While we’ve been watching the situation, and talking about it on radio over the past week, here at The BRAD BLOG we’ve yet to have time to cover what’s going on in Arizona — most acutely in Maricopa County (Phoenix) — where some half a million ballots remain untallied a week after the election when many Hispanic voters who thought they were registered to vote, were directed to cast a provisional ballot instead…for some reason.
Under Arizona law, those voters have until Wednesday to show up to the County Clerk’s office with ID to prove they are who they said they were when they cast their ballots last week. The approximately 486,405 uncounted ballots across the state include 307,620 early ballots and 178,785 provisionals. That’s 1 out of 4 ballots cast across the state still not included in the results, to date.
In the bargain, a whole bunch of Arizona races — including their U.S. Senate race, a number of U.S. House races, and several state and local races — remain officially “undecided” at the moment and/or could see their currently announced “winners” become losers.
The DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, according to TPM, may, or may not, be keeping their eyes on the situation there.
The Hispanic community in the state, thankfully, is not taking this one sitting down…especially not after standing in line for hours just to cast their vote, or, in this case, provisional ballots that may or may not be counted. They have been surrounding the Maricopa County Clerk’s office in a 24 hour vigil, and phone-banking to call those who were forced to vote provisionally, to let them know they need to get back to the Clerk’s office ASAP to try and assure their vote actually gets counted.
This is among the darkest sides of the GOP’s War on Democracy that we’ve been covering all year (for many years, actually) and the shameful battle continues at this hour. We may have more details in the days ahead (on this, and other uncounted ballots and undecided races in other states as well), but, for now, Rachel Maddow did a great overview on MSNBC last night, of the assault on democracy currently being played out in Arizona…
Brad, one of the points Rachel made was that Maricopa had closed 1/3 of its polling places.
According to the U.S. census, more than one half of the state’s entire population resides in Maricopa County. Of that, 58.3% are listed as non-Hispanic whites. That means that AZ closed 1/3 of the polling places in its most populous county — a county with a large (aka Democratic leaning) minority population.
Query: What type of voting systems are in use in Maricopa County?
Verifiedvoting.org indicates that AZ mostly uses a combination of paper ballots with central tabulators and DRE’s with a paper trail —
Maricopa county, with 1.8 million registered voters, uses the Sequoia Optech Insight optical scan reader & tabulator.
Maricopa uses Sequoia paper ballot op-scan for most voters (and Sequoia touch-screen for disabled-accessible voting).
Yeah, it all seems legit, because working class people who can barely afford to take 5 hours off from one of their two jobs to vote can now take another 5 hours off to go fight with “city hall” to get their vote counted.
The fix is in.
Please confirm that the SoS of Arizona is a Rethuglican? I’m just guessing on that.
This is the same county that “accidentally” printed NOV 8TH as election day on some of it’s spanish language only materials – not once, but TWICE, months apart.
Wow,just wow. They actually take your ballot and make a duplicate because the machine can’t count it if it has a smudge or such. Why not just count it by hand?
From NPR’s Ted Robbins.
ROBBINS: Judy Nelson and Rosemarie Johnson are filling in duplicate ballots by hand. Arizona counties use the kind of the ballot where voters fill in the bubble next to a candidate’s name. The voting machines can’t read it when the original ballot has a smudge, a tear, a coffee stain or, in this case, a check mark next to a name instead of the bubble filled in with black ink. And this step comes after other workers verify the signature on the ballot.
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/13/165057232/some-arizona-counties-still-counting-ballots
The system is crazy! Nuts! Just count the ballots. Are all the ballots being saved? Where is the “army of lawyers” we kept hearing about (again) supposedly to protect the voters rights? What is the DOJ doing?
Can we ever get uniform standards for federal elections? Paper trails, early voting etc?
As soon as an election is over and POTUS is selected, the “army of lawyers” disappears into the vapor. And winners never both to try and get all the votes counted, because it’s not “in their best interest.”
Of all the missed opportunities, it would have been in 2000 for (then) Governor Gregoire of Washinton to have forced a full investigation into voting irregularities with electronic voting machines in Snohomish County. She had just squeaked by in multiple recounts after having 15,000+ votes stolen from her in Snohomish county, and could have used her power as Governor to expose that.
But, she was scared to “stir the pot” and, as a result, missed an opportunity to save us from 2004 and beyond.
The winners will never fight for electoral justice and the losers have no clout to do so and are labeled “sore losers” for doing so.
Dear Brad,
Off-topic (but related to election fraud)
Here’s an explosive story reported by Wonkette.com . If this story is correct, Anonymous blocked Karl Rove from stealing Ohio again. Please investigate this if you can.
http://wonkette.com/489966/anonymous-claims-it-stopped-karl-rove-from-hacking-the-election-by-hacking-orca-we-think#more-489966
The author claims that hackers constructed a password-protected firewall that prevented Rove’s goons from doing a repeat of 2004. The hackers then watched as the goons frantically tried to penetrate the firewall — with “exactly 105” password attempts!
If true, this account would explain Rove’s meltdown on Fox News at approximately 11:10PM on Election Night, 2012.
Brad,
Here are more details that make Anonymous’s exploit described in Comment #9 more plausible:
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2012/1954