PHX Reporter

Phoenix grassroots activist and former mayoral candidate Merissa Hamilton said public comment at Arizona government meetings should be protected and made a "right of the people."

“Public comment needs to be protected,” Hamilton told host Leyla Gulen on the Grand Canyon Times Podcast. “In Arizona, it’s optional.”

“Most of the political entities believe it's a privilege of the people,” Hamilton said. “We need to make it a right of the people, and that's the biggest thing we'll be fighting for over the next year.”

Hamilton is executive director of the Save Arizona organization and co-founder and CEO of EZAZ.org ,which seeks to make civic action “Easy as Pie.” She previously ran for Phoenix mayor in 202 and serves as Member at Large of the Republican Party for Congressional District 1.

She said that “tyrants are really showing their true colors by limiting public comment.”

Hamilton said that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors recently limited citizens to “only one comment on two items” and that Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego limited comments to only one on five items. 

This full episode is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and features discussions on police funding and public safety in Arizona, as well as election integrity and voter eduction. 

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Full, unedited transcript of this podcast — Merissa Hamilton on the Grand Canyon Times Podcast (10/11/23)

[00:00:00] Leyla Gulen: Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times Podcast. I'm your host, Laila Ghulen. In this episode, we welcome our guest, Marissa Hamilton. Marissa is the Executive Director of Carrie Lake's Save Arizona Fund organization and also co founder and CEZAZ. org. Which, according to their slogan, makes civic action easy as pie.

[00:00:23] Leyla Gulen: She's previously ran for Phoenix mayor in 2020 and serves as member at large of the Republican Party for Congressional District 1. Marissa, welcome. 

[00:00:32] Merissa Hamilton: Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:00:35] Leyla Gulen: Indeed. Well, let's start with PAI, because I love PAI. EasyAZ. org is an interesting website. You talk a lot about the deep state in Arizona.

[00:00:44] Leyla Gulen: Well, tell us more about this resource and its mission, if 

[00:00:47] Merissa Hamilton: you could. Yeah, absolutely. So this is an interesting project that we started just a few months ago. And this is where we are tracking the agenda items at all different levels of government. [00:01:00] A big focus we have is the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, We also look at different cities, municipalities, and the Corporation Commission, and we are particularly targeting the World Economic Forum policies to essentially what they call the Great Reset.

[00:01:16] Merissa Hamilton: But it's essentially things that have to do with energy policy, transportation policy, climate, et cetera, that are designed to take away our freedom slowly. Kind of like we're like a frog in a boiling pot. So our mission with, uh, the Stop the Arizona Deep State is to protect our freedom and make sure that, uh, the people are the chief stakeholders of our government.

[00:01:38] Leyla Gulen: And it's all started fairly modestly with meetings and living rooms and so forth. So how quickly has this move in just since its recent nascent has grown and where it is now? 

[00:01:48] Merissa Hamilton: Yes. So this is something that we started a few months after I ran for Phoenix mayor. We had, we saw after. Well, we saw during the race, we were a door knocking in the last three weeks [00:02:00] and in South Phoenix and Maryville, which is a heavier Democrat areas.

[00:02:05] Merissa Hamilton: And I really wanted to find out, do these communities really want to defund the police? That's it was during the time of the BLM riots. And, and they were saying that they didn't want any more police in their community. And what we found was that over 80%, even closer to 90 percent of the residents in that community did not only did they not want to defund the police, they wanted more police.

[00:02:26] Merissa Hamilton: And the first question we would get asked after we would complete our survey is how do we get more police in our neighborhoods? Our neighborhoods are so unsafe. How do we get involved? What do we need to do? And so we found that people really wanted to vote differently. They didn't think that their representatives represented them, but they didn't know how to make their voice heard.

[00:02:47] Merissa Hamilton: And so that launched making civic action easy. And we threw in the pie because it's hard to stay angry while you're eating pie. And, and so that's how we came up with Civic Action Easy as pie. [00:03:00] 

[00:03:00] Leyla Gulen: Okay. I love that. I was going to ask that question. How did pie come into all of this, but going back to defunding the police, how is it that there is such a deep ravine between the people who want the police and who want the secure neighborhoods and communities versus the elected representatives who are wanting to defund police and wanting to remove police officers from the streets or disarm 

[00:03:30] Merissa Hamilton: them?

