2 Conflicting Legislative Agendas Arise From Gun Safety Task Force in Connecticut

Democrats called for an expansion of Connecticut’s assault-weapons ban that would cover a broader array of weapons, ban their sale and make it a felony to possess an assault weapon without applying for a certificate of possession from the state. Democrats also called for a ban on large-capacity magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Republicans joined Democrats in calling for universal background checks, expanded safe-storage requirements, added requirements to buy ammunition and other measures. They cited 16 areas of agreement. Still, Democrats and Republicans ended up with sharply differing agendas on the most contentious issues, which leaders of the Democratic-controlled General Assembly must now address. The six leaders of the two houses aim to draw up legislation perhaps within the next week.

Democratic and Republican leaders of the gun-violence subcommittee of the Legislature’s Bipartisan Task Force on Gun Violence Prevention and Children’s Safety Tuesday said gun legislation had proved extraordinarily complex and contentious, given a historic outpouring of responses from opponents and supporters of new gun-control measures.

“My experience, having been in the Legislature for 32 years, is the level of broad-based interest in this subject is unprecedented,” said State Senator Martin Looney, co-chairman of the guns subcommittee. He said the volume of contact from residents and the galvanization of public interest was “extraordinary.”

But it was clear that bipartisanship had its limits.

Republicans hailed the committee’s “comprehensive approach to gun safety,” which they said would close loopholes in current law and restrict who can legally possess specific weapons.

But they said that partisan differences remained. Speaking for Republicans on the subcommittee, Representative Craig Miner, co-chairman of the guns subcommittee, said: “We believe it’s not the gun that kills the person. It’s the person that actually kills the person. That sounds kind of cold, but that’s the way it is.”

Gun-control advocates said that it was now up to the Democratic majority, acting in concert with a strong antigun agenda from Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, to act decisively in response to the Dec. 14 shootings that left 26 children and educators dead.

“For Republicans to think that is a response to Sandy Hook is just outrageous,” said Betty Gallo, a lobbyist for gun-control groups, adding that she didn’t understand why, almost three months since the shooting, “the Republican members of the task force brought forward a proposal that doesn’t address the enormity of what happened.”

The lack of consensus in the committee came as Democrats have become increasingly frustrated by the deliberativeness of the process while other states, including New York, have passed major gun legislation. On Feb. 21, Governor Malloy announced an aggressive agenda similar to what emerged from Democrats on the committee.

Last week, Senator Looney and the Senate president pro tempore, Donald Williams, both Democrats, urged action by March 13 — the next day, March 14, will signify the third month since the day of the shootings.

In a letter to colleagues, they wrote: “Other states — New York, Colorado and Maryland — have taken action since the Newtown tragedy. In Connecticut, we must not bow to pressure from those who would delay action as a way of blocking common-sense reforms.”

But Mr. Miner said there was no virtue in moving forward too quickly and added that the response to the New York legislation should serve as a warning to legislators in Connecticut.

“I don’t consider the time to be an issue,” Mr. Miner said. “If you look at some of the laws that have been passed already by our neighbors, some of the recommendations they are trying to recover from. Did they really finish their job when they passed the first bill? I would suggest they didn’t.”

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The Twin in the Background Takes Center Stage

He may need new material.

Mr. Castro, 38, is accustomed to being mistaken for his one-minute-older identical twin, Julián Castro, a rising political star who last summer became the first Latino to deliver a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. In the two months since Mr. Castro, a lawyer and former state legislator, was sworn into Congress, he has been the twin receiving the larger share of attention.

He received high-profile assignments to the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees and was elected president of the House Democrats’ freshman class. Although his own Congressional race was noncompetitive, he made fast friends and earned praise from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for raising cash for future colleagues.

And he has been an unofficial ambassador on immigration for the Obama administration, appearing on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC the morning after the White House’s comprehensive immigration plan leaked. There he lauded the president’s efforts and highlighted what he called “commonalities” between the administration’s proposal and one by a bipartisan group of senators.

“I’m trying to very quickly be as helpful as I can,” Mr. Castro said last week in an interview, “not only as a voice out there speaking about it in the news, but also internally, in the body.”

Business Insider named Mr. Castro one of its “12 most fascinating new members” of Congress. And a study by the University of Minnesota Smart Politics project ranked him the second-most-talked-about House freshman in terms of news media coverage, edging out Steve Stockman, the Friendswood Republican who brought the Obama-bashing rocker Ted Nugent as a guest to the president’s State of the Union address.

