It seems that Republican Rep. Rachel Keshel (formerly Rachel Jones) did not appreciate that we published an interview with William Coffin, the pseudonymous Twitter personality whose research questions whether she really lives in Legislative District 17 — the Tucson district she represents.
We introduced ourselves to her on the House floor yesterday before the session started.
“Yeah, no. Goodbye,” Keshel said after hearing we were from the Agenda. “I’m not talking to you. You guys are encouraging someone who is breaking the law.”
Keshel hasn’t directly answered questions about where she resides. And that didn’t change yesterday as she declined to confirm that she lives in LD17 and fled into the House members’ lounge.
We managed to snag a photo of Keshel (on left) before she noticed the camera and moved to stand behind Rep. John Gillette (right) for several minutes.
Coffin has relentlessly challenged Keshel to give a clear answer about whether she lives in the district. Keshel has always used a P.O. Box as her filing address on campaign finance reports — which obfuscates her actual residential address. Interestingly, that part is legal: A bill passed back in 2022 and signed by then-Gov. Doug Ducey allows politicians to hide their address on voter rolls, making it difficult to verify if your representatives actually represent you.
State lawmakers — unlike members of Congress — are required by law to live in the district they represent.1
But there’s a long history of the courts taking a laissez faire approach to the question of residency, including in the cases of former lawmakers Darin Mitchell, Don Shooter, Carlyle Begay, Justine Wadsack, Kelli Butler and current lawmaker Michael Way. (We could go on, but you get the point.)
Coffin has pointed out that Keshel’s new husband, right-wing election conspiracy theorist Seth Keshel, bought a house in Vail, Arizona, in January 2024 — right around the time the two got together. That house lies a bit outside the district Keshel still represents.
But as recently as January, she said in a financial disclosure statement that she lives with Seth.
She did, however, recently respond to Coffin’s questions by escalating the internet showdown and filing a lawsuit against the mysterious internet investigator — whom she has accused on Twitter of “obsessive stalking and unhinged harassment.”
On Friday, a Pima County Superior Court judge granted an injunction against Coffin, which we were able to confirm with the court. However, the details of it remain under wraps because the court has sealed the case. It’s worth noting that injunctions of this nature are fairly easy to obtain and are usually granted out of an abundance of caution.
Coffin hasn’t been served yet, which puts him in a bit of a Catch-22. While he’s aware of the injunction, he’s unable to actually see what the judge ordered. Considering his identity is unknown, it’s unclear how the court is going to serve him — unless Keshel knows more about her digital adversary than she is willing to say publicly.
He could go down to Pima County Superior Court to contest the order, but that would mean he would have to unmask himself for the court (and anyway, he’s noted that he lives in the Phoenix metro area).
We’ve filed a request for the court to make the order (and Keshel’s allegations) public.
While we wait on more details, we thought we’d use today’s edition to break down the ongoing tit-for-tat between Coffin and Keshel — which might be summarized best in this exchange:
Unless you’re a junkie for both Arizona politics and Twitter — in which case, God speed — the odds are that you haven’t been following closely along.
So here’s a timeline of events in the saga. Obviously, there are a lot of holes in the story — and we asked Keshel to explain these via email after she rebuked us. But we haven’t heard back.
2023
January — Rachel Jones takes office as a representative of Legislative District 17. The address she lists in her financial disclosure form later in the month is a house in the district. (Note: In all three financial disclosure statements filed since, Keshel lists her address as the Arizona Capitol.)
Here’s a map of Legislative District 17.
March — Jones signs a statement of interest for reelection to her LD17 seat in 2024.
September — Jones and her husband, Justin Wade Jones, file for divorce in Pima County.
2024
January 4 — The Jones’ divorce is finalized.
January 12 — Seth Keshel purchases a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in Vail, AZ, according to documents from the Pima County Recorder’s Office. This property lies in Legislative District 19.