[00:03:31] Merissa Hamilton: Yeah, so that goes back to that same radical left Marxist world economic forum agenda. You have a lot of money on the left that is essentially handpicking these politicians to run on these agenda items. They don't want us to have Freedom and they don't want us to have local control and so local police kind of stands in their way It's pesky for them because we saw just a year later after my Phoenix mayor's race election Kate [00:04:00] Gallego, the mayor of Phoenix was trying to do a backdoor defund the police mechanism by Mandating the vaccine because she knew that meant at least 60 percent but more like 80 percent of the police force would be gone There was also a big uprising among the fire Department and they would lose somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the firefighters and so it really wasn't about the vaccine mandate.

[00:04:24] Merissa Hamilton: It was about obedience to what the overlords, so to speak, and so really, that's what that movement is all about. It's because our local police will stand up for freedom. Um, and we did a march. We did a huge march. We had over 2, 500, uh, City of Phoenix employees that organized, um, in that effort. We did a stakeholder meeting at the Capitol with our legislature, and then we marched from there to the City of Phoenix.

[00:04:52] Merissa Hamilton: And before we even got to the city, uh, they started calling us and said, Please don't come. We've pulled the mandate. We're not going to mandate anything. And, and... [00:05:00] We all decided, no, we're still going to go. Well, we found out that the city ordered the police to stand down and not shut down any of the roads for us, even though for BLM, they shut down the roads for 90 days, maybe even more than that.

[00:05:13] Merissa Hamilton: And the police disobeyed them. The motorcycle police officer said, no way we're going to close down the intersections. We'll have them walk on the sidewalks, but we're going to make sure it's safe for our, for our colleagues at the city of Phoenix. And so that's what it comes down to. They want obedience.

[00:05:30] Merissa Hamilton: They don't want, they don't want the citizens to have their own minds and they cer certainly don't want their own employees to stand up for freedom. Well, 

[00:05:38] Leyla Gulen: since it's, except where have you seen the most progress? It's since the inception of 

[00:05:43] Merissa Hamilton: I would say, yeah, I would say that a big huge turning point for us was we decided as an organization to endorse the Senate president and Speaker of the House election last year, and it was a contentious time because [00:06:00] we were working really hard.

[00:06:01] Merissa Hamilton: To unseat what I call the pro tyranny caucus Republicans. These are the guys, they're beyond, they're not just moderates, they're, they're actually worse than moderates because they really just hate freedom. And we're voting against us on election integrity, very common sense election integrity issues. Uh, very common sense.

[00:06:19] Merissa Hamilton: medical freedom issues, very common sense, parental rights, and child protection issues. And so, in the primary, the grassroots organized, and we dethroned them. And so we said, the next move is that if we don't get a Speaker of the House and Senate President that cares about the will of the people, then we'll get rolled like we did in the last legislative session.

[00:06:41] Merissa Hamilton: So we sent out 2, 000 postcards, handwritten. From the grassroots, where we all sent postcards to our legislators asking them to vote for Warren Peterson for Senate President and Joe Chaplick for Speaker of the House. And we won the Senate President election. And the lobbyist groups, the pro tyranny [00:07:00] caucus, the political class, they were not happy.

[00:07:03] Merissa Hamilton: They wrote a ton of hit pieces on me. They made rumors that we were getting millions of dollars to do this, and it wasn't true. We just... The people just sent out 2, 000 handwritten postcards, but that was a turning point and that has led to a lot of losses for the pro tyranny caucus. The Arizona budget is one example.

[00:07:23] Merissa Hamilton: That was the most conservative budget we've had in decades. While Republicans, even though Republicans previously were in charge, and that's thanks to our Senate President Warren Peterson. The Prop 400 is another example that's a Maricopa County transportation tax. We didn't get everything we wanted in it, but we changed the narrative.

