Month: November 2012

Team McSally seeks to suppress conditional ballots from Latino districts in Cochise County

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Tucson Weekly reports that Team McSally is trying to suppress conditional ballots from Latino districts in Cochise County by seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent provisional ballots from being counted on the specious grounds that the enclosure envelope was not sealed before being presented to election officials.

Spoiler alert: there is nothing in the statutes that require a sealed envelope — the ballots were accepted by poll workers, so the chain of custody was complete. CD2 Update: Republicans Go to Cochise County Court To Block Counting of Provisional Ballots in Latino Precincts:

[Martha McSally's] attorneys were in Cochise County court today in an effort to block
the counting of provisional ballots in a predominantly Latino precinct.

Barber’s campaign manager, Jessica Floyd, said it was an effort by Team McSally to disenfranchise Cochise County voters.

"We respect the ballot counting process currently taking place and want
to see it move forward,” Floyd said in statement. “The request for a
temporary restraining order filed today is an active attempt by Martha
McSally’s attorneys to disenfranchise voters in Cochise County. Throwing
away the votes of Southern Arizonans is wrong and unacceptable.”

* * *

Attorneys Eric H. Spencer and Michael Liburdi of the Snell and Wilmer
law firm claim that approximately 130 provisional ballots should not be
counted because they “have been spoiled because they were not sealed,
as required, when they were transported from the Castro Park, Ramsey and
Hopi Precinct polling locations to the Cochise County Elections
Department and Recorder’s Office.”

The lawyers have asked for a temporary restraining order to keep the
Cochise County Division of Elections from counting the ballots.

But attorneys Paul F. Eckstein, Dan Barr and David Gaona of the Perkins
Coie law firm, which is representing Barber, say that Judge Wallace R.
Hoggart should reject the request for a temporary restraining order
because Spencer and Liburdi “simply cannot point to anything in section
16-584(D)—or any section of the election code, for that matter—which
would require that provisional ballots be sealed when presented to
election officials for verification.”

The more things change . . .

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by David Safier

I just finished Jeff Biggers' new book, State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream. Biggers could have used a quote attributed to Mark Twain in his book's introduction: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” He moves back and forth between recent state history and Arizona's earlier years, pre- and post-statehood, showing that though things change, they also stay the same. It's a good read.

Take this passage from an essay by George W. P. Hunt, who would go on to be the first Governor of the new state of Arizona. Hunt was a successful businessman, but he never forgot his days as a worker, whose side he often took against what he called the "controlling influence" of the railroads and mining industries.

The same spirit of ruthless aggression which has crushed life and hope out of millions of lives in the factories, mills and mines of unhappier states, is gradually invading Arizona, calling up the courage and determination of every citizen in the defence of human rights. . . . It is right and just for every citizen, be he wealthy or be he poor, to take an active interest in public affairs, but the bounds of justice are transcended, and the rights of a free people are seriously menaced when corporations, as such, become compactly organized into political alliances for the influencing of legislation and the election of officials.

Hunt's concern about corporatization sounds incredible modern. His warnings about corporations forming political alliances to influence legislation — think ALEC — or to control elections — think Citizens United as the latest incarnation of the attempts to control the outcome of elections — resonate today as much as they did in the 1890s.

National spotlight of shame on Arizona’s ‘broken-on-purpose’ election

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A dedicated group of high school students, Adios Arpaio, ran a successful drive to register new voters in Maricopa County to vote out the anti-immigrant sheriff of Maricopa County, Crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio. Adios Arpaio registered more than 34,000 new voters, exceeding their goal of 30,000. Well done!

But then those new voters ran into trouble on election day. Many of these newly registered voters were also signed up for the "permanent early voter list" (PEVL) but claim they never received their early mail ballot. Many other newly registered voters somehow did not appear on the voter register at their polling locations. These voters were given either provisional ballots or conditional provisional ballots.

Predictably, election officials and Arizona's GOPropaganda media blamed these voters for all the election day problems. Shorter version: "How dare they register to vote and actually show up to vote!"

Voters who received a conditional provisional ballot have until the close of business on Wednesday to return to their County Recorder's Office with the additional identification required to verify their voter status so that their ballot is counted.

Several voting rights groups, campaigns and the Democratic Party are phone banking these conditional provisional voters and even offering transportation to the their County Recorder's Office to assist them. Help out if you can.

