Arizona Hearing
Today was the hearing in Arizona for the voter fraud and shameful primary that took place last Tuesday.
The hearing started with an introduction by Helen Purcell. It took a strange turn when she had someone deliver a powerpoint presentation. Thankfully chair Michelle Ugenti-Rita wasn’t having it and made Helen Purcell get up and address members and the audience directly.
Arizona State Representative Larkin should get a lot of credit today. He was the first to call for Purcell’s resignation. He was urging Ugenti-Rita to allow citizens to provide testimony early in the hearing.
Representative J.D. Mesnard (R-Chandler) was doing his best to interrupt Representative Larkin. He went as far as to mock the audience with “Do you guys even know what 1516 is?”.
What I found absolutely fascinating was the exchange between Representative Ken Clark and Secretary of State Michele Reagan. Secretary Reagan said, “If you want the taxpayers to pay for a primary, all voters should bea ble to participate”.
A little backstory on this; If you are an Independent voter. Your taxpayer dollars are paying for the primary. Yet, Arizona has a closed primary, so unless you change your party affiliation, you are unable to participate in voting even though you are paying for it.
Representative Clark delivered a very important piece of information. He introduced a bill on the floor that funded the primary. Included in this bill was an amendment to let ALL voters participate. During the hearing, Rep-Clark said that Secretary Reagan’s office had rejected the bill! This was followed by a lot of booing, and rightfully so.
Representative Larkin was able to convince the chair to hear from the citizens. People were upset, angry and disappointed that they had been disenfranchised. A man stood up and said the following, I’m paraphrasing his statement.
“Why didn’t we know about early voting? Because the media has their candidate and her name is Hillary Clinton. I know of about 4,000 people that had thier voting affiliation changed. They were all Bernie Sanders voters!”
Call it what you want. I find it incredibly discouraging and disheartening to call an election with 1% of precincts reporting. Was this part of a plan to discourage people in line to go home? Perhaps influencing them to think that their vote wouldn’t matter. I have no idea if that was the intent. It certainly doesn’t feel like a democracy.
Charles Carpenter summed it up perfectly when he said, “God. Are we having fun? This is why we can’t have anything nice.”
A rather disturbing testimony came from a poll worker. She recalled system glitches where people brought their voting cards which showed them registered as Democrat, yet when she put them in the system, it kicked out a Republican ballot and vice versa. She did a great job in documenting the information, giving the voters the correct ballots and adding notes to the ballots for audit purposes. What would have happened if she hadn’t taken the initiative? Would those votes have not counted? Would those people not have been able to vote? Nobody really addressed the issue of Spanish information that went out to voters giving them the WRONG DATE to vote.
Secretary Reagan offered a website link for people to “submit their stories”. How does submitting a story fix this problem? They don’t need to give you their story. They need you to let them vote. They need you to give them a day for their vote to count and their voices to be heard!
Almost every citizen called for an extra day of voting for those who were denied. The fact is, Illinois got to do it. Why can’t Arizona? Apparently Representative Mesnard said there would be no re-vote.
It would be wise of them to extend voting. Arizona has a chance to make this right. They have an opportunity to give the vote and the voice back to the citizens of Arizona. Listen to the people, this is not what democracy looks like. I’m going to leave you with this quote. The woman directed this to Helen Purcell. “The corruption has become so prevalent, that you became comfortable, and you became so comfortable, that you became lazy, and you became so lazy, that you got caught.”