While there has been much public discussion about the ambitions of his brother to become governor, speculation is already mounting that Joaquin Castro could challenge Ted Cruz, the state’s Tea Party-backed junior United States senator, in 2018.

“Certainly my brother being in the spotlight the way he was at the Democratic National Convention helped a lot in terms of exposing us to the nation,” Mr. Castro said. “That said, I think that you’ve got to do well when you have the opportunity or those opportunities will go away.”

Mr. Castro has embraced the limelight and is leveraging the attention in many ways. He claimed one of the highly visible aisle seats hours ahead of the State of the Union address and uses distinctive wordplay to drive home one of his main messages, that education breeds prosperity for the underprivileged. In interviews and public appearances on a recent day in Washington, Mr. Castro used a term he coined — America’s “infrastructure of opportunity” — no fewer than six times.

He has also become a serious student of domestic and international policy. The academic aspect is familiar territory for Mr. Castro, who with his brother attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School after being raised on the working-class west side of San Antonio by his mother, a political activist.

He has surrounded himself with experienced staff members: his chief of staff is a former aide to Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, and his press secretary served Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader.

In a 12-hour period last week, Mr. Castro jumped from a meeting on Islamic terrorists in Eurasia to a briefing on challenges to the Voting Rights Act and the Defense of Marriage Act. He gave his first one-minute speech on the House floor, on the effects of sequestration, approaching the dais minutes after Speaker John Boehner accused the president of playing politics. Afterward, Mr. Castro dashed across town to a forum on high school graduation and college readiness.

Mr. Castro said it was too early to speculate on his political future.

“A lot of folks feel like my brother and me or other politicians chart out their careers from Day 1 until the end. I’ve never been like that,” he said. “I just believe that if I work hard and do well, who knows what the future holds?”

But he did not resist taking a thinly veiled jab at Mr. Cruz, who has made headlines in the Senate for a prosecutorial-style questioning of Mr. Obama’s defense secretary nominee, Chuck Hagel.

“I didn’t come here to be a wallflower, but I didn’t come here to get into a shouting match with everybody I meet either,” Mr. Castro said. “Doing your job requires different modes, and you can’t just be stuck in one mode where you’re always the shrill outsider screaming at everybody.”

The Castro brothers’ political allies credit them with boosting the national profile of Texas Democrats. State Representative Rafael Anchia, Democrat of Dallas, said they had “in a very short period of time almost single-handedly breathed life back into the Texas Democratic Party.”

Ed Espinoza, an Austin-based Democratic consultant, said that among the rising Latino stars on both sides of the aisle, the Castros pose a big electoral threat. “I don’t think the G.O.P. has the answer for them,” Mr. Espinoza said.

The state’s Republicans say they are unmoved. Jordan Berry, a political consultant who was on Mr. Cruz’s campaign, attributed the attention paid to the brothers to a “ ‘Parent Trap’ effect,” referring to the movie about identical twins, and said he was “confident in our bench over theirs” in the race to connect with the state’s rapidly expanding Latino population.

Rob Johnson, a Republican operative who ran a “super PAC” in support of Mr. Cruz’s primary opponent, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, said party leaders were unworried.

“We recognize that they’re talented politicians and political operatives, but this is also Texas, the reddest of the red states,” he said. “What we need to focus on is not what the other side is doing and saying, but what we as a party are doing and saying to grow our numbers among Latinos.”

For his part, Mr. Anchia, the Democratic state representative, said he was happy to see Mr. Castro getting his due on the national stage. He said Mr. Castro had spent more time in the last few years working to get his brother elected mayor than on cultivating his own aspirations.

“He sacrificed himself for his brother’s success,” Mr. Anchia said. “For someone who is equally bright, talented and ambitious, that was an admirable trait.”

Mr. Castro said he was glad to play a supporting role and that he did not believe that he had lost out.

“Somebody jokingly asked me a few years ago, ‘Who’s going to be the Jack Kennedy and who’s the Robert Kennedy?’ ” Mr. Castro recalled. “I said, ‘I’m glad to play the Robert Kennedy.’ ”

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Deep Philosophical Divide Underlies the Impasse

That can be difficult through the fog of political war that has hung over this town. But a step back illuminates roots deeper than the prevailing notion that Washington politicians are simply fools acting for electoral advantage or partisan spite.