April — Seth Keshel donates $536 to Mark Finchem’s Senate campaign, providing an address in Aledo, TX.
May — Seth Keshel and Rachel Jones file an affidavit for a marriage license in Pima County. Their marriage license is granted about a month later in June.
November — Rachel Jones (or maybe Keshel at this point) wins reelection. (For simplicity and clarity, we’re switching to first names — Rachel and Seth — from here on out.)
2025
January — After being reelected, Rachel starts publicly using Keshel as her last name. On her financial disclosure form, she lists the Arizona Capitol as her address, as she did the previous year. On her financial disclosure form, she says she lives with her husband
April — Seth refinances the mortgage for the Vail home using a Veterans Affairs’ program, which allows vets to take advantage of preferential terms on a primary residence. This means Seth listed the house in LD19 as his primary residence.
April — Rachel files a statement of interest to run in LD17.
September 26 — Rachel donates $156 to GOP Rep. Alex Kolodin in his run for secretary of state. She lists a house in her district, LD17, as her address. According to Zillow, the house was put on the rental market just four days before the donation and wasn’t taken off the market until December 15.
2026
January 7 — Rachel distributes $250 to former GOP Sen. Steve Yarbrough, who isn’t running. She lists the same address that she used when she donated to Kolodin.
January 29 — Rachel again says that she lives with her husband and lists her address as the Arizona Capitol.
March 11 — Coffin posts an article documenting his research and questioning whether Rachel lives in her district. Over the next few weeks, he relentlessly asks Rachel to provide proof that she does.
March 23 — Rachel begins to respond to Twitter users claiming she doesn’t live in her district.
April 3 — Rachel tweets that she has been “learning a lot about cyberstalking and harassment” in an apparent jab at Coffin.
April 7 — Coffin says that the Keshels must have “executed some kind of mass reporting” against his account, which is briefly locked.
April 7 — Rachel claims on Twitter that she presented “CONCRETE evidence” about her living situation (though didn’t say what it was), says without evidence that Coffin is “encouraging cuckoos” to harm her, and adds that one elected official can back her up on living in the district.
“LD17 Democrats should ask my seatmate, @KevinVolkAZ (Rep. Kevin Volk) about the time that he sat at my kitchen table in our district and had a cup of coffee with me,” Keshel tweeted.
Just 14 minutes after the very precisely worded tweet about her table in her district, Rachel seemed to suddenly have it out for Volk, turning the tables on the centrist Democrat.
“Trust fund baby Kevin Volk, from the very prosperous Volk properties, supposedly lives in some dumpy apartment in the middle of Tucson but I’m the one with a questionable residency. Yeah. OK.”
We asked Volk about it. While he confirmed the meeting happened just after the 2024 election — which he “appreciated” — he wouldn’t say whether the house was in the district or if it seemed like Keshel lived there. Instead, he made a political pivot and took the opportunity to endorse fellow Democratic candidate Holly Lyon.
April 9 — A Pima County judge enters an injunction against harassment for Coffin on Rachel’s request. The allegations against Coffin are not yet public, but we’ve filed a request to get the document.
Yesterday, we told you that there was “no smoking gun” connecting Republican Rep. Jeff Weninger’s strike-everything amendment to an effort to keep Marana citizens from voting to stop Beale Infrastructure from building a data center in their backyard — but that the circumstantial evidence is pretty damning.
This morning, Tucson Agenda subscriber (and Arizona Senate Democratic Leader) Priya Sundareshan told us she has the smoking gun.
“I can confirm that Beale is lobbying for this bill,” she emailed us.
It’s worth noting that Beale didn’t sign up in the Legislature’s “request to speak” system to publicly support the bill.
But Democrats like Sundareshan zeroed in on the strangely specific retroactive emergency clause in the bill and realized what it was really about. On the Senate floor last week, they tried to argue that the bill is clearly all about stopping a referendum against a data center project in Marana.
“The voters who have worked with an organization to be able to put that referral onto the ballot … are, as some might say, S.O.L. (shit out of luck)” under the bill, Sundareshan said.
