Some votes are hard. This one was not.
In 2005, the Arizona Legislature took up Senate Bill 1382. Its official short title was four words long: "sex offenders; registration." What it did was require a registered sex offender who moves to Arizona from another state to register here too.
The Arizona Senate passed it 28–0. The House Judiciary Committee approved it 8–0. The House Rules Committee approved it 9–0. On April 18, 2005, the full House passed it 55 to 3. The governor signed it four days later, and it became Chapter 176 of Arizona's laws. All of that is on the Legislature's own bill record.
Nobody in the Arizona Senate could find a reason to vote no. Seventeen committee members in the House couldn't find one either.
Three House members did. According to reporting by Sahara Sajjadi at The Copper Courier, one of them was a state representative from Gilbert named Andy Biggs, a few years into his first stint in the Legislature.
Biggs is now the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona.
What the bill actually asked for
It is worth being precise about how small this bill was, because "voted against a sex offender bill" can mean a lot of things.
Arizona already required people convicted of sex offenses in Arizona to register with law enforcement. The gap SB 1382 closed was the one at the state line: someone convicted in another state, already on that state's registry, could move to Arizona and — under the law as it stood — slip out of the system.
The bill said: if you were on the registry where you came from, you're on the registry here.
That's it. No new crimes. No new prison sentences. No new spending. A paperwork requirement so that Arizona police would know who had moved into their towns.
Fifty-five of Biggs's colleagues voted yes. Every single senator voted yes. A Republican governor signed it.
This is not the first time we've written this sentence
If this were the only vote of its kind in Biggs's career, it would be a curiosity — one strange no vote from twenty years ago, easily explained away as a libertarian objection to registries in general.
It isn't the only one.
In 2013, when Biggs was president of the Arizona Senate, the Legislature tried to strip police powers from the Colorado City Marshal's Office — the department that the U.S. Justice Department later sued for serving the leadership of a polygamous sect instead of the public, including in an effort to return a fleeing child bride to the group.
The bill passed the state House overwhelmingly. It reached Biggs's Senate, and it never got a vote.
The Republican who wrote that bill told us exactly what he thinks happened. We laid the whole thing out in "The Republican Who Wrote the Bill Says Andy Biggs Killed It", and the sponsor's own words are the headline: "Women and children suffered three years longer because he protected the bad guys."
Two votes, eight years apart, on two different bills, in two different chambers. Both times the overwhelming majority of Arizona Republicans went one way. Both times Biggs went the other.
Why it's coming up now
Biggs is running for governor against incumbent Katie Hobbs, and his record on this has become an issue in the race. His campaign's position is that these characterizations are unfair.
Voters can weigh that. But they should weigh it against the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is not really arguable:
- Senate vote on SB 1382: 28–0.
- House Judiciary Committee: 8–0.
- House Rules Committee: 9–0.
- House floor vote: 55–3.
- Governor: signed.
When a bill moves through a legislature without a single senator and without a single committee member opposing it, and three people out of sixty on the House floor say no, the burden of explanation is on the three.
Twenty-one years later, Andy Biggs is asking Arizonans to make him the person who signs or vetoes bills like this one.
He owes them an explanation of that vote. So far, he hasn't given one.
Source
Over 20 years, Andy Biggs repeatedly voted to protect sex predators — The Copper Courier, August 21, 2026, by Sahara Sajjadi. Photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP.
