Thursday, February 7th, 2008...9:19 am
What the $%#& Is Up With the Pima County Results? (Part II)
This morning, the Star ran a piece about the troubles on election day. Yesterday afternoon, one Pima County official reported to me that as of that time, there were somewhere around 13,000 provisional ballots still to be counted. On election day, it was reported that this was due to the large number of independents who were demanding to be able to vote. Reports trickled in over the last day or so, however, that there were many voters whose names simply were not on the rolls. There was one precinct, reportedly, where entire letters were missing from the list. Elections director Brad Nelson did the manly thing and blamed County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez, even though she doesn’t administer elections.
The other story that was flying yesterday afternoon was that there are 19,000 mail in ballots that hadn’t been counted at that point. This was bizarre, because these are usually among the first counted. In fact, well into the evening, the only vote total reported was a couple of thousand early ballots. Many in the election integrity crowd were uncomfortable with these votes being counted early, however, they only demanded that election officials count these as close to the actual voting as possible. But, when election observers showed up to observe scheduled counts early on Tuesday, they count was delayed on several occasions and this smattering of early ballots wasn’t counted until the afternoon.
Some posters on here have claimed that the demands of the election integrity lawsuit caused the delays. Try again. The one demand that would have caused any measurable delay was the demand that memory cards be physically taken to the central counting location rather than have the data transmitted by phone. Most of the precincts in the county are within, at most, a fourty minute drive of the Mission Road location where ballots were being counted. I can’t imagine that the hours long delays in reporting the count would be caused by this supposedly onerous requirement unless they decided to drive the memory cards through Sasabe.
Yes, I know that this count will not effect the final outcome (Yes, Pam Sutherland, Hillary Clinton won), although it could make a difference in delegate distribution. I also don’t think that anything nefarious is going on here, it just seems to be incompetence, unless the elections division is playing some sort of weird passive agressive game with the election integrity people.
The problems with staffing at the polling places (which exacerbated the delays caused by people having to vote a provisional ballot) has been ascribed to the turnout. Uh, wasn’t that sort of, I dunno, predictable given what has been going on in the rest of the country?
Here is the truly embarassing thing: here was an election where the country was watching us, and the CNN site is reporting that although the rest of Arizona was in, the second largest county in the state, my home, hadn’t even counted 2000 ballots yet. Ridiculous.
8 Comments
February 7th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Tedski,
As usual you hide the dirty hands of the Democratic Party in this disaster. It was Vince Rabago, Chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party, who browbeat Huckelberry to delay the counting of early ballots before closing of the polls. Without his intervention, the ballots would have been tabulated.
Don’t forget that the County is run by Democrats on the Board of Supervisors. They and Huckelberry have the ultimate responsiblity. Or are they the usual type of wimps that prefer to blame someone who is below them.
February 7th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Rusty-
I am well aware that the Board of Supervisors is run by Democrats…friends of mine even. Part of the reason for my post was my desire to prompt them into taking action and shovel out the Division of Elections.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Tedski,
Maybe because they are friends of yours, you are a little blind to their weaknesses. They, and the Democratic chairman of Pima County told the Board of Elections to delay counnting the early ballots. The Division of Elections wanted to start early.
This smells of Hillary and the White House travel office - make wild charges and then put your friends in. I smell an attempt to corrupt the voting process in Pima County.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Rusty: Browbeat? Get your facts straight!
As Tedski correctly notes, the Democratic Party never demanded that counting of early ballots be delayed, only that the County try to do it as close to the election as practicable (due to all the prior shenanigans discovered there at the Elections Division).
It was Huckelberry who in January 2008 issued several written memorandums which included Huckelberry’s specific directives that the early ballots not be counted until after the polls closed or alternatively on election day.
On January 17th, Brad Nelson scheduled early ballot counting to begin at 12:01 am on Election Day.
However, just a few days before the election, Nelson suddenly tried changing his own announced schedule, moving it back several days.
Since Nelson was apparently acting contrary to Huckelberry’s publicly announced directives, the Chair of the Democratic Party inquired why Nelson was suddenly violating Huckelberry’s direct orders (as well as Nelson’s own prior schedule). Nelson admitted being confused about when Huckelberry’s policies took effect, and Nelson then scheduled early ballot counting to begin at 8 am on Election Day.
But guess what happened on Election Day? Do you think the Division of Elections actually began early ballot counting at 8 am?
Wrong! The Division of Elections did not do any counting for 7 hours straight (or more)! Although the Democratic Party and Republican Party observers both promptly showed up at 8 a.m. sharp on Election Day to observe early ballot counting, nothing was counted for almost an entire work shift. Sadly, the observers for both parties had to sit there for at least 7 hours waiting on the Division of Elections.
ZERO early ballots were counted during that period.
The Democratic Party observer finally left at about 3 pm. No early ballots had been counted yet.
Yesterday, even the Republican County Chair told Nelson after the fact that there needed to be better coordination because it is difficult to get volunteers when they show up to observe nothing because the Division of Elections is not doing anything.
So, don’t try to blame the Democrats for the failures and incompetence of Brad Nelson. Pima County Supes need to clean house.
That’s not all that happened. In fact, when the Republican Chair and the Democratic Chair showed up on the day after the election at the scheduled 9 am meeting on Feb. 6, to select precincts for the required audit, Nelson stood them up for the meeting he had scheduled, sending an email just minutes before the meeting saying that the meeting would now occur at 6 pm. Why? Because 3 entire voting areas had not returned their voting machines and tallies the night before and had not been counted. So, the parties had to find observers for that, a process which lasted from 12 noon through 6 pm the day after the election.
The failure to count the early ballots and include them with the first published numbers is fraught with problems because it theoretically allows the elections director to monkey with the early ballot numbers after the regular count is published.
Time for the Supes to clean house. Like I said, get your facts straight!
February 9th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Nelson warned Huckelberry that the procedures would slow the vote count and the warnings were ignored. Therefore, Huckelberry can’t push the fault for a slow vote onto Nelson.
February 11th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
…and some of us warned that the silly ID requirements of Proposition 200 would result in long lines and legitimate voters being turned away at the polls by poorly trained election precinct workers. It’s too bad that “I told you so” doesn’t really work in politics.
February 11th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
If there are allegations of voters being denied their right to vote, they need to go to the one place where their can be action taken-> The Arizona Attorney General. I called them after the 2006 elections in January and they had received ZERO complaints about Voting discrimination. If people are being denied their right to vote and they think there is an undue hardship on them because of race, national origin, they have a right to get the AG on the case, but no one to date and gone to them. They hold extraordinary power in forcing changes at the county recorder and yet no one ever brings things to their attention!
February 11th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Now it’s Terry Goddard’s fault?
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