrests in the first months of this year.
And the Senate candidates here have very different views on this.
Rafael Carranza: We have on the Democratic side Rubén Gallego, who is a Latino congressman who represents the southern part of Phoenix, which is where most Latinos live, and we also have on the Republican side Kari Lake, who was a news anchor.
Audio file, Kari Lake: Hi I’m Karry Kale with Fox 10 News and my five…
JULIO: So, who are the candidates?
First: Kari Lake, known as a star of the MAGA movement.
Rafael Carranza: Towards the end of her career, despite being a news anchor, she got into trouble, for example, by promoting, uh, fake news or repeating things that weren’t true, especially during the pandemic. Misinformation about the pandemic and well, that did distance her a bit from the public.
JULIO: She ran for governor in the 2022 elections, in an extremely close race against a Democrat. When she lost, she made accusations of fraud, very similar, by the way, to the type of accusations that former President Trump made when he lost the state in 2020. Since then, trial after trial has found that there were no irregularities.
Rafael Carranza: So, despite having lost the election, it was something that she never acknowledged, she has never admitted it.
Julio Vaqueiro: Now Kari Lake has also had differences with members of her own party, right? She has fought with some Republicans. Why?
Rafael Carranza: She is someone who says whatever comes to mind regardless of the consequences. We saw that during the race for governor, where she essentially asked Republicans who are more moderate or who have more moderate positions not to vote for her.
JULIO: Although it sounds far-fetched, it is true. A little context is needed here. For decades, Arizona was known as the state of the legendary senator John McCain, who passed away in 2018, and represented the state for 35 years. His style of politics was considered very moderate —a “McCain Republican” is a Republican very willing to negotiate with Democrats. It is clear that Kari Lake does not come from the same mold. And she does not want those votes either.
File: Kari Lake: “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here do we?
Crowd: BOOOOOOO
Alright, get the hell out!”
Rafael Carranza: So that has created a lot of problems for her, especially when it comes to… attracting more votes, because we know that they are going to be necessary and more so to make a close race. And that has not been said so far. Kari Lake is behind Rubén Gallego in the polls and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that she has not opened her platform to all Republicans, but rather has focused more on Trump supporters and people who have slightly more extreme views.
JULIO: So, according to Rafael, we have a candidate who explicitly breaks with voters from her own party and with the legacy of Senator John McCain, one of the most important politicians in the history of Arizona. But that’s not all. She has also fought with officials of the current Republican Party.
Julio Vaqueiro: The friction also happened in front of the cameras, as well as behind them. According to several reports, she has a tendency to record any kind of conversations she has with other politicians, including if they are members of her own party and it was something that she used to gain advantage and to make Jeff DeWitt —who at that time was the head of the Republican Party here in Arizona— look bad.
File:
Jeff DeWitt: Is there a number at which?
Kari Lake: I can be bought? This is not about money, this is about our country.
JULIO: In the recording, Jeff DeWitt, the head of the Arizona Republican Party by that time, is heard asking Lake if there is a number that would convince her not to run for the Senate. The recording was released in January. According to Lake, DeWitt was offering her a bribe.
For his part, DeWitt said that he was offering her advice as a friend and that the recording was selectively edited. But anyway, in the wake of this scandal, Jeff DeWitt had to resign from his position.
Rafael Carranza: And then someone else came along. Uh, yes, uh, that was like, more in agreement with Kerry Lake’s positions and so they could essentially continue with their strategy of being 100% in favor of MAGA, of President Donald Trump and essentially silencing any other type of opinions that are different within the party.
Kari Lake Archive: Oh man, President Trump, we’re going to blow your mind today, this is amazing.
Rafael Carranza: Kari Lake has taken a lot of the same positions as former President Donald Trump. And so she describes many of the migrants as criminals. People who come here to harm those who live in the United States.
Kari Lake Archive: It is an invasion. We are going to stop people from coming across. We’ll finish President Trump’s wall.
Rafael Carranza: She has taken a position saying that the children of immigrants who are born here in the United States are not natural citizens. Obviously, this goes against the Constitution, which says that anyone born here in the United States is automatically a citizen.
JULIO: So, that’s Kari Lake, with an anti-immigrant platform and rhetoric that is increasingly incendiary.
And, as Rafael told us, that may be the reason why she is losing the race by double digits, according to the latest polls.
But now let’s look at the Democratic candidate, Rubén Gallego.