But Republican Sen. Mark Finchem, who used to represent Marana, shut down that line of questioning.
“Senator, for the third time, this is not about data centers,” Finchem said. “This is about a person or organization that files a referendum petition with a city can also withdraw it … Please stay to the amendment.”
The bill is expected to come up for a vote in the Senate, then return to the House for a final vote, this week.
A perfect storm: The growing lines at local food banks are a clear sign of the country’s priorities, Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes. While the Trump administration pushes for a $1.5 trillion military budget, the Big Beautiful Bill from last year is forcing states like Arizona to cut their SNAP rolls and add more paperwork requirements for people struggling to get by. On top of all that, in 2023 Arizona cut 120 jobs of people who check SNAP eligibility. That’s bad news for a 46-year-old man who told Steller he makes minimum wage in construction, but still had his $200 per month food stamps denied.
“They told me I make too much,” he said. “How do I make too much when I’m living paycheck to paycheck?”
Good riddance: After several years of gathering signatures, residents of the San Clemente neighborhood in Tucson celebrated after they removed the racist covenants in property agreements that forbid sales to people who aren’t “White or Caucasian race,” per KVOA. One resident said she was shocked to learn her family wouldn’t have been allowed to buy a home in the neighborhood under those covenants, which date back to the early 1900s. (If you’re curious, this interactive map shows which neighborhoods have the covenants.)
That’s a no-go: A Pima County Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by opponents of Project Blue, Arizona Public Media’s Katya Mendoza reports. The No Desert Data Center Coalition argued unsuccessfully that Pima County officials violated open meeting law and misled the public when they approved the rezoning that paved the way for Project Blue, without stating in the meeting agenda the purpose of the rezoning. The coalition now has 30 days to appeal.
Transparency alert: The Tucson Police Department encrypted its radio calls, which means you won’t be able to listen to a police scanner and know what local cops are doing, KGUN’s Alex Dowd reports. Police officials say criminals have been monitoring their calls, which sometimes include sensitive information like the addresses of witnesses. The decision didn’t sit well with Tucsonans who run Facebook groups and post police activity online, but TPD says they can use a public-facing dashboard instead.
Bit by bit, it gets harder to track what powerful officials are doing. But you can reverse that trend by investing in local reporters who hold officials accountable.
When did the clock start?: Lawyers for Global Community Communications Alliance, a spiritual compound near Tumacácori that is getting sued by a woman who says she was abused there as a child, say the statute of limitations has run out on most of her claims, the Green Valley News’ Dan Shearer reports. The woman’s lawyers say those limitations don’t apply to this type of case, because the abuse was ongoing for years and the alleged abusers had near total control over the plaintiff.
0.0000083%
That’s the percentage of ballots cast in Arizona during the 2024 election that could potentially be fraudulent, Mary Jo Pitzl reports for Capitol Media Services.
It’s so small we had to think back to middle-school math to figure out how to say it. We’re pretty sure that’s just shy of one millionth of a percent.
In plain language, it’s 28 ballots out of 3.6 million.
That should put the election conspiracies to bed, right?
Sigh.
Anyway, most of the 28 suspicious ballots were from people who voted in Arizona and then voted again in another state.
Just three ballots are still under investigation by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, including one where it looks like somebody voted the ballot of a dead person.
Republican voters accounted for 15 of the suspicious ballots — more than half. Eight were from independents, four were from Democrats and one was from a voter whose party affiliation was unclear.
1 The state Constitution only requires that candidates live in the county they seek to represent, not the district — a vestige of Arizona not having legislative districts when it became a state. That distinction between law and the Constitution was lost on election conspiracist Shelby Busch and her election conspiracist lawyer, Bryan Blehm, who once had to pay out attorney fees for challenging then-Democratic Rep. Kelli Butler’s residency on the grounds that the Arizona Constitution requires candidates to live in their district.