Arizona Capitol Times Your Inside Source for Arizona Government, Politics and Business

So, you waited until today to vote. Perhaps you weren’t sure which candidate you like. Or maybe you just didn’t get an early ballot. There are some things you need to know.

A litigious libertarian think tank has asked the president of the state’s largest utility to account for the company’s political activity, and specifically whether the utility’s customers have been funding its electioneering or lobbying.

It may be hours before polls close and votes are counted in Arizona’s 2014 primary elections, but for a handful of candidates, today is just a formality. Five senators and two representatives are running unopposed in both the primary and the November general election, ensuring their place at the Capitol. And election is all but assured for many more candidates who are running on one-party-dominant districts.

Congressional pre-primary campaign finance reports filed in the past week offer a final look into the fundraising prowess of primary election candidates in three hot congressional races.

For all the promises of the survival of Republican lawmakers who voted for Medicaid expansion, the few remaining in the Senate could find their ranks diminished at the conclusion of the primary election.

There will be plenty of clutter and chatter on the day of the primaries, that hallowed tradition when Americans get to exercise their right to cast a ballot for their favorite politicians or, as many also do, ignore that opportunity altogether.

The amount of campaign cash that’s been spent by third party groups that don’t have to disclose their donors and have no spending limits — so called “dark money” — has reached an all-time high in 2014.

The Arizona Democratic Party and a conservative lobbyist are alleging in separate complaints filed with the Citizens Clean Elections Commission that Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal used state resources for campaigning.

The dearth of reliable, independent polling in Arizona elections is nothing new. A long-term decline in independent polling by universities and media organizations has left IEs and other biased groups as the main source of publicly available polling for the state’s elections.

Andrew Thomas’ gubernatorial campaign is full of familiar refrains for those who have followed the rise and fall of his political career.