Tucson Weekly’s White House Stunt Slows Hand Count Audit of Primary in Pima County

Jimmy Nintzel must have thought it would be a cute PR stunt for his paper that would widen voter participation and engagement with the primary election, but the Weekly’s Project Whitehouse turned out to be a big waste of time for the volunteers who performed the hand count audits of the election returns. It may have been cute, irreverent, obnoxious, silly, creative and iconoclastic (all adjectives I strongly support), but it had real world consequences that need to be acknowledged.

Almost 50 vanity candidates, publicity hounds, and outright wackadoodles were placed on the primary ballots of both parties with the help and encouragement of Nintzel and and Weekly – far more of that ilk than normally populates presidential primary tickets.

The result was an appreciable amount of volunteer time burned needlessly by the counting and recounting of ballots because of these dead-weight candidates.

Secretary of State Jan Brewer, who seems to be hostile to any citizen involvement in or oversight of our elections, issued ridiculously obtuse guidelines this year for the hand count audit procedures that seemed designed to annoy, harass  and waste the time of anyone involved in the process; even the County Attorneys involved with the count took a "don’t shoot the messenger" attitude toward the SoS’s procedure. The result was that the sampled precincts’ ballots had to be counted and re-counted multiple extra times because of all the minor candidates added to the ballot by The Weekly’s stunt.

Next time, Weekly, consider the poor poll workers, elections employees, and audit volunteers whose time and resources are wasted by stupid and extravagant PR stunts with our elections that don’t produce any public good whatsoever.

Well, maybe not quite no public good at all; the Project did demonstrate how ridiculously lax ballot access rules in the Presidential primary actually are. We should probably ensure that Nintzel and his band of merry pranksters can’t do this again in 2012.