Republicans don’t seek to grind government to a halt. But they do aim to shrink its size by an amount currently beyond their institutional power in Washington, or popular support in the country, to achieve.

Democrats don’t seek to cripple the nation with debt. But they do aim to preserve existing government programs without the ability, so far, to set levels of taxation commensurate with their cost.

At bottom, it is the oldest philosophic battle of the American party system — pitting Democrats’ desire to use government to cushion market outcomes and equalize opportunity against Republicans’ desire to limit government and maximize individual liberty.

And they are fighting it within a 21st-century political infrastructure that impedes compromise.

Those government initiatives include Social Security from F.D.R.’s New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid from L.B.J.’s Great Society, and the 2010 national health care law. President Obama wants to keep them in roughly their current forms — even as the wave of baby boom retirements makes them costlier than ever.

His Republican opponents are the philosophic heirs of conservatives who opposed their creation in the first place. Beginning in 2009, they gained fresh momentum in the quest to roll them back.

While the Great Recession depressed tax revenues, the Wall Street bailout and stimulus bill gave Americans sticker shock; deficits topped $1 trillion annually. So in 2011, the newly elected Republican House began pushing President Obama backward in budget fights that forced significant slowing of federal spending and some significant spending cuts.

Their climactic showdown over the debt limit in 2011 damaged the nation’s credit rating. With both sides battered and exhausted, Republicans joined Democrats in seizing the so-called sequester as the means to end the impasse.

Then Mr. Obama stopped backing up — and moved to generate momentum of his own.

The right’s soft spot, as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich learned amid the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s and early ’90s, is the popularity of expensive “entitlements” serving the elderly.

“Cut spending,” as a general invocation, is popular. “Cut spending for your mother’s Medicare” is not.

Mr. Obama used his re-election campaign to isolate and attack that vulnerability. Acknowledging the need for some entitlement cuts, he offered voters this budgetary choice: his smaller cuts combined with tax increases on affluent Americans, or the Republicans’ bigger ones without tax increases.

More Americans, as polls have repeatedly shown, prefer Mr. Obama’s approach. He won the election.

Now the president is trying to wield his public opinion advantage as a club to back Republicans down.

The budget cuts of 2011, like sequestration now, targeted smaller “discretionary” programs that don’t command the support Medicare and Social Security do. Mr. Obama argues, and some Republicans agree, that Washington has cut most of what it can from those.

He continues to advocate comparatively modest Medicare cuts focused on reimbursements to doctors and hospitals — more near-term cuts, in fact, than Republicans have been willing to specify. But at one high-profile event after another, in Washington and across the country, he accuses Republicans of preferring reduced benefits for old and vulnerable Americans over higher taxes on the affluent.

Opponents blast him for “campaigning” instead of governing. Yet those events have become his method of seeking outcomes that negotiations with Republican leaders haven’t produced.

It worked soon after the election when he forced Republicans to accept some tax increases in the “fiscal cliff” deal. It worked again when Republicans declined to fight anew over the debt limit until May, at the earliest.

That doesn’t mean it will work again by making Republicans accept a second tax increase.

Over the last generation, polarization has melted away the alloy that once narrowed differences between Republicans and Democrats, leaving both as masses of near-pure ideological ore.

The Republican rank-and-file is purer — more conservative than the Democratic rank-and-file is liberal.

Resisting tax increases is a matter of such deep conviction that some senior Republicans believe House colleagues would fire John A. Boehner as House speaker for conceding to Mr. Obama again. For less ideological Republicans, the partisan composition of their districts and states can make following national opinion riskier (against a more conservative primary challenger) than defying it (against a Democratic general-election foe).

The difficulty of winning a second tax increase may ultimately make the president regret the fiscal-cliff deal, which brought only half the new revenue he considers necessary.

For now, he seeks to grind down his opposition as the impact of sequestration mounts for air travelers, education programs and the Pentagon. Against Republicans’ solid edge on the issue of spending restraint (in this week’s NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll), he wields wide Democratic advantages on helping the middle class and protecting Medicare, and a narrow one on handling taxes.

The survey showed 50 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance. Only 29 percent expressed a positive view of the Republican Party.

