The election wasn’t stolen. But admit it: it was bungled
It’s a very old observation that mainstream media is mostly liberal and sees the world as liberals see it.
That’s not a complaint; it’s just the way it is, the nature of a business that attracts more people from the left than the right.
So, it is also clear to me that had the malfunctioning equipment at nearly 1 in 3 Maricopa County polling places frustrated Democratic voters in the same way it did Republicans on Nov. 8, The New York Times never would have parachuted in its crack team of reporters to tell us the election was hunky-dory.
Nor would they have done a subheadline treatment like this one:
“Ms. Lake’s supporters say in testimonials that they had problems at Phoenix-area polling sites. But a review by The New York Times shows that most of them successfully cast their ballots.”
The Gray Lady had not come to investigate Maricopa County’s Election Day meltdown. It came to knock down Republican reaction to it.
So it waited 22 paragraphs to offer this:
“Many of the voters’ accounts and the Lake campaign’s claims have their origins in a widespread malfunction of voting equipment early on the morning of Election Day that caused delays and confusion across the Phoenix area.”
And 28 paragraphs to serve up these two relevant sentences:
“Isolated printer malfunctions are common enough, but the scale of what happened in Maricopa County was far from ordinary. At least one printer failed at 70 of the county’s 223 polling places on Tuesday morning.”
Yes, the scale was far from ordinary. It demanded the attention of election officials and poll workers all across greater Phoenix for much of the day. The problem was huge.
So were the lines it created. I saw for myself at my own voting center, where the line snaked outside the building filled with dozens upon dozens of weary voters.
These were the stalwarts who waited hours to go through the bottleneck to cast a ballot. Much like those Republicans who are putting their stories on video for Kari Lake & Co.
They weren’t the disenfranchised, because they made darned sure they weren’t.
The disenfranchised were the ones who didn’t wait, who didn’t have the time or physical stamina (think of the elderly) to stand in line for hours to cast a ballot. They took one look at those lines and said screw it.
Good luck finding them.
Now Republicans are mad. Their candidate for governor is refusing to concede and says she is assembling a legal team to gather evidence and challenge the outcome.
Was the election rigged? No way.
There’s no way Maricopa County Republicans who oversaw this election stole it. They’re professional and honest people who would never sabotage a vote, let alone their own party and its candidates.
Is Kari Lake out of line? Not just out of line, but preposterous, making accusations without evidence and calling election officials “clowns” and “imbeciles.”
Should there be a redo? No. Full stop. However, a lot of media covering this spectacle have understated what happened to voters on Nov. 8 in Maricopa County.
This was not a “glitch,” nor was it mere “technical problems” as some have called it. This was a large-scale system meltdown on a day everyone knew for months would be thronged with MAGA voters who don’t trust early ballots.
It takes some chutzpah for Bill Gates, chairman of the Board of Supervisors to say, “Were there lines? Yes. But a certain political party is as responsible for those lines as Maricopa County is.”
To which the obvious response is this: If you can’t manage same-day voting, don’t offer same-day voting.
The printer problem should have been caught in pre-event testing. It wasn’t and this election was a trainwreck. One of many in recent years.
In 2014, the county left a candidate off the ballot and had to apologize. Then it shipped new ballots to voters and made the same mistake again — it left the very same candidate off the ballot.
Before the 2016 presidential preference election, the county reduced its polling places from 400 to 60 to save money. The result was a polling place pileup that lasted hours, with some voters waiting past midnight to cast their ballots. Voters were so furious they eventually fired County Recorder Helen Purcell.
In 2018, Arizonans also voted out Secretary of State Michele Reagan for the 2016 primary disaster and a series of other election problems.
In 2020, it was County Recorder Adrian Fontes’ turn. He unilaterally changed election rules midstream during the pandemic. The courts accepted some of his changes but rebuffed others. Voters finally threw him out.
The Nov. 8, 2022, election, the first since MAGA protesters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was the one Maricopa County needed to get right.
Unscrupulous Republicans, such as Kari Lake, were already saying the system was rigged, and Democrats were warning that democracy hangs in the balance. No detail was too small to check and then recheck and then check once more.
But someone missed something. Seventy of them. Roughly 70 voting centers with printers not ready to perform on Election Day. Those printers created chaos that roiled through the all-important morning and midday voter waves and extended well into the afternoon.
Republicans were screaming on social media, and their anger was not misplaced.
It’s often said that news is the anomaly. It’s not the 100,000 flights that take off and land safely every day. It’s the one that doesn’t.
On Sunday, The New York Times broke with formula. It devoted four byline reporters and a fifth contributing reporter to reassure us that Maricopa County’s whisperjet had landed safe and sound on Nov. 8.
Nothing to see here.
But, in fact, there was something to see in Maricopa County.
You want to threaten democracy? Keep screwing up elections as this county has done for a decade and there won’t be anyone left who trusts them.