Rafael Carranza: He’s a war veteran. He was part of the Marines. He was deployed to Iraq, where he was in a combat zone. And when he returned, he moved here, to Arizona, where he began his career.
JULIO: He ran for Congress to represent one of the most Latino districts in Arizona, in southern Phoenix, and won easily.
Unlike Lake, he has changed his discourse on migration and migrants. Before, he was quite progressive… In 2017, he described Trump’s wall as stupid and dumb.
Archive Ruben Gallegos: It’s abundantly clear that Mexico won’t vote for Trump’s stupid dumb border wall.
JULIO: But this year, he said that walls are necessary in some parts of the border…
Archive Ruben Gallegos: I think border walls are necessary in certain areas.
JULIO: Here at Noticias Telemundo we have invited the two candidates to interview them during this campaign. Kari Lake declined our invitation, but when I spoke with Rubén Gallegos in August I asked him a question about his change of tone.
Noticias Telemundo Archive
Julio: There are those who say that you have been moderating in this campaign. That you, you called yourself the progressive voice in Congress but, now you have taken more moderate positions. Why are you campaigning?
Rubén Gallegos: No, because when you are running for a state… because when you are a congressman it is a very small district. But when you are running for a state the problems are bigger and the solutions have to be bigger too. And you have to work with many more people.
Julio: Is there an immigration crisis in the United States? A crisis at the border?
Gallego: We have to reform that system. We have to have more Border Patrol, more security at the border, more technology to stop fentanyl at the doors.
Julio: But, for example, those policies and that speech do sound much more moderate and conservative than what you sounded like as a progressive…
Gallego: You can have both. We can have a secure border and at the same time we have to do something with those families who are here.
Rafael Carranza: I think that his evolution has been quite similar to what we have seen with the Democrats at the national level. Because initially, well, I think that a large part of the Democrats focused on the humanity of the migrants and on immigration reform, on being able to change the system itself, which everyone knows does not work, that there are many problems, that it can take a long time to get a visa or to go through some legal process. However, what we have seen this year is that the Democrats have changed their position a little and have become a little more to the right. Their positions have become a little more conservative.
JULIO: There is no better example of this trend than immigration reform, proposed by outgoing Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. The legislation —initially supported by Republicans and also by President Biden— was an agreement to impose stricter limits on asylum applications and expel those who do not qualify. It promised $20 million for border security. It was a much more aggressive proposal than Democrats had supported before —even the border patrol union said it supported it.
For a moment, it looked like it was going to pass with Republican support as well. Until Trump asked Republican senators not to approve it.
A reflection of how much the Democratic position on migration has changed was when Kamala Harris mentioned this agreement at the Democratic Party convention, delegates applauded it.
Archive Kamala Harris: Well, I refuse to play politics with our security. Here is my pledge to you. As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed. And I will sign it into law.
Rafael Carranza: And that is something that we had not necessarily seen before within the party’s position itself. But this year, being one of the main issues in this presidential race, it has been seen that this issue has become a little more conservative and I think Rubén Gallego is proof of that.
JULIO: Kamala Harris, for her part, said something very similar to what Gallego told me —she rejects an absolute binary between border security and a humanitarian immigration system. We can and we must create both, she declared during a visit to Arizona last month:
File: Kamala Harris
I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane. We can and we must do both.
JULIO: At the moment we do not know if this more nuanced speech on migration will connect with voters in a border state. It is an open question for both Rubén Gallego and Kamala Harris.
After the break, we go to the polls. We’ll be back.
MIDROLL 2
JULIO: We are back at El Péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.
In Arizona, they say there is no election day… It’s more like a whole month. Early voting started on October 9.
Adrián Fontes: The atmosphere here in Arizona is always —not just in the summer— very hot.
JULIO: Adrián Fontes is the Secretary of State.
Adrián Fontes: I’m the Chief of Elections for the state of Arizona.
JULIO: He’s a Democrat, he was elected in 2022. It’s an important position in a place where voting is under the microscope of conspiracy theories and myths about fraud. Just like in other states, election workers in the state already face threats of violence, mainly from voters who support Trump and who believe that the last election was stolen. But unlike the rest of the country, Arizona has a very particular law.
Fontes: Well, in the United States, in any other state of the 50 and the territories of this country, a person can register to vote. They just need to sign under oath and under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.
JULIO: In Arizona, you have to show proof of citizenship. It can be a birth certificate, a passport, a naturalization certificate —but they have to show documentation. If not, they can only vote in federal elections, like for president or Senate, but no local or state elections. They can’t vote for mayor, for example.