[00:07:43] Merissa Hamilton: And the narrative is that we don't want those WEF pro tyranny transportation policies. We want our roads fixed. We don't want road diets, and we don't want money spent on public transit that is just used to increase crime across the [00:08:00] county. 

[00:08:00] Leyla Gulen: Now, you mentioned road diets, and there was a, uh, an article regarding you speaking to council about the road diets, and there was an article that said that The point was raised where there was no point, so I wanted to know if you could clarify that and what it was that you were trying to convey to council regarding road diets and what that means to constituents.

[00:08:23] Merissa Hamilton: Sure. So that was at the city of Scottsdale. And it's funny because as we've started the Stop the Arizona Deep State project, we now have six levels of government or jurisdictions of government that have changed the public comment rules to suppress the people since we started this. And it usually takes two to four meetings.

[00:08:40] Merissa Hamilton: And the Scottsdale meeting was an example of that. So we had been door knocking to businesses in Scottsdale, um, about the public transit project they have for bus rapid transit, and that would, that would create a massive road diet down the city of Scottsdale, but at the same time, they were picking little intersections here and there to [00:09:00] create road, to add road diets as they were So, um, that's what we're Um, repairing things on the road, and the point of it is to create more traffic congestion, so it's annoying to drive, so we abandon our cars to be basically coerced into public transit.

[00:09:15] Merissa Hamilton: And so what they did with this agenda item, they were getting money from the federal government to update the road to be ADA compliant. But there's hostile strings attached that the Biden administration adds, which is to reduce the number of lanes, make it a multimodal, add bike lanes where people don't ride their bikes, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:09:35] Merissa Hamilton: And so they separated, when they were getting so many emails from us, I think they had gotten over a thousand emails based on what the city council told us, they then changed the agenda item to take the road diet off the vote. So all of the backup materials in the agenda said it was going to be a road diet.

[00:09:53] Merissa Hamilton: Thank you. But because they took the road diet part off the vote, the mayor tried to use a rule that is [00:10:00] actually to govern the other city council members to say we couldn't use the word road diet in our public comment. That rule has nothing to do with what the public can say. We have to talk about the agenda item.

[00:10:12] Merissa Hamilton: The agenda item was for road diets. Just because they changed the vote doesn't mean that, that we're not allowed to use the word road diet. It was quite comical in the end and the local grassroots did a video on it and it culminated in a lot of bad press for the mayor and he's also now gotten a lot of heat for his homeless hotels because he tried to do the same thing with that agenda item too.

[00:10:35] Merissa Hamilton: And so 

[00:10:36] Leyla Gulen: by the same token when I ask where have you made the most progress with your organization, Where are you still needing to see more impact? Where are you hitting roadblocks? Where are you kind of hitting the wall when it comes to certain legislation that you want passed or just kind of an overall political 

[00:10:54] Merissa Hamilton: philosophy?

[00:10:56] Merissa Hamilton: Sure. So, so I think that we're in a [00:11:00] war Not just in Maricopa County, but really across Arizona when it comes to stopping these World Economic Forum policies, but our leverage in stopping them is public comment. And so that's really the main thing that we'll be driving through the next legislative session is that, is that these tyrants are really showing their true colors by limiting public comment.

[00:11:24] Merissa Hamilton: Um, the city of Phoenix mayor did the same thing when we pointed out her C40 policy to ban meat. And dairy, um, that she's, uh, in the process of incorporating in Arizona with ASU. Uh, she then limited us to only comment on five items. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, uh, for one meeting limited us to only comment on two items.

[00:11:47] Merissa Hamilton: And now they keep changing the public comment rules every single meeting. We've had the Secretary of State change the public comment rules. Uh, for the machine certification after we observed and [00:12:00] submitted line by line from the meeting what issues we had and what concerns we had. And so that now you're only allowed to send in a 500 word public comment and it has to be before their certification meeting ends.

