Novess: Should have better way to pick state reps for Sun City
Posted
I feel compelled to respond to L Dick (“Payne is rep, did not run unopposed,” Sun City Independent, Jan. 27, 2021).
I can feel for Mr. Shaw’s inadvertent error (“Senator ignores those from other party,” Sun City Independent, Jan. 13, 2021) in confusing Mr. Payne with Rick Gray. As I am a fellow progressive voter in Legislative District 21 who, like Mr. Shaw, is not represented by either of our House reps or our state Senator Rick Gray, who was, in fact, unopposed last November.
Unfortunately, the method of selecting our state reps is biased with our “vote two” selection process, when two of the three candidates are Republicans. I realize that a similar bias exists in legislative districts that lean Democratic. Unless a progressive voter in LD 21 forgoes a second selection in order to support the lone Democrat, they will support one of the two Republicans with their second selection.
While it is impossible to identify with certainty how many voters chose only Kathy Knecht, a Democrat, due to the unknown number who opted to not vote for the unopposed Rick Gray, it would appear that the number may have been around 5,300 voters. I don’t know how Mr. Dick knows the source of Ms. Knecht’s campaign donations, but her informative post card campaign telling her supporters to only vote for one candidate fell 2,395 votes short of a second place finish. As to Mr. Dick’s “sworn affidavits,” eight judges (many Republican appointees) in Arizona saw no evidence of fraud in dismissing all of the cases in Arizona, some going so far as to call the suits baseless. And to label Gov. Doug Ducey a “liberal politician” is just plain laughable.
The results were certified by Gov. Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs only after the eight failed frivolous lawsuits were rejected by the courts — hardly “quickly” — and they were merely performing their constitutional duty in doing so. And Mr Dick is incorrect as the role played by our Republican controlled county Board of Supervisors in this past election. After around 70 years of delegating the sole responsibility to our County Recorder, they took back control of overseeing elections (our Recorder still is involved with managing the voter rolls and worked closely with the board). Chairman Clint Hickman and the sole Democrat on the board issued a joint letter denouncing the baseless claims of fraud. As to the “very liberal” county recorder, aside from not running the election, he narrowly lost his re-election bid.
Lastly, as to Mr. Shaw’s math skills, we are all aware of the president’s narrow statewide win. What Mr. Dick failed to point out was the post election focus has been almost exclusively on Maricopa County, which President Joe Biden carried by 45,109 votes. And to bring more numbers into the mix, Mark Kelly won by a more convincing margin statewide — more than 78,000 votes. At the U.S. House level, Republican votes only outnumbered Democratic votes by 9,198 out of 3,267,834, or 0.28%. So in the context of the solid win by Mark Kelly (2.35%), President Biden’s narrow statewide margin of 0.32% is entirely reasonable. Also, Mr. Dick’s math skills are lacking in his assertion that 3,333,829 votes were cast for president. That figure omits the not insignificant 51,465 (1.52%) votes cast for Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian candidate.
With the county board now conducting an extensive audit (beyond all of the statutory testing of machines and sampling of a percentage of ballots by voting center as prescribed by Arizona law already performed) of the election to put to rest the baseless claims of fraud, will L. Dick finally accept the results if, as expected, they show no evidence of fraud? Guessing not.
