Arizona’s Election Bungle
Once again, the Grand Canyon State is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
by Tom Raabe
November 26, 2022, 10:36 PM
What is going on in Arizona?
That is a good question, which spawns a myriad of subquestions: Did the 2022 midterms turn Arizona blue, or at a minimum, purple? Is Arizona where the “stop the steal” movement went to die? Did the midterm election show the toxicity of a Trump endorsement in local general-election races? And how is it that Florida, a state with three times the population of Arizona, can have its votes counted before you go to bed on election night, but it takes Arizona almost two weeks?
Those are all valid questions, but here’s another, more pertinent query: Are Arizona election officials so incompetent that, even after all the problems in the 2020 election and with the eyes of the nation focused on them in the 2022 midterms, they could manage to royally screw up another election?
It turns out, this last question is a rhetorical one.
On election eve, Nov. 7, the vote tabulators at all 223 vote centers in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county, comprising 62 percent of the state’s population, were checked and verified to be working properly. On election day, Nov. 8, in the first 30 minutes of voting, the tabulators started malfunctioning. During the day at least 25 percent of the tabulators were not tabulating votes; the county puts the number at 60 or 70, although others cite a higher figure. One team of Republican lawyers, led by Mark Sonnenklar, a roving attorney with the Republican National Committee’s Election Integrity program in Arizona, visited 115 of the 223 vote centers and found that 72 of them (62.61 percent) “had material problems with the tabulators not being able to tabulate ballots, causing voters to either deposit their ballots into box 3, spoil their ballots and re-vote, or get frustrated and leave the vote center without voting.”
The voters with denied votes were instructed to put their completed ballots in a special place — Box 3 or Door 3, it was called; those ballots would be tabulated later, they were told. However, many of those ballots were mixed with ballots already counted, making it impossible to determine which ballots were yet to be tallied.
more
https://spectator.org/arizonas-election-bungle/
