In one of America’s least democratic elections, the rule is not one person, one vote. It’s one acre, one vote.
Only property owners in metropolitan Phoenix can cast ballots in the April 7 race for control of the Salt River Project, one of the nation’s largest public power utilities. Early voting began this week for the landowning select, and the more land they own, the more votes they get. A farmer with 200 acres gets 200 votes; a suburban homeowner on a quarter of an acre gets a quarter of a vote. Renters are locked out entirely.
The system dates back to 1903, nearly a decade before Arizona became a state, when just a few thousand people lived in the Valley of the Sun. Since then, sprawling subdivisions have replaced cotton fields, and Phoenix has swelled to the fifth-largest city in the country. But the property ownership requirement has stuck, even as similar restrictions elsewhere were found unconstitutional during the expansion of voting rights in the 1960s.
“It is unconscionable, it is wrong, it is undemocratic,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Grand Canyon chapter of the Sierra Club. “It is some kind of feudal system.”
Seatholders on the boards and councils that oversee the Salt River Project are powerful. They set rules and decide how much the utility’s millions of customers will pay for power and water, crucial questions in a place where droughts are constant; air conditioning is essential; and electricity prices have risen, as they have in much of the country.
This year’s election is poised to be the most competitive and combative yet, as Turning Point USA, the Phoenix-based right-wing political group founded by Charlie Kirk, is spending big to defeat a slate of candidates backing more renewable energy, who are in turn supported by Ms. Bahr’s Sierra Club and other environmental groups.
Most of the clean-energy proponents want an overhaul of the election system, which they say has given agricultural interests and large farmers too much influence while disenfranchising ratepayers who don’t own homes.
“What century is this?” said Randy Miller, one of the pro-renewable-energy candidates who has served on the Salt River board since 2018. “We’ve got to change something.”
Turning Point, by contrast, appears content to work with the system as is.
“We’re just playing within the rules of the system as it was established,” said Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point.
The Salt River Project began as a solution to the valley’s unpredictable and devastating cycles of floods and droughts, which made life difficult for early Western farmers and settlers.
The project’s Roosevelt Dam, a soaring 357-foot masonry structure northeast of Phoenix that was completed in the early 1900s, impounded the Salt River, creating a reliable source of water and, eventually, hydroelectric power. The dam, a monument to engineering prowess and the nation’s vision of Manifest Destiny, made modern-day Phoenix possible.
To secure federal loans for the construction, valley residents put up their property as collateral. Large landowners took on greater financial risk in the deal, so they were awarded more voting power in what would become the Salt River Project.
The region has transformed since then, and the utility’s debts have been paid off. But still, argued Michael O’Connor, Salt River’s chief legal executive, it could someday use the land in its territory as collateral again, so property owners continue to deserve special status.
“This system has worked” to deliver reliable, affordable power and water, Mr. O’Connor said. “When you look at it, the results speak for themselves.”
The property requirement has been challenged before. In 1981, a voting rights lawsuit by a group of Phoenix residents landed in the Supreme Court, which narrowly sided with Salt River, 5 to 4. The utility’s specialized activities had a greater impact on landowners, the majority ruled, so the “one person, one vote” principle should not apply.
The Salt River Project remains the largest and most influential utility with property-based voting, experts said, but some water districts in Arizona and across the West have similar restrictions. They’ve survived because most voters are not paying attention, said Katherine Levine Einstein, a political science professor at Boston University who has studied such voting restrictions.
“Because these elections are so low salience, we end up with exclusionary and undemocratic measures,” she said.
Efforts to make the Salt River race more accessible — such as holding it on the same day as state and federal elections — have not gained traction. Changing the “one acre, one vote” policy would require approval from the utility board and the state legislature, an unlikely proposition.
Ms. Bahr of the Sierra Club and the candidate Mr. Miller say new rules would make the utility more responsive to ratepayers who favor rooftop solar and other forms of renewable energy.
“They’re scared of that,” Mr. Miller said of his opponents. “It’s challenging the status quo.”
Barry Paceley, who owns a construction company and is running for Salt River Project vice president, said the voting requirements ensured that those casting ballots “have some skin in the game.”
The customers barred from voting, which include both renters and those who own homes outside the utility’s original boundaries, can “call their friends, neighbors, folks in their church and say, ‘I can’t vote over there but you can,’” Mr. Paceley said.
Even nonvoting ratepayers should be grateful to be Salt River customers, he added, because the utility’s costs are lower than its for-profit competitors.
Turning Point is backing Mr. Paceley’s campaign, and Mr. Kolvet said the group was “agnostic” about the election rules. The group views the race as an opportunity to mobilize its field team ahead of the midterms; Turning Point’s door knockers have registered thousands of new candidates for the election.
It is also an opportunity, Mr. Kolvet said, to fend off “a rear-guard attack from radical environmentalists who want to reshape water and energy policies.”
Reis Thebault is a Phoenix-based reporter for The Times, covering the American Southwest.
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