Mule Train Mail: Mickey Duniho Writes an Open Letter to C. Huckelberry on Elections Security

Mr. Huckelberry:

I got wind of your latest memo on
election security [pdf download] by reading about it in a Tucson Citizen article. Given that
you mentioned my name in the memo, I would have expected to receive a courtesy
copy of the memo. Maybe my copy went astray.

On page 14 of your memo you said
that the Pima County Democratic Party Election Integrity Committee “has
failed to provide a number of items that it agreed to provide in response to
County requests”, including a copy of an election integrity manual that I
drafted for the party. [Download ei_manualcomplete.doc
]

I don’t know about requests to the committee, but
I provided a copy of the draft manual to the County as part of my deposition in
November 2007. I think the manual was an exhibit at the trial in December 2007.
John Moffatt was present at the November 2007 deposition, so I assumed that he
got a copy of the manual at that time. To avoid having your copy of the manual
get lost again in the County bureaucracy, I am sending it directly to you as an
attachment to this email. I want to point out that this is a draft that has not
yet been officially adopted by any part of the Arizona Democratic Party.

Your memo contains a number of good
ideas for improving election integrity in Pima County,
particularly your recommendations to improve procedures for chain-of-custody
control of ballots, doubling the number of ballots to be hand counted, and
adding the hand-count audit process to non-partisan elections. If you would
also require sorting early ballots by precinct before hand counting them, it
would greatly improve your recommended hand-count process.

Unfortunately, doubling the number
of early ballots hand counted in the recent Presidential primary would not be
an improvement. There were no Democratic ballots included in the hand count audit
and a ridiculously minuscule number of Republican early ballots: 1 batch of the
four percent of the ballots that had been set aside for hand counting. When I
complained about this omission to Brad Nelson, he claimed he was following the
Secretary of State’s manual. He did not read the manual correctly, and
the writer of the manual did not read the statute (ARS 16.602.C.3) correctly. I
hope that you will remedy this defect in future elections.

I am also attaching a file
containing the 22 suggestions I offered to you in December 2007 in response to
your call for public comment on election integrity. You recommended in your
memo adopting two of these suggestions and part of a third. I have highlighted
the adopted suggestions in green and key parts of the other suggestions in
yellow. I hope you will reconsider your omission. All of these ideas are
already operational procedures in Tucson
City elections and would
be excellent improvements to the County’s procedures.