[00:12:13] Merissa Hamilton: So you can't actually edit anything after the meeting. And so that's really, I think, our biggest, the biggest push we need to make as the people is that our lever of power. Is to show when they do those votes, if they have the consent of the governed or not, and that it brings sunlight and transparency to the process, and it brings accountability to the process, and it then lets the voters know whether or not we should rehire them for their position in the next election.

[00:12:41] Merissa Hamilton: So public comment needs to be protected. In Arizona, it's optional. It's and most of the political entities believe it's a privilege of the people. We need to make it a right of the people. And that's the biggest thing we'll be fighting for over the next year. Yeah, 

[00:12:56] Leyla Gulen: I'm going to cross that bridge again in just a moment.

[00:12:58] Leyla Gulen: But you've had a long [00:13:00] career in government. Um, where But there have been exponential changes just in the last two, three years. So first, what got you interested in politics and how has your vision, mission shifted to respond to what's happening 

[00:13:14] Merissa Hamilton: currently? That's a great question. It's been a long journey.

[00:13:18] Merissa Hamilton: I am a survivor of domestic violence and I found that as I was trying to get free, government made it much harder. Oftentimes, the police would empower. My abuser against me and wouldn't give me the protection that I thought I needed and it wasn't them it had to do with a lot of our bad laws and the operation procedures that they were under and so as I got free, I started helping other women and their children get free and I saw that it was a consistent pattern also helped with a lot of people.

[00:13:48] Merissa Hamilton: What girls that were in crisis pregnancies. And again, it was a consistent pattern. The more government got involved, the worse it was off for the victim or the person that needed help. So that's what really got me [00:14:00] involved. I also saw years ago there was situations and still happening today where Child Protective Services was going after parents, uh, pull it for things like medical freedom decisions, just wanting to get a second opinion.

[00:14:14] Merissa Hamilton: Or in domestic violence issues, they would target the victim adult saying that they were the cause that that it was negligence to let their children see them be abused. And so I and they lose their kids. And so that's what really kind of put a fire under me is I said, if government is able to take your children.

[00:14:34] Merissa Hamilton: over things that really aren't even neglect that most people wouldn't consider neglect. Then we're in a world of hurt once they start weaponizing this politically against the people. And now we're seeing it happen regularly. Uh, California just tried to pass a law and they, they almost got it done where they would target parents that didn't want to mutilate the, uh, gendered body parts of their children.

[00:14:55] Merissa Hamilton: They would lose their children. Um, To the government, uh, you're [00:15:00] seeing, uh, different states pass laws saying that if children want to take a time out from their parents, they can go into a group home. Um, and With no cause at all. So that's really the that is really the thing that got me heavily involved and it's also the reason why I endorsed Warren Peterson for Senate President because he was the first political figure of any type of having any type of a high position.

[00:15:24] Merissa Hamilton: He was the House majority leader at the time. That, uh, got a meeting together with me and DCS to bring out these issues. And I told them at that point, this was 2019, right before COVID, and I said, all it's going to take is a spark to cause, uh, these rules, these laws to be weaponized against parents, where parents are no longer the chief stakeholder of their children, where children no longer belong to their parents and instead they belong to the state.

[00:15:50] Merissa Hamilton: I think that's what we've seen has happened through COVID. That's one of the, um, fallouts of that, that government has used that to weaponize parental rights against. [00:16:00] Current 

[00:16:00] Leyla Gulen: Governor Katie Hobbs won the election over Republican Carrie Lake. Phoenix's mayor is also a Democrat, Katie, Kate Gallego, who's favored among progressives.

[00:16:10] Leyla Gulen: Gallego and Hobbs seem to be in lockstep over union issues, but Gallego has some. It's come under tremendous scrutiny over the development of mobile home parks and the barring of public comment. So the latter, which you've taken great umbrage as an impediment to free speech. So coming back to what you were saying before, how do you answer?

[00:16:34] Leyla Gulen: Why these particular people are getting elected into these positions when they turn around and then they bar people from speaking out and saying their piece and given the time that is due them to voice concerns and suggestions on how to do things better. 

[00:16:56] Merissa Hamilton: Well, I think if you look at Katie Hobbs election, I think that we [00:17:00] saw the shenanigans that happened in Maricopa County, and I don't consider that a legitimate election.

