ELECTION INTEGRITY IN ARIZONA . . . not so much!

[Kevin Spidel]

By Mike Shelby, guest blogger on SpidelBlog, AZ.

If ever there was a justification to show that Arizona’s recently passed so-called election reform bill, SB1557, was just a first step and that because of obstructionist, self-serving politicians and elections officials who engaged in power plays, petty personality squabbles, unscrupulous and disingenuous negotiations; I don’t need to look any further than Monday’s USA Today, Analysis finds e-voting machines vulnerable (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-26-e-voting_x.htm). In the USA Today article, once again, is a listing of the reasons that electronic voting must come under the strictest of security and verification methods if we are ever to hope for accurate and honest elections. Only this time it comes from the non-partisan think tank, Brennan Center for Justice, from a 162 page full report1 (see the Executive Summary2) that took over a year to examine optical scanners and touch-screen machines using elections officials, computer scientists, and security experts to analyze the data.

Arizona election integrity activists didn’t have access to a “think tank” but we created one of our own. Various citizen advocacy groups, credentialed scientists, and honest politicians (not always an oxymoron) led by a handful of dedicated individuals formed “coalitions of the reality-based” to tenaciously expose the lack of election integrity in Arizona. We relentlessly exposed the Secretary of State and her office for her dumbfounding commitment to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to bring in touch-screen electronic voting machines despite their well publicized flaws. We helped politicians from both parties expose the potential for election fraud and the incompetence of elections officials in conducting elections with any technology beyond paper and pencil. Our efforts were even recognized by the United States Justice Department who mysteriously shut down an on-going Senate investigation, never to be heard from again, in an action not taken by the federal government against a sovereign state since the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s! We helped write election integrity legislation with legislators from both parties who are more interested in truth than ideology or party loyalty. We “showed up” repeatedly at the State Capitol to testify at various committee hearings on SB1557 and witnessed the politics of petty personal power mongering, blatant disinformation, distortion of the rules, and ignorance of the facts, bias, pandering, and self-serving obstruction used to mutate a good bill into a mostly ineffective “first step.” Mark Twain was never more right when he said, “There are two things you don’t want to see being made . . . sausage and legislation.” I’ve seen kindergartners behave more responsibly and maturely than our esteemed representatives in the Arizona State Legislature. A legislative staffer with over 30 years experience said she had never seen a bill have so much trouble getting to a vote.

So, this makes me ask the question . . . WHY? Why was there so much resistance to providing the citizens of Arizona with a transparent election process that would build confidence in voters and promote greater participation in elections? Why would legislators use convoluted, circular logic and bend the rules of the House and Senate to try to kill a straightforward, understandable, and implementable bill designed only to provide complete transparency and verification of elections? Why did mostly Republican legislators inflict multiple insults to the bill and cause the sponsors (mostly Republicans) and activists to engage in hour upon hour of negotiations in which the opponents of honest and accurate elections nibbled away at the spirit and letter of the original bill? Why did elections officials in Maricopa and Pima County disseminate false “facts” regarding the costs of providing for random audits in 2% of their precincts and constantly whine that it was “too hard” that they “didn’t have enough people” that “it would take too much time” to assure we have an accurate and honest election and preserve our democracy? And, in the end, on the last day at the last hour of the legislative session, when a mutated almost totally neutered bill from multiple amendments was finally put to a vote did almost every legislator vote in favor of its passage?


The rest here: http://www.leftyblogs.com/cgi-bin/go.cgi?http://feeds.feedburner.com/ProgressiveOrganizer?m=640

[Kip Humphrey]

1. A weak attempt to provide AZ voters with a false sense of confidence

in an otherwise corrupt and corruptible voting system. Can you spell P-A-N-A-C-E-A?