Sen. Kelly Townsend and Rep. John Fillmore, the two losing legislative candidates from Pinal County, descended upon a press conference in Florence yesterday telling county officials to expect lawsuits attempting to get a do-over election in the county.
They complained that their supporters and neighbors struggled to vote when polling places simply ran out of ballots on Tuesday.
“Why the hell was the county not prepared for people showing up at the polls? And what do we say to our constituents who were disenfranchised?” Fillmore asked. “After what happened in 2020, you would think that this year, we would have wanted to be on top. And unfortunately, it's Pinal County that has got egg on our face not once, not twice, but thrice.”
Unlike the fictions that Fillmore, Townsend and others perpetuated about the 2020 election, the cascading series of errors in and leading up to Tuesday’s election in Pinal County are real and well-documented. The county has owned its screw-ups, saying they’re all human mistakes with no nefarious intent.
But the county couldn’t legally redo the election, even if the officials wanted to, County Attorney Kent Volkmer said. At least, not unless a court took the highly unusual step of ordering a new election.
“We're not hiding anything. We made a mistake. This county made a mistake. It was embarrassing to everybody here,” Volkmer said.
Someone will give the courts an opportunity. Townsend said a legal intervention was at least worth a try, but said a lawsuit wouldn’t be offered with hostility, but “to help our neighbors” who were disenfranchised.
Several hundred voters could have been affected by the ballot shortages, Volkmer said. The county encouraged people to wait for ballots to come or to come back later, but that assumes people had the time and interest to stick around. Some people almost certainly were disenfranchised, he acknowledged.
The list of compounding errors that led to the ballot shortage is so long, it’d probably be easier to spell out what went right. The county underestimated how many voters would want to cast ballots in-person on Election Day. More independents requested partisan primary ballots than anticipated. More people chose to throw out their mail-in ballots and instead vote in person because of the confusion over the previous fiasco with ballots that didn’t contain local races.
Pinal County Supervisor Jeffrey McClure said the public should expect to see changes in the Elections Department this week. Still, he refrained from outright saying that the new elections director would be fired.
All signs point to yes, though. Local officials are all sorts of disappointed and candidates are declaring “heads need to roll.” The candidates at the press conference said they understood the first strike as a human error, but the Election Day mistakes went too far.
We agree there needs to be accountability for the series of election snafus in Pinal County. But let’s remember how we got here.
Republican politicians like Fillmore and Townsend spread lies about the 2020 election, stoking their base’s rage toward election officials. Seasoned elections officials quit. New people came into offices with skeleton crews that were not prepared to run the elections. Mistakes happened.
For the past two years, Fillmore, Townsend and others like them have undermined faith in elections, and the election process itself. Now they may just have to live with the consequences.
While much of the November field has sorted itself out, we’re still keeping an eye on a few things.
Kari Lake vs. Karrin Taylor Robson: Lake pulled ahead by about 12,000 votes as of our bedtime, after several batches of votes yesterday went her way. It’s still too close for media outlets to call the race, though Lake has tried to goad them into doing so. For context, outlets the project winners have all kinds of inputs they use to declare when a candidate doesn’t have a way to win anymore. The Associated Press, the most prominent of the race-callers, details its process here. To be crystal clear, though, the only people who decide who wins an election are voters, and that’s finalized after all votes are counted.
How many ballots are left to count: It’s always a challenge to pin down how many votes are left to be tallied in each county. A law passed this year, though not in effect for the primary yet, will require county elections officials to post on their websites the number of early ballots dropped off on Election Day that await tabulation. Lake’s margin looks like it’ll hold, but we still have a whole lot of ballots to count.
A lot of races have yet to be called: The big one is the Democratic primary for secretary of state, where Adrian Fontes leads Reginald Bolding by about 25,000 votes as of Wednesday night. But don’t call to offer your condolences to down-ballot candidates just yet. Without knowing how many ballots are outstanding from each district, many of those close legislative (and local) races could still change.
The view from the coasts: In its national elections roundup, the Los Angeles Times subheadline for Arizona is “The never-ending 2020 election in Arizona,” which about sums it up. The Washington Post went with “Election deniers have a good night,” which is also right. And the New York Times’ subhead declared, “Another conspiracy theorist comes closer to overseeing elections,” which we’ll also accept as a correct answer to Chuck Coughlin’s question of “What the fuck happened here?” Politico Nightly had perhaps the smartest take on what Arizona’s primaries mean for the general election, which can be summed up by this quote from Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates:
“I think the only way back is by humiliation at the ballot box, and the problem is the Democrats aren’t strong enough to do that,” Gates said. “I think (the GOP nominees) are electable, which is frightening.”
