Arizona voters broke the gender barrier in 1998 when they voted five women into statewide elected office and turned the state into the first in the nation to have an all-female elected line of succession.

Justin Dart, the man often considered the father of the Americans with Disabilities Act, famously and repeatedly said: “Vote as if your life depends on it – because it DOES!” For people with disabilities, this is especially true. Every policy decision from employment, to housing and transportation, to funding of programs like CHIP, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are influenced by whom we elect.

The Federal Election Commission levied nearly a quarter-million dollars’ worth of fines against three dark money groups for failing to report contributions from an organization run by Sean Noble after the Arizona political operative inadvertently disclosed the alleged violations in a 2014 interview.

A complaint filed with the Internal Revenue Service against a “dark money” group that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2014 governor’s race appears to provide a stark example of the way new campaign finance laws could bar Arizona election officials from punishing a violation, even when it’s right in front of their faces.

A U.S. district court judge may decide two critical issues in Arizona before the November presidential election: whether to stop the state’s new so-called “ballot harvesting” law from taking effect and whether to force elections officials to count out-of-precinct provisional ballots.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation today interviewed former Arizona Corporation Commissioner Gary Pierce and Corporation Commission staffers as part of a probe into the 2014 elections.

Arizonans who don’t like the other choices for president this year won’t get a chance to vote instead for the Green Party nominee.

Candidates are not going to get an extra month or so ahead of primary elections to put up their campaign signs.

Secretary of State Michele Reagan did not compile a new election procedures manual for the 2016 cycle, perhaps the first time in decades, if not longer, that the office did not release the biennial publication that instructs county and local officials on the conduct of elections.

With the dust settled after yesterday’s deadline to submit nominating petitions, it appears as though 219 candidates have filed to run for legislative, statewide and federal offices. There are 7 statewide candidates (a low figure, but there are only three Corp Comm seats on the ballot this year), 171 legislative candidates and 41 federal candidates.