Tens of thousands of citizens wait in line for upwards of an hour to perform a sacred rite of citizenship, to vote for the people who will run the government. Yet when they get to the actual voting booth they are unable to cast their votes because the “tabulators won’t read the ballots.” Many are sent to other polling places, where if they don’t find the same problem with the equipment, they are unable to vote because they are recorded as having already voted. As a stop-gap the election authority decides to place the unreadable ballots into a special box at each polling place so that they can be later scanned, but many of those ballots are mixed-up with discarded ballots and presumably lost.
The race for chief executive was decided by a margin of little more than 17,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million votes cast with the political establishment’s preferred candidate winning.
So where is this place of strange elections and funny results? Putin’s Russia? Early 20th-Century Mississippi or Chicago? The country of some South American tin-pot despot of yore? Nope 2022 Maricopa County, the 3rd largest voting district in the country, and key to what many are calling the most important presidential election in more than 160 years.
So what was the response of Maricopa’s Board of Supervisors, the ones responsible for overseeing elections in the county, to this catastrophe? They commissioned an investigation but limited the scope to a technical issues dealing with printers and not the wide-ranging investigation needed to figure out why democracy malfunction that day (operational incompetence on the part of said Board.) They made sure the white-washed investigation was given the patina of respectability by appointing a retired Supreme Court justice to oversee it.
The investigation was chaff, meant to deflect responsibility, not ascertain it. To claim an investigation was performed and then call the case closed. Everything in the passive voice, nobody at fault. How do we know nobody was responsible? Because the people responsible told us so.
I discussed this last night with a friend of mine and he responded, incredulously in his delightful British idiom, “And nobody got the chop for this?” Of course not, because that would imply responsibility.
Said Board, which was responsible for the original debacle, receives the report which was only charged with looking at printers, and pledges itself to “continuous improvement” when their own incompetence most likely led to thousands of voters being disenfranchised and quite possibly an election decided by it. I wish I kept the citation of when one said that no one was denied the ability of vote because 1) there was no comparable investigation to determine that 2) it would have been impossible by a matter of logic to determine a non-event
So who is at fault for this democratic disgrace in 21st Century America? Not the Board of Supervisors for running an election with faulty equipment or poorly trained staff, but rather you and I and Kari Lake are for pointing out a narrative different from the “accepted” one put out by the Arizona political and media establishment. We are the “election deniers.”
I am not an election denier in what is now the “traditional” sense. I am not claiming the problems that resulted in the 2022 Election were due to intentionality as opposed to incompetence. I am not claiming that Kari Lake should have won the election. However any reasonable person could come to those conclusions based on what happened that day and how the Board of Supervisors responded. To those who call me a denier, I ask them if they want to take those odds to Vegas.
The context for all of this is Kari Lake. She might have been the Republican nominee but she is not of the Republican Party, an outsider and political neophyte, a supporter of Trump, and in just about every way imaginable possible “Arizona MAGA.” In short, in the eyes of the Maricopa establishment she’s the enemy. This includes many Maricopa Republicans, if anything she’s from the Arapaio-Biggs-Gosar wing of the party, and not the McCainites.
So when the preferred result was achieved and everyone who is anyone (meaning not you and I) were ready to move on and she objected, then she had to be smeared as the one who was a “denier.”
Sounds familiar to 2020 doesn’t it? Like there is a stock narrative prepared that can be modified to fit any election anywhere in the country that has a funny smell to it and that people object to.
Well this is more than just reciting historical dirty laundry.
So as I said in an earlier piece, Maricopa is the critical part of one of the most critical states in what many are calling one of the most critical elections in our history. Maricopa County is ready for this by… preparing for violence by “election deniers” with razor wire and bullet-proof glass.
Wish they did that level of preparation for running elections in 2022.
With prep work like that the County should be the one protecting Trump, not the Secret Service.
This isn’t to deny that there wasn’t some overheated rhetoric toward elected officials after 2022 or threats of violence; unfortunately that’s the background noise in our day and age. However that comes from both sides and there has been only one side that has actually tried to do that to public officials. As far as the threats officials in to Arizona, punish the miscreants making actual threats and make a public example of them.
So the narrative is already in place. Critical election run by unapologetically incompetent officials and if you do more than ineffectually whine about it, say protesting or demanding answers, you won’t just be labeled “far right” or “election denier” but potentially enabling violent threats to democracy itself. In other parts of the country, the election systems nationwide are a wreck with corrupted poll books, insecure mail-in voting, and hackable computer machines.
Remember they are telling you as a citizen that you are not entitled to an open and fair election, but that the burden of proof is on you to say otherwise. To even raise the question makes you a political outcast.
The establishment is presenting each of us with the metaphorical choice of “silver or lead” when it comes to confronting electoral funny business and each of us must make that choice of “Do you want to do or do you want to be?”
That’s the game plan, not just for Maricopa, but for the country.