Katie Hobbs adds 88 vetoes to her record, rejecting GOP bills on schools, wolves and elections

Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs on Friday signed 72 pieces of legislation and vetoed another 88. 

Her signatures and vetoes came after a busy final week for the Republican-controlled state legislature, in which they voted on and sent her more than 150 bills. Many of those bills, which supported a far-right agenda, were passed along party lines in marathon voting sessions. 

The final day of the legislative session lasted from around 10:30 a.m. June 12 to 4:45 a.m. June 13. In those final hours, Republican legislative leaders also pushed through seven resolutions passed along party lines that will be sent to the voters, bypassing a Hobbs veto. 

The long list of Hobbs vetoes include:

• House Bill 2830, which would have forced Arizona schools to teach students about every stage of fetal development, but prohibited those lessons from including sex education. In her veto letter, Hobbs wrote that “instructional requirements should be left to experts, not politicians trying to force mandates on our teachers.”
• Senate Bill 1280, which would prohibit the state from bringing Mexican Gray Wolf puppies into Arizona or using state funds to do so. 
• Senate Bill 1015, which would allow people who detransition to sue the medical providers who performed their gender transition procedures for damages within 25 years of their transition, as long as that procedure happened when they were under 18. 
• Senate Bill 1013, which would ban the state from using diversity, equity and inclusion measures in its hiring practices. 

She also vetoed a handful of voting-related bills that were inspired by the evidence-free election fraud conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 and 2022 elections that have become core beliefs among Republicans. Those include Senate Bill 1057, which would require ballot paper used to include a list of anti-fraud measures, including watermarks and holographic foil, and Senate Bill 1038, which would make the cast vote record after Arizona elections a public record, releasable to the public. 

“I am confident in the ability of Arizona election officials to administer free and fair elections without added expense or complexity,” Hobbs wrote in her veto letter of SB1057. 

Rural Action Arizona celebrated her veto of House Bill 2873, a piece of legislation backed by data centers that would have allowed citizen petitions to the ballot to be withdrawn after they were already filed. 

“Today’s veto is proof that people power still works in Arizona,” Natali Fierros, executive director of Rural Arizona Action, said in a statement. “Arizonans called, emailed, and showed up because they refused to let data center lobbyists silence Marana. Governor Hobbs heard us, and this victory belongs to every single person who took action.”

The bills that Hobbs signed were all supported by a bipartisan group of legislators. 

Those include:

• Senate Bill 1416, which would require law enforcement agencies to submit detailed information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about a missing child within 24 hours of their disappearance. It would also require detailed information about the child’s description to be released to the media. 
• Senate Bill 1400, which would allow law enforcement agencies in the state to create mental health wellness and crisis response programs to help their employees deal with job-related trauma. 
• Senate Bill 1174, which would require the Arizona Department of Child Service to show in a single report “the entire history of a child and that child’s siblings who have been the subject of prior hotline calls or department investigations.”

Hobbs still has yet to act on about three dozen bills.

The 88 vetoes bring her total vetoes for 2026 to 151. Since she became governor in 2023, she has vetoed a record 541 pieces of legislation.