[00:17:04] Merissa Hamilton: Uh, I know hundreds of people that were disenfranchised and weren't able to vote. We, we see this, uh, that evidence coming forward in the, um, election cases that Save Arizona is bringing forward and also in Abe, Abe Hamade's case. The bottom line is that these people believe that they are rulers. Even when Kate Gallego, for example, after we were able to defeat her great emergency when she declared that in COVID and it came back to a local emergency, which meant that the city council would still exist, she was trying to eliminate the city council.

[00:17:37] Merissa Hamilton: She ran, it was reported that she ran downstairs to the vice mayor, Betty Godardo at the time, and was screaming through the hall so loud that the staff in the offices on the other side of the building heard her yelling, I was raised to govern. That's really what it comes down to. These people believe that they are there, that they have been endowed to govern.

[00:17:59] Merissa Hamilton: Not to [00:18:00] have, not to follow the consent of the governed, but that they are there to rule as in their overlords. So I think that's what this battle comes down to. It's really just freedom over tyranny. Do we, and it's about democracy. It's funny because they all always say we need to protect democracy. Their definition of democracy is them being able to rule over you.

[00:18:21] Merissa Hamilton: Whereas, uh, the legitimate definition of democracy is that we have a government by, of, and for the people. And that's the reason why the founders gave us a republic. Because they knew we would get to this day. Where you would have people getting elected and thinking that they rule over you. Rather than having a republic where the people are the chief stakeholder of their government.

[00:18:41] Leyla Gulen: Isn't it pretty typical, though, a lot of politicians speaking with forked tongue that especially during an election cycle that they say and do one thing and then once elected it changes course. So do you think that there were any indications prior [00:19:00] to these people being elected into these positions?

[00:19:03] Leyla Gulen: That either tip voters off or did not tip them off that this is the course that was going to be taken once they were seated in their office. 

[00:19:12] Merissa Hamilton: So I think that for people that are, that are in the know, that are active, like myself and a lot of our EZAZ members. I think you could look to, for example, like Katie Hobbs hiding in her basement.

[00:19:23] Merissa Hamilton: She barely campaigned. She wouldn't really tell the people what her plans were. Um, she wasn't transparent at all. I think that showed that's how she was going to rule. You can also look to how she was as the Secretary of State. She kept her offices closed. She, uh, kept them closed to, to small business owners that needed their paperwork filed, and she really crippled our economy in a lot of ways, and no one knew that, the media didn't report on it at all, the, the mainstream media that is, and so, I, I think that there are those signals that you can see, however, I affectionately call our voters, many of our voters are what I call Netflix [00:20:00] voters.

[00:20:00] Merissa Hamilton: What I mean by that is, they don't have access to commercials. They don't watch the news. Maybe they'll see things that pull up on their Google headlines, but we know from the Arizona Legislative Big Tech hearings that Google is specifically targeting those headlines to eliminate transparency and manipulate people's vote.

[00:20:20] Merissa Hamilton: And so, all of the, all the access that people have. Now in this big digital age is being manipulated against them. And also a lot of people are just opting out of knowing what's going on. My mom is one of those Netflix voters. She lives in Florida, and when that big hurricane was coming, she was right dead smack in the eye of, of it.

[00:20:40] Merissa Hamilton: And she had no idea that a hurricane was coming. And I texted her and I said, Hey, are you ready for the hurricane? And she said, Oh, I saw it was cloudy. I just thought it was a rainstorm. That's okay though, right? Yes, she's okay. Okay. She got prepared before the storm and she was fine, but that's just an example like we we are living in a [00:21:00] perfect storm politically and and so many people are just at home just kind of isolated from all of it.

[00:21:07] Merissa Hamilton: It's too much for them to see what's happening. But we're going to lose our freedom if we don't, if we don't wake up. And so that's part of the mission of both Save Arizona and E Z A Z. We want to help to provide transparency and voter education so that the voters will vote better based on their values once they know what they're really voting for.

