My part-time Green homey Perry Dorrell at Brains & Eggs wields some mighty political bloggage. This entry succeeds where so many mass-market alt-media outlets have failed: It provides a fairly complete picture of Tuesday's primary election clusterfuckery in Maricopa County, Arizona, the state's most populous county..
Too many of the usual progressive web-watchdogs—from USUncut to Raw Story to Talking Points Memo—emphasized the waiting times at the polling stations, huffing and puffing, "That's not democracy!" Well, in plenty of nations with democratic institutions, long queues for voting are the norm, because they simply don't have the resources to provide a polling station in every neighborhood. They consistently gave incomplete accounts of this complex story.
Yes, I understand their point: Many voters will be discouraged, not want to wait in the queue for five hours, and will go home instead. This is an absolutely intolerable form of vote suppression in a nation that does have sufficient resources to do better.
But any report that omits the other factors, such as thousands of voters' party affiliations changing without the voters' knowledge, is irresponsible at best. You can pin the blame for inadequate polling places and long queues on incompetence, and accept the county recorder's explanation, "We screwed up," for that. But when so many registered Democrats find out on Election Day that they are suddenly registered something-elses, that situation crosses the line from incompetence to malicious electoral fraud.
Perhaps County Recorder Purcell had nothing to do with the switcheroo. But computers don't just change data points like that willy-nilly. Somebody—whether Republican, Democrat, or Anonymous hackers just trying to prove how hackable these databases are—sabotaged the system. Purcell and her staff never got around to checking the figures for sudden seismic shifts in the county's voter registrations.
Let's not forget that people were still casting ballots, or receiving provisional ballots, as late as 11 pm Phoenix time, after the news networks had called Arizona a victory for Hillary Clinton. CNN et al are as much to blame as Purcell. There's enough slime here to give the major media, the DNC, the Maricopa County government, and the state government of Arizona a proper coating.
You'll notice that I am not in a dither over this because Bernie Sanders was denied a possible victory in Arizona. I prefer Sanders to Clinton, and I believe the polls that say Sanders stands a better chance of stopping the Trump juggernaut. But unlike Perry, I couldn't bring myself to vote for Sanders in the Democratic Primary for a number of reasons, mostly Sanders's voting record on foreign and defense policy. From my objective Green perspective, the situation in Arizona reeks of corruption. The Arizona Primary should be re-run, this time with foreign or UN observers watching for further fraud.
Too many of the usual progressive web-watchdogs—from USUncut to Raw Story to Talking Points Memo—emphasized the waiting times at the polling stations, huffing and puffing, "That's not democracy!" Well, in plenty of nations with democratic institutions, long queues for voting are the norm, because they simply don't have the resources to provide a polling station in every neighborhood. They consistently gave incomplete accounts of this complex story.
Yes, I understand their point: Many voters will be discouraged, not want to wait in the queue for five hours, and will go home instead. This is an absolutely intolerable form of vote suppression in a nation that does have sufficient resources to do better.
But any report that omits the other factors, such as thousands of voters' party affiliations changing without the voters' knowledge, is irresponsible at best. You can pin the blame for inadequate polling places and long queues on incompetence, and accept the county recorder's explanation, "We screwed up," for that. But when so many registered Democrats find out on Election Day that they are suddenly registered something-elses, that situation crosses the line from incompetence to malicious electoral fraud.
Perhaps County Recorder Purcell had nothing to do with the switcheroo. But computers don't just change data points like that willy-nilly. Somebody—whether Republican, Democrat, or Anonymous hackers just trying to prove how hackable these databases are—sabotaged the system. Purcell and her staff never got around to checking the figures for sudden seismic shifts in the county's voter registrations.
Let's not forget that people were still casting ballots, or receiving provisional ballots, as late as 11 pm Phoenix time, after the news networks had called Arizona a victory for Hillary Clinton. CNN et al are as much to blame as Purcell. There's enough slime here to give the major media, the DNC, the Maricopa County government, and the state government of Arizona a proper coating.
You'll notice that I am not in a dither over this because Bernie Sanders was denied a possible victory in Arizona. I prefer Sanders to Clinton, and I believe the polls that say Sanders stands a better chance of stopping the Trump juggernaut. But unlike Perry, I couldn't bring myself to vote for Sanders in the Democratic Primary for a number of reasons, mostly Sanders's voting record on foreign and defense policy. From my objective Green perspective, the situation in Arizona reeks of corruption. The Arizona Primary should be re-run, this time with foreign or UN observers watching for further fraud.
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