Political Irony

The state of Florida used to be the poster child for how not to run an election. But their crown is in serious danger of being passed to another state, Arizona, whose recent primary election was an unmitigated disaster. In fact, the Arizona Secretary of State even confirmed that election fraud did happen, and that failures “took place at virtually every level of government.”

First, and most importantly, the Arizona legislature failed to provide any funds for the primary. They left it out of the 2015 budget, promising to fix the oversight later, but never did. As a result, the number of polling places was slashed. For example, Maricopa County contains more than four million people (it includes Phoenix). In 2008 it had 400 polling places, but for this election there were only 60. Not only that, but the remaining polling places had as few as six voting booths. And for some reason, poll workers purposely left voting booths empty, in what appears to be deliberate voter suppression.

As a result, many people waited in lines as long as six hours to vote. Others never got the chance.

It gets worse. One poll worker testified that the election system tried to force her to give Republican ballots to Democratic party voters repeatedly throughout the day. The computer system made other errors, including showing 100% of precincts reporting, along with obviously false election results, at least six hours before the last person even voted.

There is also strong evidence that the voter database was hacked, changing the party affiliation of voters. The Secretary of State admitted this, saying “This is something that I know happened, and I know it happened to people in this room. It is not hearsay. It happened to someone in my own office.”

There should be an immediate federal investigation into this election. This obscene level of corruption and incompetence cannot be tolerated in a democracy.