[00:21:26] Leyla Gulen: Yeah, it's not a, it's not a great metaphor, though. I mean, truly, when you see the cloudy skies, the ominous horizon, it is a perfect example of what is happening in society. And if you decide to bury your hair, head in the sand and not face reality, but we've got So many more channels in which to take in information and to feed our minds.

[00:21:55] Leyla Gulen: Why is it so difficult? Why, what are people doing? I mean, [00:22:00] besides watching Netflix, of course, what is everybody doing it? And how is an organization that is? Charged with a mission to inform voters about how to cast their ballot based on what's best for their futures. How do you get to them? Like, what do you do?

[00:22:16] Leyla Gulen: Do you have to turn over rocks? Do you have to, do you have to remove the sand? What do you do to get people engaged and invested? In their futures and in these election cycles. 

[00:22:29] Merissa Hamilton: Yeah, I think removing the sand is the right strategy there. We have started in AZ, we've started something called the Arizona Rescue Mission.

[00:22:37] Merissa Hamilton: And this is really to inform voters during these legislative cycles. What their different bodies of government are voting on and, and the decisions they're making, we ask them at their, we, we primarily do this by a voter contact at their door and we hold meet and greets in their neighborhoods. And so we're empowering neighborhood leaders to basically [00:23:00] organize their neighborhood and give an opportunity to people that want to stay in the know, to know what's happening in their government.

[00:23:06] Merissa Hamilton: So an example of that is we found after contacting about 2000 voters. In primarily in the congressional district one area that the number one issue was inflation. So we created the website azinflationrelief. com and it's a scorecard during the legislative session of how the legis of all the bills that would impact inflation or costs on goods.

[00:23:30] Merissa Hamilton: Being able to start a new business, creating more competition in the marketplace, etc. And we scored them. And that has been a huge win for the grassroots, because it's a very easy way to message to the voters to show them with a quick snapshot who is voting for them and who's voting against them. And most of the, turns out, most of the Democrats, in fact all of them, are voting for more inflation.

[00:23:53] Merissa Hamilton: They're voting for more government spending. They're voting against things that would reduce the cost of goods and make it easier [00:24:00] for people to have economic opportunities. So that's how we do it. We go, we adopt neighbor, we find neighborhood leaders. We do a voter contact effort in the neighborhood. We invite them to meet and greets to hear from their elected officials.

[00:24:12] Merissa Hamilton: Hear from candidates, we give them a call to action to get involved and then we make it easy for them to participate. So if even people only have 15 minutes a week, we can still help them be effective in that time. As far as Governor Hobbs goes, 

[00:24:26] Leyla Gulen: a March poll showed that 43% of voters approve the job that she's doing, while 30% did not, and the rest were undecided.

[00:24:33] Leyla Gulen: So what does that tell you as to where the state is 

[00:24:36] Merissa Hamilton: headed? So that, I'm really glad you brought that up. 'cause that was the second question that we would ask the voters is how do you. What do you feel about, what is your job approval rating for Katie Hobbs? And they, and at that time in March, and we were mostly talking to conservatives at that point, um, we now talk to all voters, but 50 percent of conservatives thought Katie Hobbs was doing [00:25:00] a good job, even though she was vetoing so many bills.

[00:25:02] Merissa Hamilton: They didn't know about her vetoes, and they didn't know what she was vetoing. So once we started getting that information out there, it got to the point where the mainstream media couldn't just not put that information out there. There's so much of the public that was already finding out from a lot of our voter contact efforts.

[00:25:20] Merissa Hamilton: And so once that happened, then it flipped. And Katie Hobbs had a strong disapproval rating. And she remains as now having, I think, either the lowest or like in the lowest three in the country of governors with support from the people. So that. I think that speaks for itself, that with, as voters know what's really happening, then they, they change their positions.

[00:25:44] Leyla Gulen: Now, I want to segue into last year's election. Many conservatives, they were expecting this big red wave. We kept hearing big red wave. A lot of it media hype, but it was widely argued that there were valid inconsistencies and issues with safe and fair [00:26:00] elections, specifically as it relates to Carrie Lake and her extremely close attempt at securing the governor's office at the ballot and her subsequent failure to appeal the results.

