The Daily Agenda: Hand count confusion in Cochise County
The Daily Agenda: Hand count confusion in Cochise County
Never a good idea to vote before knowing any details ... Would be cool if voter intimidation stopped ... And we all hate fundraising emails.
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After declaring on Monday that they were ready to go to jail over ordering a full hand count of the upcoming election, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors now says “full” doesn’t necessarily mean a 100% hand count, and the two board members who authorized the count say they intend to follow state law.
Just how they plan to do the count, while keeping it within the parameters of state law, is still a big question mark.
“One of the things that has been said a lot is, how are we going to even count all the ballots? … It's not my job to accomplish this. We will do that together,” Supervisor Peggy Judd, one of the two supervisors who voted for the hand count, said at a meeting Wednesday.
In case you haven’t been following the news out of Cochise County, two of the three county supervisors voted to do a hand count … of some kind. With less than two weeks to Election Day, the county has yet to figure out how to do this time-intensive, costly task. And there’s been confusion over what the supervisors themselves actually want to do.
The questions surrounding the hand count and its process hold huge significance. If the county proceeds, vote totals could be delayed, potentially affecting close statewide races. It’s not clear what would happen if the hand count doesn’t align with the machine tabulations. The costs, from both the count itself and legal fallout, could be huge.
The local paper, the Sierra Vista Herald, wrote an editorial deriding the hand count, calling it a “direct attack against Cochise County voters, election workers and everyone else who believes in a fair and functional vote.”
Wednesday’s meeting came after the Secretary of State’s Office threatened to sue the county, and the county’s own attorney, and its insurer, warned the proposal stepped outside the law and that supervisors could be held personally liable. There’s no precedent in law for a 100% hand count of all ballots.
State law and the Election Procedures Manual set specific steps for a hand count of any kind, which the Secretary of State’s Office detailed in a letter to the county. For example, it said the county could hand count ballots cast on Election Day in person, but not early ballots. And per state law, it can only audit four races on the ballot, not all of them.
And a legal hand count must include people from all political parties, the letter noted. That would give local Democrats the ability to decline to participate and thus derail the effort.
The SOS gave the county until 5 p.m. Wednesday to respond with what they intend to do. The supervisors voted to respond by saying they intend to follow state law, providing no details on how.
At one point in Wednesday’s meeting, Judd also claimed the Arizona Senate would be helping cover the costs of the hand count, saying she’d been assured the Senate “has money for that” and “they will grant us that money.”
Not so, Arizona Senate GOP spokeswoman Kim Quintero said1.
“This is not accurate. The Senate will not be helping with expenses incurred by a hand count the board authorized. Not sure why this misinformation was put out there by this board member,” Quintero said via email.
Despite the endless confusion over what’s happening with the count, one thing is clear: Changing election processes so close to an election creates not only confusion, but sows distrust in the elections. A hand count is unlikely to assure election deniers and skeptics that our processes work — it could do just the opposite.
Goldwatergate?: The Phoenix Police Department is investigating a burglary at Democratic gubernatorial nominee Katie Hobbs’ campaign office in downtown Phoenix that occurred sometime Monday night or Tuesday morning. Details were scarce as of our deadline, but there are surveillance pics of the guy who the campaign suspects did it.
What’s on the phone?: AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to keep her phone out of the hands of the Jan. 6 committee, which subpoenaed her and her husband’s records, Havasu’s Today’s News-Herald reports. The 9th Circuit’s ruling against Ward is now on hold.
Our current reality: Two lawsuits now contend that the people watching drop boxes are violating the law and intimidating voters. One of those cases was before federal Judge Mike Liburdi on Wednesday, who said he would rule quickly, possibly by Friday. Meanwhile, Clean Elections (the state agency) sent a cease and desist letter to Clean Elections USA (one of the groups encouraging drop box watching), telling them to stop using the name because it confuses the public. Gov. Doug Ducey lightly weighed in on the issue, saying he wanted people to “follow the law.”
Cut that red tape: Ducey has made slashing regulations a key part of his administration for the past eight years, but the Republic found that Ducey created twice as many regulations as he took off the books, and some of the regulatory changes he included in his tallies were simple changes like making letters lowercase.
A little battle over democracy: The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington profiles Democratic secretary of state candidate Adrian Fontes and the stakes of our state’s race for elections chief, which could decide the fate of the 2024 presidential election. In the profile, Adrian calls his opponent, Mark Finchem, a “fascist” and says he’s determined to “kick Finchem’s ass in November.” And Time profiles Kari Lake and her rise as the new face of MAGA, saying that she’ll remain a key figure to the movement even if she loses.
“That’s total bull—t,” Lake told Time when asked about certifying the 2024 election. “I will certify the 2024 election. You know why? Because we’re going to have election integrity bills that are passed that shore up our election laws, that remove loopholes from cheating. By the 2024 election, we’re going to have honest elections in Arizona, full stop.”
Makes no sense: During her Clean Elections interview, GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake claimed that restricting abortions would lead to “locking up a lot more rapists,” a claim that has no basis in fact, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. Lake did not respond to the outlet to clarify her comments.