Could The Real Political Upheaval Take Place On The Left?

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Posted by Bob Lord

I have a different view of the Republican bloodletting we seem to be witnessing now. Even before the election, the so-called pundits were predicting the internecine war that would take place within the Republican Party. The masters of the obvious predictably predicted a struggle between the teabaggers and the Establishment. Somewhat less predictably, there now seems to be a spat between the newly identified "conservative entertainment crowd" (i.e., Fox and Rush) and the morons who believed their wild-eyed predictions. This aspect of the squabble is kind of hilarious, because we're seeing that the whole right-wing crowd was led astray by a bunch of gasbags who just couldn't get their collective heads around the idea that polls have predictive value. They even had a website where they "unskewed" the polls. And it also appears that the Romney campaign was throwing fake polling data into the mix, which apparently deceived even the deceivers over at Fox. 

What we're not seeing is any real analysis of how all this will play out in the long-term. The furthest the analysis goes is whether the Republican Party will be able to recover, or whether it will go the way of the Whigs, or somewhere in between. But the real change could actually take place on the left. Here's why:

Governor Brewer Signals Support of Comprehensive Immigration… and Then Walks it Back

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By Michael Bryan

hat tip to Crooks & Liars:

Perhaps Governor Dingbat's staff should just stop allowing her to do live interviews.

Brahm Resnick interviewed Brewer post-election and prodded her regarding the softening in her party nationally on comprehensive immigration reform after the drubbing her ticket got among Latinos (a 44% gap on the Presidential line). He asked Brewer if she would now be open to a comprehensive immigration deal now that her enforcement first position has so thoroughly alienated Latino voters.

"But here's the thing," Resnik pointed out. "With John Boehner and Sean Hannity, Grover Norquist and [Maricopa County Attorney] Bill Montgomery — what he said in particular was, 'You know what? We can do both at once. We can secure the border and do comprehensive immigration reform.' Is that something you're on with? Because it sounds like you are just a secure-the-border-first person."

"What ever works," Brewer replied. "If we can do both at the same time, I'm fine and dandy with that. But we cannot resolve these kinds of issues today and then have the problems still existing."

Well, that's certainly a new tune for Brewer.

Of course, she didn't really mean it. On Sunday, KPNX reported that Brewer's office had contacted Resnick after the interview was recorded on Friday to walk back her support for comprehensive immigration reform in concert with securing the border.

Spokesman Matt Benson said, "the governor still believes in securing the border first," Resnik wrote. "He added that she was willing to 'come to the table' to deal with all immigration issues. Later Friday, the governor's office issued a statement reaffirming her 'secure the border first' stance."

It should not come as a surprise that Brewer's head remains buried in the sand. Toward the end of the interview she clearly implied that the Obama Administration intentionally leaves the Tucson sector "unsecured" in order to whip up racial animus to secure the Latino vote.

GovBrewerObamaWhen asked if the GOP, and the AZGOP especially, deserved any blame for alienating Latinos, she replied, "No, President Obama, in the last four years, they've had four years to get our borders secured and they refused to do it, but yet we know they can. We know that they can secure the borders. Why won't they secure the border? Because they wanted that out there because they knew that they could turn it into an issue of all about racism."

Say what? So Obama has purposely left the border insecure (despite cleverly covering his tracks by plowing more billions into enforcement, deporting at a record clip, and radically expanding manpower on the border) in order to alarm white folks so much that they'll go batshit, pass a bunch or racist legislation and piss off Latinos, so that in turn Latinos will feel so disrespected by the GOP that they'll vote for him in droves? Now we're deep in the crazy…

Reality adjustment just isn't in the cards for politicians like Brewer and Arpaio. They are incapable of acknowledging that their belief that the Obama Administration and Dems are exploiting racism is nothing more than projection of their own racist motives onto the opposition. The AZGOP has been successfully exploiting racial animus and the fears of white America to win elections for several cycles now. Expecting them to stop now and support a reasonable resolution is like expecting a Coatimundi to ditch its own tail rings.

If the GOP wants a fresh start with Latino voters, they can only do so with fresh GOP politicians who didn't cut their teeth on denigrating Latinos and scaring the shit out of white voters (with headless corpses in the desert, for example…)
to get elected. Of course, that disqualifies nearly every currently elected AZ GOP pol… 

See the video after the click…