Among demographic groups, the only one viewing Mr. Boehner’s party more positively than negatively was white Southerners (by just 39 percent to 35 percent at that). More than twice as many Americans credited Mr. Obama, as compared with Republicans, with emphasizing themes of bipartisan unity.

Even if numbers like those don’t threaten the House Republican majority in 2014, they alarm party strategists who’ve watched their nominees lose the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. Mr. Obama’s hope: the fact that Congressional Republicans are insulated from national opinion doesn’t make them impervious to it.

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The Payoff in Delaying Retirement

“It’s a disaster, but a slow rolling one,” said Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, wouldn’t disagree. “Other than being precisely the opposite of the kind of fiscal changes we need, what’s not to like?” he told me, with more than a touch of irony.

Yet despite the broad criticism, what the impasse between Democrats and Republicans just did to the federal budget is not at all atypical. It follows to the letter the most ironclad rule of American politics, which has held sway for the last three decades: spare the old.

The impasse was portrayed as a doomsday machine that went off unexpectedly — the consequence of an intractable divide in Washington over taxes and spending. It led to the so-called sequester, the product of a longstanding bipartisan reluctance to tinker with the social safety net erected to maintain the living standards of the elderly. Why? Because the old vote at much higher rates than the young.

It’s true that Republicans have offered plans to limit spending on Medicare and Social Security by turning them into voucher-type programs, letting seniors buy their own health insurance with a set amount of money and manage their own pensions. But they never dared pay the political cost of turning these ideas into law even when they controlled Congress and the White House.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been reluctant to put up an all-out fight for the large tax increases needed to pay for the expanding entitlement programs demanded by an aging population, without any cuts. Usually champions of progressivity, they have nonetheless resisted proposals to direct benefits for the elderly more specifically to low and middle income Americans.

This fixation on defending entrenched positions is getting us nowhere. The problem — a growing cohort of retirees, born during the baby boom, now claiming Social Security and Medicare — is only getting bigger.

But what if there were a way for the government to ease the strain that the aging place on the budget while actually increasing their income in retirement, at little or no cost to their benefits? A well-designed reform would even improve the nation’s rate of economic growth. The way to do it is simply to encourage older workers to spend a larger share of their increasing life spans in the work force.

Reform along this line might even garner bipartisan support. But it requires Democrats and Republicans to overcome their fear of disturbing the old.

Spending on Medicare, Social Security’s old age pensions and retirement programs for civilians and military on the federal payroll will hit almost 9 percent of the nation’s total economic output by 2023, according to baseline projections by the Congressional Budget Office. It will consume about 38 percent of the federal government’s entire budget, up from 25 percent four decades ago, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Meanwhile, the C.B.O. expects the discretionary part of the budget — which includes every program requiring annual appropriations, from the budgets of the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation to worker training programs and early childhood education — will shrink to its smallest share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration. Forty years ago discretionary programs, including much of the spending aimed at improving the economy for future generations, consumed more than half of the budget. In 10 years they will consume less than a quarter.

Senior citizens, to be sure, merit protection. Social insurance to keep retirees from dropping out of work and into poverty is as necessary today as when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935. But an income support system meant for a society where people retired in their late 60s and died in their late 70s is under strain as Americans take to retiring earlier and living well into their 80s and beyond.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 7, 2013

The Economic Scene column on Wednesday, about the benefits of encouraging workers to delay retirement, misidentified a science organization that receives an annual appropriation from Congress. It is the National Science Foundation, not the National Academy of Sciences.

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Massachusetts Primary Battles Heat Up

Two Democratic congressmen will square off in the April 30 primary; Republicans have a three-way race. The winners will face each other in a special election scheduled for June 25.

All five candidates submitted at least 10,000 signatures on Wednesday to earn a spot on their respective primary ballots. The signatures still have to be verified, but the field is almost certainly set.

The surprise entry on the Republican side was Michael J. Sullivan, a former United States attorney and former acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He managed to collect more than 23,000 signatures in 12 days without the aid of hired hands, which he called a “groundswell of support” for his candidacy.

The two other Republicans are State Representative Daniel B. Winslow and Gabriel E. Gomez, a businessman and former member of the Navy SEALs, both of whom used paid workers to help gather the requisite signatures.

The Republicans had to scramble for signatures in a brief time frame, made all the more narrow by the announcement just four weeks ago by former Senator Scott P. Brown that he would not seek the seat. Mr. Brown would have had no competition in a primary. Until he bowed out, the field was frozen.