The former and future governor: Though he won’t be governor next year, Ducey is already putting up $100 million of federal COVID-19 relief funds for a repeat of the summer camps the state funded this summer to help students catch up, Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer reports.
We’re flyover country to him: In an article about how the White House is anxious about Democrats’ chances in November, Politico reports there’s “widespread frustration” with Hobbs’ “tentative” gubernatorial campaign, as Lake could serve as a possible running mate to Donald Trump in 2024. The article also notes that President Joe Biden skipped stumping with Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly on a recent tour of the West, since Kelly didn’t invite him.
Candidate intimidation: Former lawmaker Demion Clinco, now a member of the Pima County Community College District Governing Board running for re-election, returned home from a candidate forum last week to find campaign signs in his own yard calling him a racist and a liar in Spanish, the Daily Star’s Tim Steller reports. The signs claim to be paid for by a group that doesn’t exist, so Clinco ripped them out of his yard and removed other signs around town. The usually sleepy race is “unusually expensive and hostile” this year, Steller writes, as board members consider firing the college’s chancellor.
That’ll show her: The State Bar of Arizona gave a slap on the wrist to Erin Otis, the high-level prosecutor at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, after ABC15’s Dave Biscobing unearthed records earlier this year showing she mocked and ridiculed people in her courtroom and took cases that presented a clear conflict of interest. But it’s not clear why the Bar issued the admonishment, its lowest form of discipline, against her, Biscobing writes.
Some ways are better than others: With his scheduled execution looming, Arizona inmate Murray Hopper refused to pick a method of execution, so the state plans to use its default of lethal injection, the Associated Press reports. No condemned prisoners have opted for Arizona’s newly refurbished gas chambers, which uses the same hydrogen cyanide gas that Nazi concentration camps used, as their preferred method of death.
“Death penalty experts say the United States switched to lethal injection due to the horrific nature of gas executions, which they say are slow and leave the condemned gasping for breath and thrashing in their restraints while appearing to be in excruciating pain,” the AP’s Jacques Billeaud writes.
California-ing Arizona, then the country: An Arizona initiative to prevent medical creditors from price-gouging medical debts, Prop 209, which is backed by California union money, could become a model initiative for progressives in other conservative states, Politico writes, if Arizona voters ultimately pass it.
Not gonna break the bank: Three Gilbert residents who were kicked out of a town council meeting for “silently holding signs that read ‘Stop Lying’ and ‘Don’t Mesa My Gilbert’” are threatening to sue the town for violating their free speech rights, the Gilbert Sun’s Cecilia Chan reports. While government bodies routinely ban signs at public meetings, the trio isn’t asking for much: Their attorney Tim La Sota says they’re willing to settle for $1 and an apology.
We bet you’ve all received fundraising emails from political parties and candidates that are FULL of RANDOM CAPS LOCK and strangely bolded passages and overly familiar language (“you up?”) that implore you to bust out your wallet OR THE BAD GUYS WILL WIN.
That’s why we love this McSweeney’s take on those emails, titled “If I Emailed My Parents Like Democrats Email Me.”
There could be new leadership in the Senate by the time the county needed funds, which would affect the Senate’s potential involvement, but Judd didn’t specify who told her the county could get state funding.
Just a thought. You might like to look into the Mayor’s race in Sedona. One completely incompetent candidate has collected $86k and the other $57k in a community of 10,000. Much outside money and advertising out of the area by Armstrong the $86k candidate. Might read in Red Rock News. Just a thought. Crazy money for a job that pays about $600. a month.
Arizona State Representative Karen Johnson introduced legislation in 2006 that would have required hand counting all elections in Arizona. That bill, successfully passing the House of Representatives, was assigned to Judiciary Committee in the Senate where a strike all amendment converted that census to an audit, the random selection of candidates and voting precincts to ensure that the machine counts were accurate.
In 2020, eleven of 15 counties complied with that state law. Evidently, Cochise was not among those eleven and is now attempting to not only comply with the law but to expand the audit to ensure that universe from which the sample is drawn is complete.
So, the Supervisors of Cochise County are acting sensibly while the Arizona State Senators were insane.
To have been acting sanely, the Arizona State Senate would have mimicked Cochise County, expanding the Maricopa County machine count audit (which was performed) slightly, but also expanding the audit to Registrations, Mail-in ballot requests and voting statewide.
The evidence suggests that Arizona Democrats are massively ballot harvesting in apartments, condominiums, mobile-home complexes, nursing homes and remote areas of outlying counties; leading Republicans by 24,000 ballots in mail-in ballot returns.
A guest on Horizon last week was just open about it; "the Democrats have found a way around the ballot harvesting prohibition".
Meanwhile, Republicans are still obsessed with the red herring of machine counts. Morons.
The obsession with ballot boxes is a part of this moronic behavior. The only time to watch ballot drop boxes is in the final three days of the election; when USPS boxes can no longer be used as mail-in ballot drop boxes.