Recorder’s silence on election is deafening

Here is Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, answering reporters’ questions last week after an election bungle, with polls unable to open on time, workers seemingly unprepared and the guy in charge assuring us it wasn’t his fault.

(Insert dead silence here.) Here is Fontes on Tuesday, taking to Facebook to post a video rather than facing reporters and their questions. This, to announce that he would be releasing a report Wednesday or Thursday that answered voters’ questions about last week’s election debacle.

“We had some problems. We didn’t deliver for all of our voters,” he said in the video.

“We’re not going to worry about politics and name-calling and blamecasting. We’re not going to worry about headlines. We’re going to worry about getting you the information directly from us, so that we can continue to be transparent, which we have been since I got elected.”

And here is Fontes on Thursday: No report will be forthcoming, on the advice of attorneys, Mr. Transparency told The Republic’s Jessica Boehm. No questions answered.

It is apparently none of our business why 95 polling precincts didn’t open at 6 a.m. on Election Day, as required by law. Why up to 270,000 voters had trouble exercising their fundamental, constitutional right to cast a ballot in one of Arizona’s hottest primary elections in decades.

None of our business why some polling places had voting machines that didn’t work or computers that hadn’t even been set up or poll workers who didn’t seem to know what they were doing.

None of our business what is in a report — paid for by, well, us — that presumably explains one hot mess of an election. Again, that is.

Fontes, a Democrat, sailed into office two years ago in the wake of incompetence by Republican Helen Purcell. The longtime county elections chief lost her job after voters waited in line until midnight to cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential primary.

Purcell blamed voters for that debacle.

Fontes, meanwhile, blamed a contractor for this debacle — and the contractor immediately pushed back.

Memo to Fontes: No contractor is responsible for what happened last week.

You were elected on a campaign promise to do better.

You had nearly two years to prepare for the primary election.

You knew a day before the election that you had a crisis on your hands.

Yet mum was the word then, and mum’s the word still.

The Maricopa County Board of Su-

pervisors has ordered an audit of what went wrong, to ensure that it won’t be repeated in November. That’ll cost us $200,000.

No word yet on whether we, the mere taxpayers who must foot the bill, will be able to read the audit and find out what happened here.

Then again, we already know who is to blame.

Memo to Fontes: No contractor is responsible for what happened last week. You were elected on a campaign promise to do better.