The Democratic primary has been set for some time. A lengthy list of possible candidates — including the actor Ben Affleck and Edward M. Kennedy Jr. — evaporated after Representative Edward J. Markey, the liberal dean of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation, indicated early on that he would run. The Democratic establishment quickly coalesced around Mr. Markey in an attempt to stave off challengers who could drain the party of money and resources in a primary.

But Representative Stephen F. Lynch, a former ironworker who is the most conservative member of the delegation, entered the race anyway, and has been whipping up support among the unions. He and Mr. Markey have agreed to a series of six debates in the roughly 10 weeks before the primary.

If Mr. Markey wins, it seems likely that he will prevail in June, if only because Massachusetts is so heavily Democratic. Mr. Markey supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage and has sought action to stop global warming.

If Mr. Lynch is the winner, the political calculus will change. Some of this positions — he opposed President Obama’s health care plan and has been against abortion rights — put him out of sync with many in his party. Since entering the race, he has softened his stance against abortion but still calls himself “pro-life.” At one time he opposed gay marriage but changed his view many years ago. He supports a ban on assault weapons; he said he voted against such a ban in Massachusetts once several years ago because it was too weak, which reflected the view of the gun lobby, but he supported the federal ban.

“If Lynch wins the primary, it gets dicier” for the Democrats to win the general election, said Jeffrey M. Berry, a political scientist at Tufts University. “Some Democrats might sit it out.”

All three Republican contenders are starting out as relatively obscure and underfunded, Mr. Berry noted. He said they would have to spend money to raise their profiles in the primary, which could leave them short of cash by June.

Mr. Sullivan opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage; Mr. Winslow could have more appeal to Democrats since he supports both. Mr. Gomez has yet to articulate his positions on numerous issues.

While the Democratic National Committee is backing Mr. Markey, the Republican National Committee has not committed to backing the Republican nominee.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 1, 2013

An article on Thursday about a primary election in Massachusetts for the Senate seat relinquished by John Kerry misstated the timing of a decision by Representative Stephen F. Lynch, one of the Democratic contenders, to drop his opposition to same-sex marriage. He changed his position several years ago; he has not done so “since entering the race.” The article also overstated the degree to which Mr. Lynch has altered his positions since deciding to run. He has shifted on one — not “some” — issues. (He has softened his opposition to abortion, though he still calls himself “pro-life.”)

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Minority senators raise alarm on elections-linked bills

A trio of racially diverse state senators on Monday condemned elections-related bills that they say discriminate against minorities and called on the U.S. Department of Justice to monitor the legislation.

Of particular concern to the senators are Senate Bill 1003, which would limit who can return a voter's ballot, and SB 1261, which would drop people from the early voting list if they failed to mail in their ballots and instead voted at the polls. Both passed the Senate last week.

"It would truly throw up obstacles to the early-vote process," Senate Minority Leader Leah Landrum Taylor said of SB 1261. She is African-American.

She was joined by Sens. Jack Jackson Jr., a Navajo, and Steve Gallardo, who is Latino. All three are Democrats, and all three said the bills would have a "devastating" impact on minority voting.

Gallardo said the legislation is a great example of why Arizona still needs to be under the protection of the federal Voting Rights Act, which was passed to protect minority voting rights and just last week was the topic of a U.S. Supreme Court case.

"The potential effect of these bills is alarming, and the genesis of these bills is equally concerning," the senators wrote.

None of the groups that have worked to increase minority voting was invited to the meetings where the bill language was crafted, Gallardo said. Although the bills have the backing of the state's 15 county elections officials, Gallardo said, those officials need to look outside their offices and consider the effect on voters.

Sen. Michele Reagan, R-Scottsdale, introduced the bills and made changes in response to concerns raised at public hearings last month. SB 1003 originally said only an immediate family member or roommate could drop a person's ballot at the polls, but she changed it to allow the voter to designate someone to do so, requiring signed statements from both the voter and the person delivering the ballot.

But the bill prevents any member of a political committee, political party or group or organization -- such as those that mobilized Latino voters last fall -- from delivering people's ballots. However, it exempts candidates and their spouses, who could continue to collect ballots and deliver them to elections officials.

Anyone violating the return procedures would be guilty of a Class 6 felony.