Fontes: It’s a higher standard of proof than anyone in this country outside of the state of Arizona. And it’s not reasonable. It’s not necessary. It’s not a thing that we should do. But we have those rules here. We’re going to go ahead with that until our people change it.
JULIO: The Secretary of State agrees with what other experts say: that the proof requirement is not necessary because it’s already a crime to vote if you’re not a citizen. And research shows that there are very few cases of fraud —a handful that wouldn’t affect any outcome.
Fontes: Let’s be honest, if there is a person who is not in this country legally or for any other reason, they should not be voting. Do you think that person is going to submit all their data, their information, their date of birth, their email address and all that to an officer who is going to check all that information and then under oath indicate that they are a citizen, putting at risk the possibility that they will be able to be a citizen in the future. Are these accusations not realistic? No, they don’t really happen, but the liars are going to continue with their lies. And the rest of us are going to move on with our lives.
JULIO: Donald Trump has repeated this accusation without evidence over and over again: that his opponents are pushing undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, to steal the election from him.
NBC Archive:
Donald Trump: A lot of these illegal immigrants are coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.
JULIO: You would think that Arizona, with this law requiring proof of citizenship, they would be immune from this accusation. But… In recent weeks, Secretary Fontes’ office announced… a rather large hole in the system.
Telemundo News Archive:
Authorities discovered an error in the database that for two decades wrongly designated voters as having access to the ballot.
JULIO: There are 218,000 people who —by accident— have been able to vote the full ballot for twenty years even though they never showed their proof of citizenship. And look out, these people voted without a problem, under Republican and Democratic secretaries of state.
Fontes: These people were not at fault because it was the state and the motor vehicle division that were not taking care of or ensuring these certifications of citizenship.
JULIO: Initially, the Republican Party argued that these people should only vote in federal elections, since they did not comply with state law.
Fontes: Well, when we saw the list, the majority of those voters on the list were Republicans. That’s why when we petitioned the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the Senate president and the speaker of the House of Representatives here in the Arizona Statehouse, all Republicans petitioned on behalf of my legal position, stating that all of those voters should vote the entire ballot. It was a political issue, it was not a question of law.
JULIO: There is no evidence that these people are not citizens —they just didn’t have proof when they registered, because when they registered that law didn’t exist. It’s a complicated case but, at the end of the day, the Arizona Supreme Court decided that it’s too close to the election and no changes could be made.
But that’s not all. A conservative group affiliated with the Trump campaign says they want to investigate the threat of non-citizen voters in Arizona. And they’re demanding that the list of these 218,000 voters be released. Adrian Fontes says that would be intimidation for those on the list, and he won’t do it until after the election.
FONTES: We have an example on video where they tried to do it and one is too many. Someone knocked on the door demanding that they have certificates or papers. That is not the kind of society we want to live in, where other people are investigating their neighbors. It is not a necessary thing at this time, so I am going to try with everything I can, to preserve peace, preserve the dignity of our voters and prevent those people motivated by who knows what, who do not have that capacity from going to confront our voters.
NATALIA CONTRERAS: Now, with all this, what I am going to be monitoring is whether perhaps Texas is going to want to do what Arizona does, which is require proof of citizenship to register, to vote. Or perhaps put more restrictions on who can register to vote.
JULIO: Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat based in Texas. Votebeat is an election-focused coverage outlet.
NATALIA: Too much is happening right now. It’s ours —like our Super Bowl, right?
JULIO: She says that this accusation —without evidence— that non-citizens are voting, is now seen in several states across the country. Including Texas, a border state, just like Arizona.
NATALIA: In fact, we just published an investigation focusing on this announcement that the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, made in August. And he said in a press release that in Texas, the registrations of more than 1 million voters had been canceled. That number included more than 6,000 who are supposedly non-citizens.
JULIO: One million voters, and more than six thousand supposedly non-citizens.
NATALIA: It’s too much. When I saw that number, knowing that Texas has very strict laws for one to be able to vote, it seemed too much to me. So we started to investigate.
JULIO: First, they found that this number includes all voters removed from the rolls since 2021. It’s nothing new.
Now… It’s quite common for officials to do maintenance on the voter rolls, removing people who have died, for example, or who have moved. Sometimes election administrators send a letter to verify your address, or correct an error, so that you can be removed from a suspension list.
