Monday, July 16th, 2007...9:26 pm
I Have Them Right Here Somewhere, I Guess…
Randy Pullen’s has spent the last few months claiming that the Republican party has registered thousands of new voters. I’m assuming that the majority of these voters are Republicans, or it would defeat the purpose of the whole enterprise, wouldn’t it?
So, then the question becomes, where the heck are these folks hiding?
Take a look at what has happened to Republican registration over the past few months. At the November election, Arizona had 1,014,690 Republicans. By the time of the next quarterly report, in January (around the time Pullen was elected chair), the number of Republicans had climbed to 1,019,422. One more report was submitted, in April, and the number of Republicans had actually decreased slightly to 1,019,220. So, during the first months of his term, the state has actually lost Republican registrants. During that same period, by the way, the number of total voters increased by more than 15,000.
Okay, I’m being unfair here. This wonderful new voter registration program may not have hit high gear until after April. Or, even better, all they could have registered thousands of new voters, but it wasn’t enough to offset the losses in other parts of the state. Wait, that wouldn’t be saying much, would it?
The trouble is that Pullen has been making claims that just can’t be possible. For example, he claimed at a District 17 meeting a while back that there are 5,000 new Republicans registered there. Well, a couple of things stretch credulity here. There are 24,972 Republicans in that district now, so that would be a 20% jump in only a couple of months. The district has also been trending Democratic for a decade. The district used to be considered bulletproof Republican, but now is represented by three Democrats. Even better, Democrats are now only 415 registrants short of the Republicans there. If Pullen managed to turn that around that quickly, then maybe he’s got skills the rest of us haven’t fully acknowledged. Needless to say, these phantasmic voters didn’t show up on the voter rolls when the next report came around.
So, that brings us to the silly rumor that is going around: that the Republican party has, in fact, registered thousands of voters but has been holding on to the registration forms in the hopes of generating buzz when all get turned in at once. Fun little rumor, but I have my doubts that it is true. For one, there is no better way to irritate the county recorders than to hold on to registration forms, even for a week, then drop a bunch of them at once. Any press buzz generated by a press conference in front of boxes of voter registration forms would be negated by the fact that thousands of people would be ticked off by not getting their voter cards in a timely manner, plus loss of cooperation from the recorders when VBM time comes. Doesn’t seem to be the smartest tactic.
Wait, now that I think about it, they would be perfectly capable of that level of incompetence.
4 Comments
July 17th, 2007 at 7:42 am
I have heard Republicans claiming that the electoral advantage of the GOP has increased statewide and that Democrats are not doing much better than they alway do. But…that independents are increasing massively.
Is any of this true? I guess what matters most is what the registration looks like in swing districts (like the one Ted notes). Any potential gainers for Democrats legislatively in 2008? I Maricopa getting more “moderate”?
July 17th, 2007 at 8:56 am
If the Republican Party is in big trouble because they lost a couple of hundred voters, what about the Democratic Party, which went from 859,738 to 858,988? What happened to all those new Democratic voters we hear about?
By the way, Tedski, when are you going to tell us about the scuffle your brother started with an Iraqi War veteran. I’m sure you can twist the truth of that story as well as you did with the voter registrations.
July 17th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Hey, you are right, Democratic registration is down. But, last I checked, there is no leader from the Democratic party claiming thousands of new registrations.
Yeah, Rusty, you are correct, I never said anything about the scuffle. Wanna do something about it?
July 17th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Ted, where your math is right but your point is wrong is that county recorders continue to clean their voter rolls, so you may start with 10,000 voters, register 1,000 new voters, have the lists cleaned up where 980 voters have moved, died, or gone inactive, and you’ll show 10,020 voters as the new total. Does that mean you only registered 20? No, you still registered 1,000.
Also, while I know that journalistic standards don’t always apply to blogs, I find it hard to believe that you have been attending Republican meetings in Tempe. So you can’t say that “Pullen said” when the best you could say is that “I’ve heard that Pullen said”. You state hearsay as fact. In fact, Pullen has never claimed more than 2,000 new voters in LD17 and yes, those were since the last totals came out, so you wouldn’t see them in the new totals.
Which brings us to the point that the totals you see are compiled quarterly, they are not running totals. Any forms turned in since the last numbers are not going to be reflected until the next quarter. So your speculation that forms are being “held onto” isn’t necessarily true. If they’ve been turned in, you still aren’t going to see them show up in the numbers until the next batch of numbers are released.
The existing numbers show that the GOP lead, statewide, over the Dems has increased. Your third paragraph conveniently ignores that Ind voters have been growing fastest of all. By leaving them out of the equation you make it appear that Pullen’s claims are mathematically impossible. I assume that you are smart enough that you tried to be clever, as opposed to assuming that you didn’t think of the Ind registrations at all.
You’ve also ignored gains in swing districts like 5, 12, and 23. Focusing on 17 might be convenient for the picture you were trying to paint, but you would better serve your readers with increased accuracy.
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