Democratic Party officials said it's common for voters to drop off their ballots at party headquarters, because they are wary of the U.S. Postal Service. Last November, 600 to 700 voters did so, party spokesman Frank Camacho said.

The state Republican Party said it doesn't get such requests, but Maricopa County GOP Chairman A.J. LaFaro said it has happened on the county level. However, he said, party officials support SB 1003 and would adjust.

The senators also complained about another bill that would have required anyone who received an early ballot to return it a week before election day. That measure, SB 1274, was held in the Senate Elections Committee and has not advanced. The other two bills are awaiting action in the House.

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Critics assail reform plans for elections

Election 2012 -- with its surge of Latino voters, increase in impossible-to-track campaign donations, and hotly fought ballot measures -- is reverberating at the Legislature in a flurry of bills that seek to remedy the problems exposed by last fall's contests.

THE BILLS

Bills proposed to address the problems that occurred during the November general election would do the following:

Pare down early-voting lists.

Make it more difficult to deliver other people's ballots to polling places.

Make it more difficult to place citizen initiatives on the ballot.

But many of the bills, including three approved in the Senate last week, could backfire. County elections officials promoted much of the legislation in the name of trying to avoid a repeat of last fall's issues, when a flurry of provisional ballots caused final results to be delayed for more than a week. Many voters were forced to file provisional ballots because their names appeared on early-voting lists.

But new restrictions could alienate voters and lead to further confusion, if not lawsuits, critics argue.

One bill would pare down early-voting lists; another would make it more difficult to deliver other people's ballots to polling places; and other bills would make it more difficult to place citizen initiatives on the ballot.

The loudest complaints have come from Arizona's Latinos, who led aggressive voter-registration drives that added thousands of new voters to the rolls. Those voters tend to cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Others have criticized the double standard that would be created for petition-signature requirements: strict compliance for citizen-driven initiatives, but a looser standard for candidates.

"We should be working on encouraging folks to participate in our elections, not taking that right away," said Sen. Steve Gallardo, D-Phoenix, who has led the charge against bills that would tighten rules for Arizona's popular early-ballot program.

Sam Wercinski, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network, said the bills are not so much a reaction to the 2012 election as to the protests sparked by the two-week wait for results.

"We've always had large numbers of provisionals," said Wercinski, whose group lobbies for voting access. "I think politicians saw how powerful the permanent early-voting list and vote-by-mail are for new voters, and particularly Latino voters, and that's why we have all these bills."

Even elections officials, who would have to enforce whatever changes the Legislature approves, say the best solution to confusion over early voting is increased voter education. However, there is no money in the current bills to provide for greater voter outreach.

Lee Rowland, an attorney at the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, said Arizona is not alone in reacting to last fall's elections with a stream of proposed changes.

There was an "unprecedented level of restriction" in the 2012 election, she said, such as the refusal of Florida Gov. Rick Scott to extend early-voting hours to deal with long lines and confusion in Pennsylvania over a new voter-identification law.

"It's really important that the focus be on actual problems, not manufactured problems," Rowland said. "What we really shouldn't see is a return to some of the restrictive practices that happened before the election."

To hear the backers of some of the key bills at the Capitol, Arizona's laws weren't restrictive enough. From trying to rein in who can return a voter's ballot to how much scrutiny should be given to voter signatures on petitions, the bills seek to tighten the rules.

Early-vote troubles

Many of those provisional ballots that caused problems in last fall's election came from voters who had signed up on the permanent early-voting list and received a ballot in the mail. But on Election Day, for any number of reasons, people who received an early ballot walked into a polling place and either dropped it off or asked for a ballot. Those who got a new ballot had to vote provisionally so elections workers could verify that they had not voted twice. That process added time to the tabulation process.

It's not a phenomenon unique to 2012: Ever since Arizona created the early-voting list, late-arriving "early" ballots have slowed elections returns.

Senate Bill 1261 would thin out the permanent early-voting list by automatically removing any voter who does not vote by mail for two consecutive election cycles.

The clock would start ticking with the 2010 election, meaning voters who didn't cast an early ballot in 2010 and 2012 would be purged. They could still vote, but would have to do it the old-fashioned way by going to the polls.

The Arizona Voters Coalition doesn't like the automatic nature of the purge. Rather, this collection of civic groups said, the state should let voters opt out of the list. Coalition members include the League of Women Voters of Arizona, the Inter-Tribal Council and Mi Familia Vota.