NATALIA: I don’t know about you, but sometimes I ignore the mail for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and it stays there, on the dining room table. I mean, a lot of people don’t open their mail if they don’t respond to that letter, so what happens is that their registration is canceled.
JULIO: All these changes are so common that there is even a federal law that dictates a quiet period for the 90 days before an election.
NATALIA: It’s to prevent someone who is eligible to vote from having their registration canceled.
JULY: The Department of Justice is suing the states of Virginia and Alabama right now, for example, for allegedly violating this period.
Both governors announced that they had found thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls, though in reality those cases are of eligible voters. People who may have ignored the mail on the dinner table. If there are non-citizens on the list, there are very few.
And that is what Natalia and her colleagues found when they investigated Governor Greg Abbott’s announcement in Texas. Of this huge number —1.1 million people— only 6,500 were identified as possible non-citizens… And of those, it was actually 581 people, many who had simply not responded to a letter from the state. The Votebeat team found that citizens —legitimate voters— have definitely been removed from the voter rolls.
A mistake, sure, but not a purge of 1.1 million people, and not a defense against a threat without evidence of voter fraud.
NATALIA: All of this is maintenance that is necessary and good, but the way it is being used, knowing that most people do not understand this process can be very damaging, it can be very damaging to that trust that we can have in this process, right? What I hope your listeners understand is that every time we see these announcements we have to remember that these are routine maintenance. Okay? So we have to question what the motive really is behind these, these announcements that we are removing so many people. When this is done on a daily basis.
JULIO: Natalia’s team found that the press release creates the impression that authorities are preventing attempts at massive fraud. Experts who are monitoring this election say that Republican authorities in several states are using the accusation without evidence to sow doubt about the election results. For example, Trump said this month that the Justice Department wanted to add illegal voters to the rolls in Virginia —something that is false.
Juan Proaño: They are making these announcements to send the message that they are removing all those people. And that is a way to intimidate, intimidation, and our community is paying close attention to that.
JULIO: Juan Proaño is the CEO of LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights group in the United States.
Juan: What they are doing now is putting all that information ahead of the election, because if or when they lose, they are going to say, well, we lost because Latinos who are not citizens voted and we announced that this was happening, that it was going to happen and it is a lie, because now there are many organizations that have done the analysis.
JULIO: They are preparing the ground, let’s say, to later say that there was fraud. Is that what Lulac is saying?
Juan: Yes, and to contest the election.
JULIO: And according to Juan, this strategy serves to intimidate potential Latino voters, sowing fear.
Juan: We are receiving calls. Can they vote? Is it against the law? If they are going to vote, are they going to go to jail? If they vote, for example. Those questions when you put it out there in the community, it’s going to be that Latinos are not going to vote, they are not going to participate in that election.
JULIO: As candidates, Harris and Trump have very different views regarding the right to vote. Harris proposes expanding access to mail-in voting, for example, and a minimum period for early voting. Trump wants a law like the one in Arizona —with proof of citizenship at the federal level.
Adrián Fontes: Oh, my God!
JULIO: Adrián Fontes, secretary of state of Arizona, says that for many people it would be very difficult to obtain citizenship certificates.
FONTES: Well, let’s say that there are municipal halls in various parts of Florida, in Louisiana, in Texas, where a hurricane has destroyed all the documents.
JULIO: Many Americans do not have proof of citizenship such as a passport, for example.
FONTES: And if they wanted to impose those rules on the whole country, in the United States, it’s going to be incredibly difficult for us to first obtain those documents from all people. And it’s not fair. It’s not necessary because we already know that it’s very, very, very rare for someone not to be eligible to vote or to try to register to vote, it’s not necessary, but some people have a different opinion. That’s one of the things in this country. Everyone can have their own opinion.
JULIO: Next week on El péndulo: love, mercy, equality, democracy. We’re going to an evangelical church in North Carolina.
Interviewee: I haven’t voted. I can vote now. Amen.
Great. Yes, sir. And yes, I have confidence and I want to vote.
JULIO: We’ll hear from you next week.
Daniel Alarcón: El péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.
Julio Vaqueiro, from Noticias Telemundo, is the host.
This episode was produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, Mariana Zúñiga, and Jess Alvarenga. Editing is mine, with special help from Daniela Cruzat.
Desirée Yépez is the digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact-checking. Music, mixing, and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. Graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.
At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is a senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the series’ video journalism.
At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.
El péndulo is produced with funding from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.
You can follow us on social media as @central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast punto audio.
I’m Daniel Alarcón, and thank you for listening.