Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
When Jan Brewer was Secretary of State, she frequently mismanaged elections in this state from improperly certifying election software that had not been properly reviewed and certified by the federal testing labs and purchasing security vulnerable touch-screen voting machines, to being unable to timely validate signatures on petitions for voter initiatives.
Two measures made it onto the 2008 ballot after Brewer threw up her hands when she was unable to timely validate petition signatures and she used her discretion to simply order the measures onto the ballot. The Legislature subsequently moved up Arizona's primary date by a week to accommodate Brewer's inability to perform the essential functions of her job in a timely manner.
When election experts complained about Brewer's mismanagement of elections, she dismissed them as "anarchists." She really did. Arizona Secretary of State Calls Transparent Election Advocates 'Anarchists', 'Conspiracy Theorists"
Then there was the whole conflict of interest and appearance of impropriety issue surrounding Jan Brewer's highly partisan role as co-chair of the George W. Bush campaign (2004) and the John McCain campaign (2008). This put her in the league of Ken Blackwell (Ohio) and Katherine Harris (Florida), among the worst secretaries of state in the country.
Now that the Accidental Governor's appointee, Ken Bennett, is Secretary of State he is following in Jan Brewer's footsteps of election mismanagement. The Arizona Republic reported Wrong voting info sent to 191,000 Arizona homes:
Leading up to Tuesday's sales-tax election, more than 10 percent of Arizona voters were told to cast ballots at the wrong location — and the reason why is in dispute.
In 12 of 15 Arizona counties, some voters received publicity pamphlets that directed them to non-existent polling places. Maricopa, Pima and Apache counties were not affected.
About 191,000 households received the wrong information last month, and people began calling Secretary of State Ken Bennett's office to complain. The state mailed postcards to voters with the correct information the week of May 3. [An additional $35,000 in costs.]
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Bennett's office, which oversees statewide elections, determined the wrong voter-registration data base had been used to generate polling place information.
Tuesday's election was consolidated, meaning the state combined multiple precincts into one polling place to save money. The publicity pamphlets used the voter database for the general election, which uses more polling places.
Bennett's office blamed the error on Omaha-based Election Systems & Software, which developed and maintains Arizona's voter-registration database.
* * *
But ES&S said Bennett's office had approved the information that went out in the pamphlets.
"We did everything on our end that our customer asked us to do," said Kim Gurznick, a company spokeswoman. "There were items that were signed off by the customer before the actions were completed."
No more excuses. Just say no to Republican incompetence. Elect a Democrat as our next Secretary of State and let's begin to clean up this mess.
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Bennett’s too distracted with the lawsuits against his company (Global Building Systems) to function as SOS. I am supporting Sam Wercinski for SOS because he has the proven leadership skills Ken Bennett lacks. When Sam was chairman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party he increased the number of PCs so that there was one in each precinct. He also conceived the idea of GEMDEMS, the West Valley Democrats, and the Circle of Friends who provide significant funding for the MCDP. Sam was the first SOS candidate from either party to file – more signatures than were needed and for all 15 counties – evidence of the statewide network of supporters he has been building since last summer. Sam also just received the endorsement of Planned Parenthood of Arizona. Sam is on a roll.