Write In Charles Eakins — Arizona House, LD1

My name won't be printed on your ballot.

That isn't a mistake — it's how a write-in campaign works. It means I have to ask you for something more specific than a vote.

Find "State Representative" There's a blank write-in line underneath the printed names.
Write in Charles Eakins Spelling doesn't have to be perfect. Legible is enough.
Fill in the oval next to the line This is the step people miss. A name without a filled oval doesn't get counted.

Why I'm running.

I tried to talk to my state representative. He blocked me.

Quang Nguyen uses his social media accounts to conduct the public's business. His profile lists him as State Representative for LD1 and Chair of House Judiciary. He posts there about his committee's agenda, the bills he sponsors, and legislation signed into law. Then he blocked me from it.

In Lindke v. Freed (2024), the Supreme Court held that when an official uses a social media account to exercise government authority, blocking citizens from it can violate the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit, which covers Arizona, applied that rule the following year in Garnier v. O'Connor-Ratcliff.

I'm not running over a block. I'm running because a representative who won't hear from one constituent shouldn't be the only choice the rest of the district gets.

He doesn't think we're equal before the law.

Threatening someone is already a crime in Arizona. So is harassment. Those laws protect every one of us the same way.

In January 2026, Quang Nguyen introduced HB2412 to change that. Under his bill, the same words that are a misdemeanor when you say them to your neighbor become a felony when you say them to a public official, a government employee, or a member of their family.

Threatening or intimidating: six months for the rest of us, a class 3 felony for them — the same tier Arizona law reserves for threats made on behalf of a criminal street gang. Harassment: six months for us, a class 5 felony for them. Identical conduct. The only thing that changes is who was listening.

He also left "harassment" defined exactly as loosely as it already was — conduct that seriously "alarms, annoys, humiliates or mentally distresses." Annoys. Writing to your representative too often, in a way he found seriously annoying, would have carried a prison sentence.

The bill died in the House Judiciary Committee. He chairs that committee.

I don't want to live in a state where the people who work for us are harder to criticize than the people who don't.

I didn't just complain. I wrote the bill.

Arizona protects you at trial. It does nothing to protect you from the trial.

If you lawfully defend yourself here, you can still be arrested, charged, held, and taken through a full jury trial before a judge ever rules on whether you were justified. You win — after the legal bills, the lost job, and a year of your life. The process is the punishment.

Florida fixed this in 2017. So did Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and South Carolina. They give you a pretrial hearing where the state has to prove you weren't justified, before it drags you through a trial. Arizona has no such procedure.

So I wrote one. It's a draft, it needs Legislative Council review and a sponsor, and you can read every word of it.

Read the Arizona Pretrial Self-Defense Immunity Act →

They made speaking the crime.

As of September 12, it is a crime in Arizona to fly a drone over your own backyard — if you are using it to say something.

A law that took effect this month puts a one-mile criminal zone around any ticketed event. There is an exception for your own property, and then the exception is withdrawn if the flight is used “to convey or communicate a message.” Same drone, same yard, same altitude. The only thing that changes is whether you were speaking.

It also exempts hobbyists while reaching the press and small businesses by name, makes it a felony to photograph “near” a facility without ever saying what near means, and turns any FAA regulation into an Arizona misdemeanor with no intent requirement at all.

Read what the statute actually says →

Who I am

Charles Eakins outdoors with his dog Luna, red rock formations behind them. — Me and Luna, out under the red rocks.

I started working at fourteen, on job sites with my dad doing construction. Through my teens and into adulthood I apprenticed under my grandfather hanging drywall — hanging board, taping, mudding, sanding. He built houses up and down the Verde Valley, and he taught me the trade the way it gets taught: on the job, with him watching. It's honest work, and the kind where nobody has to tell you whether you did it right. You can see it.

I'd been writing software since I was twelve. In my mid-twenties I went into IT full time, and I've spent more than 25 years since building backend systems, test automation, and hardware firmware.

I never stopped making things with my hands. 3D printing, laser cutting and engraving, CAD design. I designed the circuit board and wrote the software for a Prescott Valley company's product — which is about the best description of how I work that I've got: figure out the hardware, then make it do something useful.

I also wrote GridWalker, a free, open-source app for wilderness search and rescue. It works offline, with no cell signal, because that's the situation searches actually happen in. I gave it away rather than sell it.

Where I come from

I was born in Phoenix, but Pine is home. That's where most of my formative years were — a small town under the Mogollon Rim, a couple thousand people. Rural Arizona isn't an abstraction to me. It's where I'm from.

I come from a long line of rebels, and I can trace it back to the founding of this country. My eighth great-grandfather, William Shippen Sr., was a Philadelphia physician who represented Pennsylvania in the Continental Congress.

He also built things meant to outlast him. With Benjamin Franklin he founded the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and served as a trustee there for twenty-four years. His brother Edward was one of the founders of Princeton, where William sat on the board from 1765 to 1796 — thirty-one years. Two of the oldest universities in the country, and the Shippens had a hand in both.

My grandfather was aboard the USS Utah when she was torpedoed and capsized at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Fifty-eight men did not get off that ship. He did.

Years later, during the Korean War, he served aboard the USS Missouri — and it's worth saying what that ship was.

The Missouri was commissioned in June 1944 and reached the Pacific that January. She covered the landings at Iwo Jima, fought through the Okinawa campaign, and shelled the Japanese home islands, earning three battle stars. In May 1945 she became flagship of the Third Fleet. Then, on the morning of September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, with MacArthur and Nimitz aboard, the Japanese delegation signed the instrument of surrender on her deck. The Second World War ended on that ship.

My grandfather came aboard later, for a different war. The Missouri went back into combat off Korea and earned five more battle stars — shore bombardment at Inchon, fire support for the Marines at the Chosin Reservoir. That was the deck he stood on.

That's who I come from. One grandfather who came home from two wars, another who built houses across the Verde Valley and put a taping knife in my hands, and a father who had me on a job site at fourteen. People who made things that had to hold up, and who didn't get to argue with the result.

Charles Eakins