Be careful what you wish for: While Tuesday’s showing was a big win for Trump, it was also a big win for Democrats, who will now face the most extreme slate of candidates possible in November. While Democrats are quietly celebrating the victories of Kari Lake, Mark Finchem, et al., the Republic’s Laurie Roberts reiterates her lack of faith in Democrats to not screw this one up like they usually do.
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A piece after our own hearts: The Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz binges Arizona’s election results on cable news and writes the line all the network news anchors were searching for: “As goes Arizona, so goes democracy.”
A whole new round of commercials for us to watch!: The Lincoln Project is already aiming its never-Trumping dollars at Blake Masters, putting out an ad that declares Masters is “always on the wrong side” of issues, and that he believes “America should have let the Nazis win” and that he “writes lovingly about a Nazi war criminal.” Meanwhile, Katie Hobbs’ gubernatorial campaign already has an anti-Lake ad up that calls the likely Republican primary winner “not just radical but dangerous,” noting, among other things, Lake wants to “legalize rocket launchers” and “criminalize abortion.”
More media navel gazing: It’s not as unusual as you might imagine for local newscasters to turn into politicians, or at least candidates, Jon Alsop writes in the Columbia Journalism Review. And according to his unscientific survey, they’re mostly Republicans.
“(I)t’s concerning that Lake is trying to flip a media career into one built on media-bashing — and that she isn’t the only former local news personality running in this election cycle to have publicly disowned or otherwise denigrated their past profession,” Alsop writes.
Ok maybe!: Politico surveys the landscape in the five states that held primaries on Tuesday and declares the takeaway is although Trump endorsees won all sorts of races, “the fact that these battles were, and are, close might signal Trump’s hold on the party is loosening.”
Profile proliferation: Podcaster Sam Adler-Bell brings us another long and heady think piece in the New York Times opinion pages about the meaning of Blake Masters. It doesn’t live up to the headline “The Dark Fantasies of Blake Masters,” but it contains a few fun lines. Masters predictably hated it.
“Mr. Masters treats politics as a game of moral and physical carnage in which nothing is precious, and rules are for losers and marks. Great nations are those that allow great men to rise above the law, while binding the rest of us ever tighter to its dictates. And Blake Masters wants to make America great again,” Adler-Bell writes.
All politics is local: A handful of local politicians are losing their reelection races. Nogales Mayor Arturo Garino appears to have lost to sewer-bill-scandal-plagued councilman Jorge Maldonado, though the nature of the run-off primary means it’s too early to call the race, the Nogales International notes. On the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren, the husband of state Rep. Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren, placed second in a 15-way race for president, and will face incumbent Jonathan Nez in November’s runoff, the Republic’s Arlyssa Becenti writes.
They’ve both read at least one book: In Arizona’s most biblical primary, the defeated Rusty Bowers, who knew pretty well that he’d lose handily, “reflected on the Dark Ages” after Tuesday, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. And David Farnsworth, who ousted Bowers, called his win a “great awakening.”
Of Cheerios fame: Kevin Robinson, the Phoenix City Council candidate whose opponent challenged his residency, survived the legal challenge and will be on the ballot, the Republic’s Taylor Seely reports. This is the council election to replace the outgoing Sal DiCiccio.
Big Diet Coke fan: For Votebeat, Rachel profiled Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s first big election, which comes after nearly two years of people hating him for an election he didn’t run.
Today, we’re laughing at Kari Lake’s late-night victory speech — and the contrast of Karrin Taylor Robson’s early victory-ish speech.
After surging to a narrow lead around 1 a.m. on election night, a jubilant, at the very least, Lake stepped out onto the stage at her party wielding an oversized golden sledgehammer while vaguely threatening the media and mocking her opponent with the ease of an unhinged former newscaster. The late night crowd hangs on her every word while she wings it through a victory speech.
“I’m looking out at this crowd, and these are the hardcore partiers,” she said. “And this is still larger than my opponent’s crowd was at the height.”
Compare that to Robson’s speech Tuesday night when she was up by about 8 percentage points and sinking. Even when she was ahead, she didn’t sound excited, and her speech was full of awkward pause-for-applause lines.
Re: "lack of faith to not screw it up". Maybe state and county D orgs should bring on some Kansas consultants
I am cautiously optimistic that these Trump loving candidates will pay the price in November, starting with Masters. This gross clamoring for Trump's affection only works in the primary. It simply won't work in the general election as many Democrats and Independents (and some reasonable Republicans) will come out in full force to vote against the MAGA agenda bringing home victories for Hobbs, Kelly, Fontes and Mayes, along with a few others in Congressional races. #VoteBlue2022