The Daily Agenda: The Pinal problem
Let's just say it wasn't politically savvy ... Joe Arpaio is still not winning ... And the mountains could be bigger.
Poll workers and observers spent several hours yesterday telling the Pinal County Board of Supervisors about a laundry list of problems at the polls in the county’s primary.
Some precincts ran out of ballots for some voters before noon. They waited hours to get more ballots. Some voters left. Some got angry. One was arrested, the sheriff said.
Poll workers didn’t get the equipment they needed. They weren’t properly trained. They’d call a phone number designed to help them with immediate problems and dispatch people to help, only to wait on hold.
Newly placed Elections Director Virginia Ross, formerly the elected recorder, explained what led to the ballot shortages: The previous director, who has since been fired, assumed nearly all people on the Active Early Voting List would not vote in person, which Ross called a “false assumption.”
“You have to be not only politically savvy, you have to be media savvy because if you’re hearing messaging from one party or the other party directing their members, their voters to go to the polls or to vote early, those observations need to be taken into account when you’re doing this work,” Ross told the board.
The county is working on an outside review of what went wrong that led to both the misprinted ballots and the problems on Election Day. That should be ready in a month or two, before the general election. In the meantime, county supervisors approved new positions to help run elections, increasing the department by five people, effectively doubling the people who report to Ross.
County officials have shown a willingness to accept responsibility for the disaster. Taking the time to learn from workers what went wrong is another good sign. Ross, who is now running the show, is a steady hand who understands Arizona elections.
But it’s going to take a lot of work to restore confidence. The problems didn’t all come from one elections director, and simply firing him doesn’t solve them.
And they’ll have to contend with lawsuits, one of which goes to a hearing today. Arizona Sen. Kelly Townsend, who lost her race, filed suit last week, seeking an injunction to stop the canvassing of the county’s election results. The county has already canvassed, so that particular lawsuit is likely moot.
Townsend, though, thinks voters have legal claims under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection provisions.
“After what we've heard here today, no one can argue that the people who voted in the morning were not treated differently than the people who voted in the afternoon or the evening,” Townsend told the board. “People were met with a different situation, and the right to vote was denied. The question is, how many were denied the right to vote?”
We still don’t know exactly how many people were denied the right to vote in Pinal County because of the bureaucratic meltdown. But the public deserves a solid estimate from the county, which has so far not provided one, to understand whether some outcomes could have been different.
Republican Rep. John Fillmore, who lost his legislative primary for re-election by a little more than 1,300 votes, also told us he’s considering a lawsuit, since he had momentum in Pinal County and might have been able to win if the county didn’t run out of ballots.
“I'm not gonna say that the election was rigged, like Trump,” he said, laughing. “I'm not gonna say that the election should be held over. I am going to focus on the fact that thousands of people's votes were disenfranchised, which is in violation of both the United States and the Arizona Constitution.”
He said his suggested remedy would be to simply put him on the November ballot — which, unlike the primary, will not be limited to Republicans and independents who request a Republican ballot. He said he might fare better in a general election, with Democrats voting, considering he once ran for Congress as a Democrat.
“Had there not been this SNAFU, there's a very good probability that I would have pulled it out as a squeaker,” he said. “So my request is just put me on the ballot.”
Without knowing how many voters were turned away, we’ll never know if Fillmore or any of the other failed candidates in Pinal County ever had a chance anyway.
Rachel has gone to Pinal County so much lately, she’s becoming part of the furniture in the supervisors’ meeting room. Help cover our trips out of town so we can bring you statewide news!
He doesn’t even go here!: The Department of Justice indicted a Missouri man for leaving threatening messages on Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s phone after the “Audit War Room” Twitter account, which was run by former and (likely) returning lawmakers Steve Montenegro and Ken Bennett, among others, spread lies about Richer’s office deleting election files. Walter Lee Hoornstra faces two charges, carrying maximum penalties of two and five years in prison. Richer says he has lots and lots more for the FBI and DOJ to investigate, and he blames his fellow Republicans, specifically Senate President Karen Fann, for egging violent extremists on with the audit.
“This voice message and every other one I received in mid-May is 100% Karen Fann’s doing,” Richer told the Arizona Mirror. “She authorized morons (to run the ‘audit’), exercised zero oversight and absolved herself of any responsibility.”