[00:26:09] Leyla Gulen: So the Save Arizona Fund was set up. What work has been done? In the last year with that organization. 

[00:26:18] Merissa Hamilton: Yes, so Save Arizona has a number of election lawsuits out there, not just really, I mean, we have a number of lawsuits out there related to Carrie Lake's election contest, but we also have a number of lawsuits out there related to things like the public records request process, and with the signature, ballot affidavit, signature envelopes, and other items like that.

[00:26:39] Merissa Hamilton: And so really Save Arizona's mission is to. One, empower the people to be involved in the public process of, uh, governing our elections. And so we have, are in the process of launching an election task force statewide, and we'll be, uh, bringing together county task forces to do that work. And then we'll also [00:27:00] continue on with the election contests, uh, that are happening.

[00:27:03] Merissa Hamilton: Those lawsuits are very important because it's, it's, uh, shows. Put sunlight on what's happening in the elections and it informs the legislature on the laws that need to be clarified and really the abuse of power that we have bad actors in the counties are taking and also the fact that the county board of supervisors, especially in Maricopa County, but also in in Pinal and other areas.

[00:27:28] Merissa Hamilton: They are certifying these elections with really not having the information as to how that election was conducted. And we saw that Katie Hobbs threatened to imprison border supervisors that said they weren't quite sure that their elections were operated according to the law. That's a problem that needs to change.

[00:27:46] Merissa Hamilton: And so I think that the transparency that we're seeing from these cases is just priceless. And it's getting more voters involved in the process of how their government works. And we're seeing more people get involved in every area of public participation that's [00:28:00] available with the election planning process.

[00:28:02] Leyla Gulen: Well, you kind of answered my next question because I was going to bring up that Carrie had introduced you at a press conference a few months ago. And one of the things that you said that you were taking it up a notch and you're going to empower every freedom loving voter. And so I was going to ask what that process looks like, what that's going to entail.

[00:28:20] Leyla Gulen: But another thing is how do you reach the young people, the young voter, because going back to what Carrie had said during that press conference is that's what all this is for. The future generations to continue to be able to enjoy democracy in this country. So, so what, how do you reach out to the younger voters and get them on 

[00:28:43] Merissa Hamilton: board?

[00:28:44] Merissa Hamilton: Yeah, so I'm really excited to see there's a young Republican club in Arizona and they have, we're coming up on voter registration, national high school voter registration week, and they have planned all throughout the state [00:29:00] voter registration activities within their high schools. So that's one way that we can reach out to younger people is if someone's going to be voting age.

[00:29:10] Merissa Hamilton: By the next election, they, by the next major election, then they can register to vote now. And once they are eligible to vote, then their voter registration will automatically be activated. And that's a great way to then be able to message to those voters. Other things that we can do is there's lots of community events out there that young people like to go to.

[00:29:29] Merissa Hamilton: We have a ton of county fairs that are happening. The Arizona Republican Party is, has a booth at the Arizona State Fair, as an example, and so we need to go to the places that young people are at, and, and put messaging out there that attracts them. I think Turning Point does a great job at this on their college campuses.

[00:29:46] Merissa Hamilton: Young Americans for Liberty also is a great college club that gets young people involved, and, but then after that, Uh, once they're, once they've graduated from college, that's where we need to do that heavy voter contact to keep them engaged, [00:30:00] um, after that point. 

[00:30:02] Leyla Gulen: Well, we've got three months left in this year and 24 is gonna be here before we know it.

[00:30:09] Leyla Gulen: So what's next for you before the year end and what do you have, what plans do you have for the next year? 

[00:30:16] Merissa Hamilton: Yeah, so right now we're very focused on the bond elections that are happening across the state at E Z A Z, you can go to E Z A Z dot org slash bond elections, and we have, uh, listed out information about all the bond elections, but not just that, the receipts as to how those government entities have been spending your money.