The group also objected to the bill's original penalty of imposing a Class 5 felony, punishable by up to 11/2 years in prison, on anyone who knowingly altered a voter-registration form without consent of that voter. Sen. Michele Reagan, R-Scottsdale and the sponsor of SB 1261, reduced the penalty to a Class 6 felony, which often is bargained down to a misdemeanor.

The Senate approved the amended bill last week on a party-line 16-12 vote, with Democrats opposed. It's now in the House.

The state Democratic Party assailed Reagan over the bill, as well as two others approved by the Senate, sending out a news release headlined "Help stop voter suppression in Arizona" and charging that the bills were part of her strategy to nail down the GOP nomination for secretary of state in 2014.

Reagan, who's been clear about her interest in the top elections post, said the bills come with the backing of county elections officials, both Democrats and Republicans. They resulted from study sessions last year that involved an array of people involved in the elections process who were trying to plug the holes plaguing the system.

However, she never invited the Latino organizing groups that mobilized thousands of new voters. They held a news conference, testified at the Elections Committee hearings Reagan chairs and, just last week, staged a silent protest that led to their ejection from a Senate hearing room. About a dozen young people held up small signs claiming Reagan was anti-Latino.

These grass-roots groups are particularly upset with another Reagan bill that would limit who can carry a voter's ballot into a polling place. It carries a Class 6 felony penalty. Currently, anyone, or any group, can take in ballots, a practice that Reagan last month said she found appalling.

SB 1003 would require anyone who delivers a ballot on behalf of a voter to sign a statement that they have the voter's permission to do so. It's a concession to critics of the original bill, which would have limited the practice to immediate family members or roommates.

Reagan questions whether protesters realize she's amended the bill to allow the voter to designate anyone they want to deliver the ballot. And she has set up meetings to discuss concerns with these groups, saying they had never asked before they launched their protests.

SB 1003 is a response to the practice of grass-roots groups that signed up thousands of Latino voters and then collected their ballots for delivery to the polls.

"A lot of people trust us more than the U.S. mail to take in their ballots," said Brendan Walsh, who worked on voter registration and turnout with Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy.

SB 1003 also passed the Senate on the same 16-12 party-line vote. Sen. Jack Jackson Jr., who represents the Navajo and Hopi tribal areas, said SB 1003 could have a "devastating" impact.

"Republicans want to make a felon out of someone helping their neighbors to vote, but many members of our tribal communities live in remote areas and depend on help to deliver their early ballots," Jackson, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Initiative reform

Last summer saw courtroom battles over two of Arizona's most contentious ballot initiatives: to dedicate a permanent sales-tax increase to education and to create an open-primary system. Both withstood their challenges but lost at the polls.

But the legal battles could have turned out differently if SB 1264, also sponsored by Reagan, had been in place. The Senate approved the bill 16-12.

Among the two dozen changes the bill proposes is one that would make "strict compliance" the standard for voter signatures on initiative petitions.

In the court challenge to the open-primary system, the judge relied on a "substantial compliance" standard that allowed certain voter signatures to be counted, although opponents argued they should be tossed.

Chris Herstam, an attorney and former state lawmaker, questioned why the Legislature is creating a tougher standard for voter-initiated measures while not imposing it on their own candidate campaigns.

"An obvious double standard exists by giving candidates the benefit of the doubt, but not citizens who wish to utilize their constitutional rights," said Herstam, who supported the open-primary system.

This provision of SB 1264 would "neuter" the 101-year-old citizen-initiative process, he said.

Jim Drake, staff attorney for the secretary of state, said the rules for candidate petitions are in a different statute and should be looked at separately.

Another provision of the bill would clarify that only a copy of a citizen initiative that is time- and date-stamped by the Secretary of State's Office would qualify as the official version.

Backers of the education sales tax relied on a version of their measure that had been submitted electronically when they circulated petition sheets. The courts upheld the education supporters, and the measure qualified for the ballot over the objection of opponents.

However, the ensuing campaigns on the education sales tax and the open primary were defeated largely because of an infusion of money from non-profit corporations that are not required to disclose their donors.

Reagan said she couldn't find a way to force those groups to disclose their donors, and the Senate last week defeated a Democratic amendment that was an attempt to put the disclosure burden on the recipient of the outside contributions.

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