As I listened to the news on the radio this morning, I think I heard (suppressed) laughter as Arizona Secretary of State told Senators that the state prosecuted a whopping, mind-boggling fifteen cases of voter fraud, in the last eighteen months. And yet, none of these were even cases of non-citizens voting, but were citizens who voted in Arizona and in another state.
I wonder how many snowbirds were inadvertently caught up in the fury, as Republicans fought so hard to hide their voter suppression efforts behind the thin veil of fraud?
As per the Washington Post, Bennett wasn't the only state-level SoS to be humiliated in front of the Senate. Matt Schultz of Iowa also volunteered for the panini press.
“Do you have evidence of non-citizens voting in Iowa?” Durbin asked Schultz.
“Since August 2012 six people have been arrested,” Schultz said.
Responding to another question from Durbin, Schultz said 1.6 million Iowans voted in the last election.
“There are six cases,” Durbin repeated.
Schultz said: “That is what we have so far. We just started the investigation in August.”
Likewise, the score from Arizona was 15 cases over a year and a half, while 2.3 million ballots were cast in the last election here. I could find nothing to indicate how much money they've spent pursuing election fraud cases, or how much they spend on the voter ID program in general. But, hell, that's nearly one case per month. Way to go. Clearly the election
turns on all this alleged fraud.
Not that those 2.3 million were counted without incident. Arizona was one of a few laughing-stocks among the states, where the ballots took weeks to count. This provided Arizona Republicans plenty of time to come to terms with Obama's victory, although it didn't stop them from offering some sour birther grapes the other day. Although provisional ballots were a big chunk of the problem, there were also hundreds of thousands of 'early' ballots not actually turned in early. Seems to defeat the point to me, but that's procrastination for you. Still, in front of the Senate, Ken Bennett defended the debacle, insisting that the states are in no need of a federal voting standard.
Election Day miser, election fraud spendthrift
"I don't know of any situations in Arizona that rival the six-, seven-hour situations that I was hearing about in other states," Bennett said. "Mandating that we all do it one way, a one-size-fits-all way of doing things, I don't think ever improves the situation. It usually creates unintended consequences and has negative implications rather than positive ones."
Yeah, at least we're not Florida or Ohio, eh? Really? No,
not really, as I found after a few minutes of
investigation. I mean, this was news, it was reported to be so. Not that hard to find.
Yuma resident Danielle Andrade was among those who voted provisionally. Andrade, a 19-year-old Hispanic college student, signed up for the permanent early-voting list when she registered in March, but said she didn’t receive her ballot — though she didn’t rule out misplacing it.
“They were really nice about it,” Andrade said. “My only complaint was the six-hour wait (in line). I didn’t really let (voting provisionally) cross my mind.”
So there you go, Secretary, you're wrong. There's your magic six-hour threshold of embarrassment. I guess if it was only five, you'd call it a job well done. That article from the Arizona Republic also notes that Maricopa County refused to provide demographic information about its provisional ballots to the newspaper. This prevented the paper from being able to demonstrate that Hispanics were hit harder by provisional balloting than other groups.
Not in Maricopa, but they could in Yuma County, as the election officials there are apparently somewhat less obstinate about releasing information. Clearly the Phoenix Republicans need to have a little talk with them.
But such information was available in Yuma County. There, The Republic found a similar effect with actual voters: a higher percentage of Hispanic voters cast provisional ballots than the percentage of Hispanics registered.
On November 8th, two days after the election,
Bennett reported more than 631,000 ballots had yet to be counted. That's more than a quarter of the entire vote in the state, as per Bennett's testimony to the Senate yesterday. Although the hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots contributed to this serious problem, nearly 460,000 of the lot were early ballots. What would happen here if half a million people dropped off the early voting roster and hit the polls on Election Day instead? Would Arizona then have the long hours, the long lines stretching out into the night? It seems to me that the state government has taken advantage of the early ballot system, not to provide a timely and accurate vote, but a vote of convenience -- for us, and for them.
And sure, it's convenient for me to vote early. And I do. On the early voter list, I get my ballot along with all of the voter guides with plenty of time to spare. I can sit down with it and do my research, in the guides, online, in the news, wherever. That's exactly what I did, although I did mail it in, well...early.
For the state, however, they also derive a certain...convenience out of it. Clearly, Ken Bennett & co. lack the staff to count the ballots unless you give them a couple weeks to do it; this has happened before, after all. I read here that he proudly stated that they got done one day earlier than the last time. One day!
Bennett said that, contrary to some published reports, there was no trend among the provisional ballots to show that minorities were disproportionately affected. And, he noted, the ballot counting actually concluded one day earlier than in 2008, despite an increase in the number of ballots that needed to be processed after election day.
Inadequate staff, that means money. The state is saving money by encouraging its citizens to vote early, but it seems as if they're failing to encourage the people to actually turn in the vote early. And so it ends up being not an early vote, but a late vote.
For my part, I don't know if it matters all that much how quickly the vote gets counted, as opposed to getting everyone counted and accurately so. The speed, and the convenience, it seems, is a matter of pride. It's clear, though, that Republicans like Ken Bennett (and his illustrious predecessor, Jan Brewer) prefer to run elections on the cheap, and don't much care if it's difficult to register and vote, or how long it takes people. So long as there's some other, worse state they can point to and say we're better than them.
That's some quality work there, pal.
Meanwhile, the data suggests the provisional balloting problem hits Hispanics hard, and yet Maricopa County is permitted to hide this from the press, to refuse to release what they know, to conceal the problem and who it affects most -- who Maricopa County Republicans have targeted.