[00:30:35] Merissa Hamilton: So that you can make a decision not just as to what they claim, what the politicians claim they're going to spend this money on, but how they've spent the money that they have, and if they even need more money, how much cash on hand do they have, as an example. Um, so go to ezaz. org slash bond elections and Save Arizona is going to be, uh, doing some, uh, ballot chasing trainings along with American Majority.

[00:30:57] Merissa Hamilton: And powering the grassroots to get the message [00:31:00] out to their local voters. We did a similar effort in May in Tucson with the Prop 412 election. We set up a website called 412facts. com and the grassroots contacted over 85, 000 of voters by text message. And we won that election. That was, that election was to bring in a radicalized version of the Green New Deal.

[00:31:21] Merissa Hamilton: We were winning so hard with that messaging that the Democrats the week before election day started telling Democrats to vote no on it because they didn't want the talking point the next day after the election to say Tucson voters Reject the Green New Deal and and so we need to do this again. We need to message to the voters We need to let them know what's on their ballot and stop some of the spending that's stealing our freedom 

[00:31:44] Leyla Gulen: And I just want to ask you real quick.

[00:31:46] Leyla Gulen: So, so that Prop 412, so those who are proponents of it would say, would argue, Oh, it's just an extra dollar on your power bill every month, but for the next [00:32:00] 25 years, at least for those who are voting and maybe not as invested in the year. Democratic process. They think, what's an extra dollar? How do you stamp out 

[00:32:12] Merissa Hamilton: that apathy?

[00:32:14] Merissa Hamilton: So we stamped out that apathy by saying what that dollar was going to be spent on. We also showed that TEP, the electricity provider that would have been adding that tax, was asking for a 12 percent rate rate increase. Through core com. So it wasn't actually going to be just a dollar. It was going to be about 180 a year on average.

[00:32:35] Merissa Hamilton: But worse than that, it was going to fund road diets. It was going to fund 15 minute cities. It was going to fund shutting down their small businesses, it was going to ban natural gas, it was going to ban gas stoves, it was going to shut down a lot of restaurants, and so we put out what that dollar was going to be spent on, and that's how we defeated it.

[00:32:54] Leyla Gulen: And that, that's the point, right? Because... It's more than what meets the [00:33:00] eye, so it's not just that one dollar, but everything behind it. And that's what people need to remember, right? So they, they need to read. They need to listen. They need to be hungry for information if they want to have the future that they envision for themselves.

[00:33:17] Merissa Hamilton: Yeah, absolutely. And right now government is most of our jurisdictions are sitting on still sitting on gobs and gobs of cash from covid that are unspent millions and millions of dollars. They don't need this extra bond money and they're going to use it to fund the Pro tyranny caucus, World Economic Forum policies.

[00:33:36] Merissa Hamilton: At the schools, they're using it to fund redoing the bathrooms so that boys can be in girls bathrooms, as an example. They're using it to bring in a graphic curriculum that will sexualize kindergartners. Um, at the cities, they're using it to implement 15 minute Uh, cities to put in, uh, really by transportation, intelligent systems [00:34:00] to make our streets like 1984, it's, it's a big deal.

[00:34:03] Merissa Hamilton: What this money is going to be spent on. And we're also in an inflation, having some of the worst inflation in the nation still. And so we have seniors that are struggling. We have a lot of people that are going homeless. A lot of this money is being spent on housing migrants, not helping our seniors. And so we need to make, the voters need to know what they're voting on, uh, before they cast that ballot.

[00:34:24] Merissa Hamilton: And that's what our mission is. You can't really have democracy if you don't know what you're voting on. And so whether you're on the right or the left, if you're there to protect our republic like we are. Then you should know what you're voting on. If you're there to protect democracy on the left, then you should know what you're voting on.

[00:34:41] Merissa Hamilton: At the end of the day, the voters should be the chief stakeholder of their government. And we do that through education.

[00:34:52] Leyla Gulen: And co founder and CEO of EZAZ. org, Marissa, thank you so much for joining us. 

[00:34:59] Merissa Hamilton: Thank you for [00:35:00] having me on. And I really appreciate all the reporting you do to shed light on what's really happening in our government. Thank you.