2 Dems eyeing run at GOP incumbent for secretary of state

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett now wants to stay right where he is, rather than try to move two floors up in the Executive Tower.

Bennett, appointed to his position in January, was considering a run for governor, but now that Gov. Jan Brewer is seeking a full term, Bennett said he is no longer eyeing the Ninth Floor and is looking to keep his job on the seventh.

But Bennett and other candidates for Arizona secretary of state should be warned: Emphasizing your qualifications to succeed the governor can sink your campaign.

Voters don’t generally think of gubernatorial candidates as people who might die in office, said Earl de Berge of the polling firm Behavior Research Center.

“I think that would be a very ill-received platform for anybody,” de Berge said. “It’s a negative vibration.”

Barring a scandal or a sudden shift in voter interest from taxes to the technical, the 2010 campaign for Arizona secretary of state promises to excite only the closest observers of the state’s politics.
Such voter indifference seems odd, considering that half of Arizona’s recent governors vaulted directly from secretary of state to the chief executive.

“Even though … it is a heartbeat away, in effect, from the Governor’s Office, it just doesn’t seem to command that kind of interest from voters,” de Berge said.

The voters’ shrug notwithstanding, jockeying for the office, which pays $70,000 annually, has been spirited, if limited to only a few state politicians.

As for Democratic candidates, former Real Estate Commissioner Sam Wercinski may have some primary-election competition after freshman state Rep. Chris Deschene, of Window Rock, announced that he too might seek the office.

This year, Arizonans were once again reminded that the secretary of state is first in the line of succession should the governor’s seat become vacant. Brewer took over when then-Gov. Janet Napolitano resigned to become U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security.

But all three hopefuls for secretary of state said they won’t focus on their qualifications to take over as governor.

That’s probably a wise course, considering the governor’s race and U.S. Sen. John McCain’s re-election bid will dominate voters’ attention in 2010.

De Berge said well-informed voters are aware of the line of succession, but most don’t really focus on it. Four of Arizona’s last eight governors were secretaries of state who filled vacancies.

In 1977, Secretary of State Wesley Bolin ascended to the Ninth Floor after Gov. Raul Castro resigned to become President Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Argentina. In 1978, following Bolin’s death, Attorney General Bruce Babbitt inherited the office, because Rose Mofford, who, like Bennett, was the appointed secretary of state at the time and therefore not eligible for the line of succession. Mofford only had to wait. She became governor in 1988 after Gov. Evan Mecham was impeached and removed from office.

Jane Hull inherited the Governor’s Office in 1997 when Fife Symington resigned following his conviction on bank fraud charges. And Brewer, of course, became governor in January 2009 after Napolitano joined the Obama cabinet.

But those incidents didn’t generate more voter interest in the 1978, 1990 or 1998 races, de Berge said.

Fred Solop, a director of the Department of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, said those transfers of power often trigger interest in creating a lieutenant governor position for the state, but they don’t usually translate into increased attention on the secretary of state’s race.

“As much as the candidates can position themselves to being qualified to take over the Governor’s Office if need be, I just don’t think that’s going to be the deciding factor,” Solop said. “The secretary of state’s election is going to take on less visibility compared to what’s happening for the governor’s race and the Senate race in this state.”

Bennett, a former state senator, seems always one strong cup of coffee away from running for governor. He thought about it in 2006, and his maybe-campaign for 2010 evaporated with Brewer’s early November decision to try to hold her seat.

He said he expects that, in the campaign, he will mention his qualifications to take over as governor, but he said he wants to focus on the secretary of state’s duties as Arizona’s chief elections official.
“Honest and fair elections, I think, has to be a real big theme of the campaign because it’s a very important part of what the Secretary of State’s Office does,” Bennett, a Prescott Republican, said.
Wercinski and Deschene said they, too, will focus on the responsibilities the secretary has.

With a full term as secretary of state, Bennett said he would like to improve the way Arizonans can access and file information online, including data on lobbying and campaign finance that the office is responsible for overseeing.

Wercinski, a former U.S. Air Force officer who spent two years on the Arizona Real Estate Advisory Board under Napolitano, said he wants to reach out to voters so the state can avoid having so many provisional ballots, which sometimes are disqualified over questions of eligibility.

Last year in Maricopa County alone, he said, 9,000 provisional ballots were disqualified because voters were at the wrong precinct or didn’t have proper identification.

Wercinski said he also wants to use the Secretary of State’s Office to guarantee Arizonans’ voting rights and ensure transparent, fair elections. He noted that Arizona is still required by the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 to clear all changes to election laws and procedures with the federal government because of a history of disenfranchising minority voters.

Deschene said he was prompted to run in part because of his own personal experiences. In 2008, Deschene was one of several Navajo candidates who found themselves in a legal battle over petition signatures.

Mark Haughwout, one of Deschene’s primary election opponents, sought to invalidate many of the signatures on Deschene’s petition signatures because the signers provided post office boxes instead of physical addresses Opponents of the lawsuit said many people who live on Indian reservations don’t necessarily have street addresses, and prohibiting them from using post office boxes deprives them unfairly of their votes.

Deschene won the lawsuit and went on to win a legislative seat.

The Secretary of State’s Office, he said, could have answered “a lot of these questions simply just by way of communicating with county recorders to find a solution to our situation,” Deschene said. “I’m sad that we had to go through the court process to get an answer.”