This is an election year. With every election comes the desire to voice views on political issues. As Sedona’s only newspaper and the largest news outlet in the Verde Valley both online and in print, we have longstanding policies about how to handle letters to the editor regarding campaigns, elections issues, ballot propositions and candidates.
If you want a robust election with many choices, sign candidate petitions even if you might be on the fence about who to vote for come election day. You’re signing to put them on the ballot; they still have to earn your vote. Ballots are secret, so they’ll never know anyway.
Candidates officially have until April 1 to file their campaign signatures, though some petitions state April 8. That’s because the Arizona State Legislature decided to move up election day from Aug. 6 to July 30, after candidates obtained packets and started collecting signatures, by passing a 30-page bill designed to address signature complaints from lawmakers that led to the months-long recount in Maricopa County in 2020 that returned results nearly identical to the election night count.
Don’t worry, county recorders are annoyed, too, but “petitions with the August 6 primary pate in the header are grandfathered in and will be valid during the filing period,” the Yavapai County Recorder stated.
Several candidates have websites where you can sign their petitions digitally. Take advantage of this technology, at least until the legislature messes with that, too.
The primary election is Tuesday, July 30. Most voters should have received a voter ID card in the mail. You have until July 1 to register for the primary.
For local races, the primary is the de facto big election day, with the November election working as a runoff if no candidate or not enough candidates reach the 50% plus 1 vote threshold to be elected outright in July.
Once the official candidates are announced, we’ll contact them all in the five towns we cover to work on our news coverage and candidate profiles. Depending on the seats for which they’re running, we do profile stories, candidate-written essays, or both, and try to make page placement as equitable as possible.
If you want to voice support for a candidate or issue, you can always do so with a paid political ad. These are guaranteed to be published because you’re paying for the space in the newspaper, or online through targeted digital ads. They can be large or small, color or black and white, or digitally targeted to registered voters who live in Sedona, and can say exactly what you want to say with whatever word limit you pay for. Contact our Advertising Department and General Manager Kyle Larson at (928) 282-7795 ext. 114 or klarson@larsonnewspapers.com to purchase a political ad.
Political ads require the purchaser to put “Paid for by …” at the very bottom of the ad so everyone reading knows exactly who is funding the advertising. Transparency in elections is vital to the democratic process.
Letters to the editor on issues, conversely, go into the general letters queue and are published roughly in the order in which they are received, based on the space available. Like all letters, they are limited to 300 words.
Letter writers can send us letters about issues or ballot issues, or state, county or local ballot propositions, should there be any. Early ballots go out Wednesday, July 3, and early voting also begins that day, so the last day to send a letter on an issue being voted on in the primary will be Monday, June 23, to make it in by our last edition before early voting. After that, we will hold letters until after the election, so write your letters sooner rather than later. Do it now just to be safe.
Out of fairness to all candidates, we do not print letters to the editor endorsing or criticizing individual candidates. If we run one letter supporting one candidate, we would be on the hook to run letters for every other candidate. In a multi-seat race, this could get messy if a candidate starts a letter-writing campaign, which has been attempted many times in my years as editor.
We’ll be very clear about that now, and I’m certain I’ll have to refer letter writers to this editorial, but if the letter states “I support candidate X” or “ … so vote for candidate X,” we’ll direct the author to buy a political ad. Again, you can buy political ads endorsing candidates by name throughout election season and Kyle Larson will be more than happy to work with you on a good-looking political ad.
If you want to criticize the actions of an active elected official — president, governor, member of Congress, state official, county supervisor, council member for current events in the news — that’s always fair game. Officials have to serve the public and deserve criticism whether it’s an election year or not.
If there are any numbers or hard facts [i.e., “Proposition 101 will raise taxes 1.45%”], they must be validated with either a document, a link or something independently verifiable. If it’s just an opinion [i.e., “Proposition 101 will raise taxes, which are bad”], then that’s fine.
We prefer letters sent by email, so we don’t have to retype them. Send them to me at editor@larsonnewspapers.com, or mail them to 298 Van Deren, Sedona, AZ 86339 or drop them off at our newsroom in Uptown.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