It’s a slam dunk: After getting trounced in the primary for a seat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, local election pen theft instigator Gail Golec is suing to try to stop the certification of the election. She’s representing herself.
Make Fountain Hills Great Again: The local election in the usually sleepy suburb of Fountain Hills was among the nastiest, dirtiest and most vitriolic residents have ever seen, the Republic’s Sam Kmack writes. The race shows, once again, that politics is a rotten business, that nonpartisan races are anything but and that most people have no idea what a city council does and instead want to scream about national issues. And in true Trumpian fashion, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is refusing to concede in the mayoral race, which he lost by a slim margin of 213 votes.
Just keep suing: There’s another federal lawsuit against one of the election integrity bills Republican lawmakers passed this year, this one focusing on Senate Bill 1260, which would, among other provisions, make it a felony to register a person to vote in Arizona if they are registered in another state. That’s problematic, the liberal groups that sued argued, because there’s no exemption for someone who now lives in Arizona and intends to stay and vote here. They argue other provisions of the law will disenfranchise people who move often, the Republic’s Ray Stern writes.
We’re sure this is the only case: Police and prosecutors presented “a troubling, unfair, and biased case” to grand jurors while seeking charges of negligent homicide against a woman who hit a cop with her car after the cop stepped into traffic, according to a Maricopa County judge. ABC15’s Dave Biscobing writes that the judge’s ruling notes that law enforcement left out key details, like that the cop didn’t look both ways before stepping out into traffic. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office must bring the case back to a grand jury in less than two weeks or it will be dismissed, Biscobing writes.
Avoid sewage whenever possible: The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality is warning Arizonans to avoid contact with water in the Nogales Wash after intermittent sewage flooding from Nogales, Sonora, caused sewage to leak into the wash. It’s a recurring problem, the Nogales International notes. The flooding has killed at least three people across the border.
We’re not in 2018 anymore: The Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy tags along with volunteers gathering signatures to force a referendum on Arizona’s new universal school voucher law, noting they accomplished the seemingly impossible task of collecting enough signatures for Prop 305 in 2018 to force a more watered-down version of the new law to the ballot, where the people vetoed it. The key difference between then and now, he writes, is that this year, education advocates face an organized opposition campaign, including protesters urging people to “decline to sign” when they try to gather signatures.
The rehabilitation tour: Former Trump White House spokesperson and one-time local Stephanie Grisham co-authored an op-ed in CNN with fellow Trump administration official Gavin James arguing Republicans need to stop putting Trump First, as Trump has always done, and start actually putting America First.
¿Dónde está Katie?: Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Katie Hobbs’ low-key campaign isn’t inspiring, well, pretty much anyone, including the Republic’s Laurie Roberts, who writes that waiting for GOP nominee and “total nutjob” Kari Lake to “hang herself with her extreme views,” as Hobbs seems to be doing, is not a winning strategy.
He writes the best ledes: “The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs may have had an accomplice,” the Arizona Daily Star’s Henry Brean writes in his latest about a team of researchers studying a crater at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that appears to be caused by a 66-million-year-old meteor big enough to decimate life on the planet.
When you can’t stonewall, slow-walk: Local reporter Dillon Rosenblatt yesterday kicked off his new Substack where he’s chasing down public records. He’s got a meta piece detailing what he found from requesting the public records requests log from Gov. Doug Ducey’s office. While there were a number of quick turnarounds, it took the governor’s office more than a month to produce records for most requests. The longest took 553 days.
Our bad: We had a water fact wrong in yesterday’s edition. The federal cuts announced this week were part of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan, but they could still cut more if states don’t come together to do it first. The web version was corrected to fix the mistake. Thanks to the wonks who pointed this out to us!
As the city of Tucson takes a cautious approach to spending its $150 million surplus, selecting items like IT infrastructure, investments in the police department and additional trash pickup, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Steller has better ideas of how to spend the money.
He suggests building a water slide down A Mountain, stringing a zipline to escape flood zones, throwing a really big 250th birthday for the city or making the local mountains bigger by digging out smaller mountains and putting them on top.
“Mount Lemmon and the Santa Catalinas are impressive, but they’re not as impressive as they were around 25 million years ago,” he writes.
Instead of using "Our bad" for the water fact correction, I would have preferred a liquid based pun. Something like "We slipped up" would have sufficed.
Tim Steller’s idea isn’t new. Google “heaping Pelion on Ossa.”